MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmmBacon | 2025-07-24 18:04:09+00:00
The article doesn’t say why the chips have a cost difference. The wafer cost of advanced nodes is ~$30k per wafer. Is the wafer cost different or is the yield different and hence the reason for the variance of 5-20%? All else being equal (same die size/design on same process) I suspect that a large part of the cost difference is yielded cost due to maturity of operations at the Arizona fab. Taiwan has had many years to optimize operations. You see this for any product initially when it moves to a new production site.
by harmmonica | 2025-07-24 18:04:11+00:00
I'm glad you pointed out the lack of engagement on this topic. Here I was thinking "everyone" who's even remotely interested in AI (based on the comments on AI posts I would think that would be "everyone" on HN) would want to know how Google is faring in this new world. There was just an article on the front page about how clicks were massively down when AI snippets are at the top of search results. I, for one, was really interested in knowing how Google would be able to withstand what seems to be a ton of folks opting to use LLMs in lieu of search. This earnings report says they're faring pretty well (of course the mass of people have obviously not yet replaced search with LLMs).

I personally still don't necessarily think Google can continue to thread the needle, but that's entirely vibes-based. If they can somehow continue to grow GCP; direct AI snippet/Gemini traffic to clicking links they lose from traditional search results; and that it's actually true that LLMs are not yet good for the higher cpc links (some speculation about that) then maybe they can successfully navigate this transition.

And at the risk of shouting into a void re your first point, how do you (the general you) reconcile Tesla's market cap and general interest in their business? Tesla EVs are currently a drag on Tesla's growth so then you have robotaxi and Optimus as the hoped-for drivers of growth. And then Waymo somehow is an afterthought for Google earnings (at least at this point). Tesla's market cap says that there's enough belief that robotaxi really will roll out very aggressively and therefore robotaxi is a big enough business to justify some major percentage of Tesla's long-term future. Because, absent robotaxi capturing a major chunk of the market, you're left with Optimus/AI-enabled robots being all of Tesla's growth story? A product or suite of products that doesn't even exist yet? I guess the reply to all of that is what everyone says: it's a meme stock at this point.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-07-24 18:04:26+00:00
Why don't Tech CEOs and CTOs see how AI is going to "disrupt" their jobs? If anyone can write code, why will I hire your company to create the software I use?

I also see the non-development jobs as much more in peril from AI; I can go generate marketing copy, HR policies, and project plans of comparable (or better!) quality today.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-24 18:04:38+00:00
Because it's not actually politically tractable. Pretty much every one of these proposals has some implied back side or quiet part you don't say out loud to it that the exact same people who like the sound of walkability in the abstract would be unwilling to make.

Think about how many people who support this stuff would be screaming bloody murder if some developer bought their neighbor's lot and coordinated with some other local developers to submit all their proposals for the most hard to approve stuff right at thanksgiving to take advantage of all the sped up paperwork and limits on how long government can sit on things and then built right up to the sidewalk.
by lxgr | 2025-07-24 18:04:39+00:00
I believe it's also because of this (from https://www.sqlite.org/wal.html):

> [...] The checkpoint does not normally truncate the WAL file (unless the journal_size_limit pragma is set). Instead, it merely causes SQLite to start overwriting the WAL file from the beginning. This is done because it is normally faster to overwrite an existing file than to append.

Without the checksum, a new WAL entry might cleanly overwrite an existing longer one in a way that still looks valid (e.g. "A|B" -> "C|B" instead of "AB" -> "C|data corruption"), at least without doing an (expensive) scheme of overwriting B with invalid data, fsyncing, and then overwriting A with C and fsyncing again.

In other words, the checksum allows an optimized write path with fewer expensive fsync/truncate operations; it's not a sudden expression of mistrust of lower layers that doesn't exist in the non-WAL path.
by iambateman | 2025-07-24 18:04:47+00:00
I’m optimistic - perhaps naively - about my ability to retool within work.

10 years ago, I was building WordPress websites for motivational speakers. Today, I build web apps for the government. Certainly in 10 years we will be in a different place than we are today.

Your argument, taken in a broader sense, would have us tending to corn fields by hand to avoid a machine taking our job.
by danaris | 2025-07-24 18:05:08+00:00
This is only true if the degree to which they increase productivity meaningfully rises above the level of noise.

That is to say: "Productivity" is notoriously extremely hard to measure with accuracy and reliability. Other factors such as different (and often terrible) productivity measures, nepotism/cronyism, communication skills, self-marketing skills, and what your manager had for breakfast on the day of performance review are guaranteed to skew the results, and highly likely, in what I would guess is the vast majority of cases, to make any productivity increases enabled by LLMs nearly impossible to detect on a larger scale.

Many people like to operate as if the workplace were a perfectly efficient market system, responding quickly and rationally to changes like productivity increases, but in fact, it's messy and confusing and often very slow. If an idealized system is like looking through a pane of perfectly smooth, clear glass, then the reality is, all too often, like looking through smudgy, warped, clouded bullseye glass into a room half-full of smoke.
by eyelidlessness | 2025-07-24 18:05:11+00:00
I found myself following a similar trajectory, without realizing that’s what I was doing. For a while it felt like I was bypassing the discipline of TDD that I’d previously found really valuable, until I realized that I was getting a lot of the test-first benefits before writing or running any code at all.

Now I just think of types as the test suite’s first line of defense. Other commenters who mention the power of types for documentation and refactoring aren’t wrong, but I think that’s because types are tests… and good tests, at almost any level, enable those same powers.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-24 18:05:12+00:00
The only reason it didn't end on pile of obscure languages nobody uses, it called Google, followed by luck with Docker and Kubernetes adoption on the market, after they decided to rewrite from Python and Java respectively into Go, after Go heads joined their teams.

Case in point, Limbo and Oberon-2, the languages that influenced its design, and authors were involved with.
by user_7832 | 2025-07-24 18:05:58+00:00
Yeah, and not only do you get to see if it's down or not (reddit infamously always says it's up even when there are issues), but you also get to see the raw data of reports. Ofttimes I've seen the trend go up and realized it's a very recent issue - even before downdetector itself recognizes it as such.

Human reading > DD reading >> "All our services are operational" when they're absolutely f--ing not.
by lock1 | 2025-07-24 18:06:04+00:00
If only Java also provided Either<L,R>-like in the standard library...

Personally I use checked exceptions whenever I can't use Either<> and avoid unchecked like a plague.

Yeah, it's pretty sad Java language designer just completely deserted exception handling. I don't think there's any kind of improvement related to exceptions between Java 8 and 24.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-24 18:06:56+00:00
Naïveté, and, IMO, a necessary deliberate desire to look the other way.

“Hey, I’d love to see the ahem ‘qualified leads’ looking at this crisis pregnancy center website, or at the Border Patrol website, or at the IRS tax deduction FAQ website.”

It’s so incredibly easy to imagine the ways this will be abused.
Quick One for Builders
by Faridat_Ojulari | 2025-07-24 18:07:42+00:00
If you’re working on a landing page, pitch, or explainer and it feels like people aren’t really getting it… that’s usually a messaging issue.

Not in a “fancy branding” way. I mean the basics:

-People visit your site but don’t sign up -You’re getting intros or traffic, but no clear interest -You keep rewording things but still have to explain what you do on every call -Or you're building in public, but the message just isn’t sticking

On the flip side, good messaging helps your product make immediate sense and actually moves people to act.

That means things like:

-Your site says exactly what you do and why it matters -Your emails and DMs get more replies -People stop comparing you to the wrong competitors -You don’t have to “sell” as hard on every call

If that’s something you’re dealing with, happy to take a look or share some ideas. No pressure.
by leptons | 2025-07-24 18:07:43+00:00
I used to be a die-hard Intel customer, and recommended to everyone that asked me what to but, to buy Intel. That has changed. Now it's price/performance that matters more than brand. Intel also had a few missteps that made the brand lose a bit of its luster.

My most recent computer is AMD Ryzen based, but we just bought an Intel-based Dell for my partner because the price/performance was better than comparable AMD machines at the time, possibly due to a sale. But the Intel chip is a lot faster than my laptop, so now I'm a little bit jealous of the Intel machine.
by benabbott | 2025-07-24 18:07:56+00:00
Whenever the topic of weight loss comes up, I always make the same recommendation: Lift weights. Lifting weights increases your muscle mass. Muscle burns calories, even at rest, which raises your TDEE. (A bodybuilder will burn more calories sitting on the couch than someone who doesn't lift weights). For most folks (myself included) cardio sucks. You _could_ jog for an hour every day and burn x-hundred calories due to the increased energy expended... Or you could go lift weights a few times a week, and after a couple months, naturally burn more at rest due to increased muscle mass.

I say this as not a nutritionist nor a doctor, but I don't believe I'm off base here. Feel free to correct me on this if I am.
by sophacles | 2025-07-24 18:08:12+00:00
I think your security background is coloring your perception of the term memory safety. Specifically the requirement that the various issues lead to exploitation. These issues can lead to many other issues that are not vulnerability in the security sense, e.g. data corruption, incorrect (but not insecure) behavior, performance issues, and more. I don't think any of those were ever dismissed or excluded from memory safety discussion. Infosec circles tend to evaluate most ideas in the context of (anti)exploitation, and the rest of programming tends to focus on what the cool kids argue (that is they often weigh security concerns higher than other issues as well), so the other problems caused by double-free or buffer overruns (etc) just may not have been given as much weight in your mind.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-24 18:08:25+00:00
By definition, as a Black guy, how would I have White friends who didn’t like Black people? I mentioned I go down to the bar downstairs from where I live where I’m friends with the bartender to hang out with him and whoever comes by - all tourists who I will probably never see again (near Disney world). I’ve met and spoken to people all over the world and even had a few shallow conversations with people who only spoke Spanish using my very limited (B1) level Spanish speaking skills.

What I’m not going to do is go to a rural evangelical church in Alabama to let them get to know me.

I hate the narrative that I’m suppose to be “the better person”. I don’t owe anyone my energy. I don’t owe people “forgiveness” who want to bring harm to me or my family. I have no need to show people that I’m “the model negro”.

I also wouldn’t have “friends” of any color who spew racists or homophobic BS. Again I have plenty of friends who are traditional Reagan/Bush/Romney pre-2016 conservatives. We disagree on certain things. But we agree on common human decency.

I also find the “allyship” crap that I see in leftist circles vomit worthy.

On another post here on HN, someone posted on an “Ask HN” how could they find a job as someone with cerebral palsy. I mentioned that I had “CP” that mostly affected my left hand and went on about the post.

Then I had I guess people who called themselves “disability allies” chastise me for using the abbreviation “CP” because it was also an abbreviation for child porn.

I had to point out that every single disability organization like Easter Seal (the place I went growing up) abbreviated it CP.

It’s no different than I assume White people telling me that I should befriend a Klansmen to change their mind. Until you have walked in my skin, you have no right to tell me how I should spend my time changing the minds of a bunch of racists pricks.
by raincole | 2025-07-24 18:08:32+00:00
And I have a very hard time understanding why AI is "pushing the errors to the right".

> Compiler -> code review -> tests -> runtime checks -> 'caught' in prod

With AI we still compile the code.

We still do code review.

We still run tests (before code review, obviously; don't know why it's listed like this).

We still do QA at runtime.

I feel like anti-AI people are those one who actually treat AI as magic, not the AI users. AI doesn't magically prevent you from doing the things that helped you in pre-AI era.
by keyringlight | 2025-07-24 18:08:35+00:00
I think a lot of this comes down to assumptions about the audience and something along the lines of "it's not a problem until it is". It's one aspect I wonder about with migrants from windows, and all the assumptions or habits they bring with them. Microsoft has been trying to put various safety rails around users for the past 20 years since they started taking security more seriously with xp, and that gets pushback every time they try and restrict or warn.
by tadfisher | 2025-07-24 18:08:35+00:00
True; but a counterargument is that the _display protocol_ is not the right abstraction layer for decoupling window management from the display server. There is nothing stopping someone from writing a batteries-included wlroots-like library where the only piece you need to write is the window management and input handling, or even an entire Wayland compositor that farms these pieces out to an embedded scripting runtime.

But even then, I think we have rose-tinted glasses on when it comes to writing an X11 WM that actually works, because X11 does not actually give much for free. ICCCM is the glue that makes window management work, and it is a complete inversion of "mechanism, not policy" that defines the X11 protocol. It also comes in at 60-odd pages in PDF form: https://www.x.org/docs/ICCCM/icccm.pdf

For an example, X11 does not specify how copy-and-paste should work between applications; that's all ICCCM.
by WhatsName | 2025-07-24 18:08:39+00:00
If it were any good I would assume there would be no need to hype it up.

My theory is that LLMs will get commoditized within the next year. The edge that OpenAI had over the competition is arguably lost. If the trend continues we will be looking at inference like commodity prices, where the most efficient like cerebras and groq will be the only ones actually making money at the end.
by lrvick | 2025-07-24 18:08:44+00:00
I do not have time for lots of exercise beyond the occasional walk but I hated that I was 40lb over my healthy/ideal weight I used to be. So I simply ignored all the tactics of others in my life chronically struggling to lose weight or keep it of and did the research on the Standard American Diet.

All data pointed to Americans simply consume way way too many processed foods, carbs, and artificial sugars. No one should be surprised, but no one wants to change this because shit food tastes so good. I simply dropped all high processed foods, dropped to about 100g of carbs a day, and cut out soda completely. All the extra weight fell right off over 6 months. I did nothing else. Also my dopamine response has changed and healthy food and canned sparkling water now feels as good to consume as fast food and soda used to.

Meanwhile friends with the same problem try lots of exercise and never lose any weight, and others use ozempic with no diet changes and also lose no weight. No one wants to hear they have to do something as hard as a permanent major diet change, but blame biology and terrible nutrition education. I am just the messenger.

YMMV, but my own experience certainly agrees with this study.

Commit to stop eating like an overweight American long term and you are likely to stop looking like one.
by Spivak | 2025-07-24 18:08:56+00:00
Well yeah, the sugar is also there to produce the soft squishy texture people expect from sandwich bread as well as the aiding the Maillard reaction when it's grilled. Miss me with a grilled cheese made with any other kind of loaf.

But we are talking about bread here, even in the absence of sugar and oil it's still got plenty of calories for you. Grain St Methode's white bread, a no added sugar brand is 180 cals for two slices and Wonder Bread, famously packed with sugar, is 140 cals for two slices. It's the bread which is making you fat, the sugar isn't moving the needle in any direction as far as the obesity crisis is concerned.
by constantcrying | 2025-07-24 18:09:16+00:00
> We have within easy reach the ability to 1) stop more people from becoming homeless, and 2) help people who are homeless get their lives back in order.

I live in a country with a right to housing. The government will literally pay your rent. Public transit is still full of homeless people. Guess why? Spoiler: It is not because housing is unaffordable or because transit is bad.

>Hell, I'm actively watching my brother-in-law and his baby mama descend through the mental illness and addiction process, and even though they've been evicted and are now dragging their daughter through the couch-surfing phase, they still aren't at the living-in-tents-shitting-on-the-street phase of that descent.

And you are sure that, if they stayed completely drug-free and sane, they couldn't find jobs which allowed them to pay rent? The problem here are the drugs, blaming anything else is absurd. There is exactly one way to help them and their child get the parents of the drugs and the child away from them until the parents stay sober.

Literally every single step in that tragedy, as you describe it, revolves around drugs. Seeking the cure in anything but getting rid of the drugs is absurd.

>We have within easy reach the ability to 1) stop more people from becoming homeless

No, we don't. The only way to stop people being homeless is getting rid of the drugs. Even if the government is legally obligated to pay for housing there are still homeless people because of the drugs.

>2) help people who are homeless get their lives back in order.

No. We need to get drug addicts sober. Anything else is secondary. Do you think your brother in law would be fixed if he got free housing, but remained a drug addict? Of course not.
by alberth | 2025-07-24 18:09:29+00:00
I know this can be a touchy subject, but honestly, it shouldn’t be surprising.

It’s just basic thermodynamics.

The energy (calories) you take in has to go somewhere. Some of it gets used for daily activity, but if you take in more than you burn, your body has to store the extra—it doesn’t have any other way to deal with it.

At the end of the day, it really is just a matter of calories in vs. calories out.

Exercise just helps burn more of your excess energy so that it doesn’t get converted into (weight) storage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
by seangrogg | 2025-07-24 18:11:19+00:00
If there is a reason to want to in-house the fabrication of chips then it seems silly to not extend that to at least the boards that house them, otherwise we wind up still being reliant on an international supply chain which seems to defeat the purpose.

Even if it was just motherboards in particular and not others, that seems like a necessary step in securing the supply chain and if we only do that for national defense the benefits of competition likely won't extend to consumers that are still exposed to trade taxation.
GA and RL and prompt-driven agents
by Victorius | 2025-07-24 18:11:20+00:00
Hi HN, I’ve been thinking about a new idea and would love to hear your thoughts. I’m exploring the concept of an AI agent that improves itself using reinforcement learning (RL) policies. The goal is to create an agent that can assist with programming, requirements engineering, or similar tasks that can be driven by LLMs.

One of the main challenges is that RL typically requires a finite set of actions, whereas prompts for LLMs can be arbitrarily complex or open-ended. To address this, I’m considering using a genetic algorithm (GA)-based approach, where a prompt is represented as a set of chromosomes. Each chromosome consists of changeable “phrases” like: - "You will receive a $5 tip" - "Please be as concise as possible" - "Think step by step before answering" I came across a recent paper - GAAPO: Genetic Algorithm Applied to Prompt Optimization (2025) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07157 - that aligns with this direction.

However, I think this can be extended further by introducing a two-level architecture: Meta-Agent * Oversees high-level orchestration * Responsible for task analysis, code generation, requirements refinement, etc. * Evaluates sub-agents and commands them to evolve for better results

Sub-Agent * Executes specific tasks (analysis, development, testing, etc.) * Operates using LLMs and evolves prompts via gene optimization * After each evolution cycle, we can spin up multiple instances of sub-agents and evaluate them to select the ones with the best performance (fitness function based on task success, quality of output, etc.).

What do you think of this approach? Is it feasible in practice? What are the potential limitations or pitfalls? Any known work or prior art that you’d suggest reading?

I did a quick Google Scholar search and couldn’t find any paper combining GA + RL + prompt-driven agents in this architecture — let me know if I missed something! Looking forward to your feedback.
by analog31 | 2025-07-24 18:11:27+00:00
It's a real two-edged sword. On the one hand we claim to value originality. On the other, people will eschew originality if it hasn't been validated by some kind of gatekeeper.

Conventional wisdom among musicians is that the best way to attract an audience and make money is to play covers or familiar works. It's hard to get an audience to show up for "originals," whether it's in Classical or contemporary music.

It's hard to get people to visit a restaurant that's not part of a chain.

Disclosure: Musician in an "originals" band. ;-)