MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perihelions | 2025-07-24 18:27:52+00:00
The last billion over the past billion years could each, also, have been hostile alien probes. It's only now that we've the ability to observe them, in the past ~10 years, a cosmic blink, that we tangibly observe what's been going on all this time. (If we go and burn down the astronomy observatories, this will never happen again!)

That Harvard guy's such an attention-seeking clown.

(Worth remarking there's nothing fundamentally novel about observing comets from interstellar space; that's been predicted for centuries. Because it's ancient knowledge that certain comets are observed *departing* the solar system, into interstellar space; so why shouldn't we expect the same to happen in reverse, symmetrically? It's just a question of number statistics).
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-07-24 18:28:04+00:00
I wouldn't have jumped to a conspiracy angle immediately, but there are some signs which are difficult to overlook:

- Said person was apparently employed due to his good understanding of databases and distributed systems concepts (there's a HN thread about how he found an issue in the paper describing an algorithm); yet makes fundamental mistakes in understanding what the WAL does and how it's possible not to "partly" apply a WAL.

- Said person expects a SQL database to expose WAL level errors to the user breaking transactional semantics (if you want that level of control, consider simpler file-based key-value stores that expose such semantics?)

- Said person maligns SQLite as being impossible to contribute; whereas the actual project only mentions that they may rewrite the proposed patch to avoid copyright implications.

- Said person again maligns SQLite as "limping along" in the face of disk errors (while making the opposite claim a few paragraphs ago); while ignoring that the checksum VFS exists when on-disk data corruption is a concern.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-24 18:28:14+00:00
> What does Greece's economic crisis have to do with the way European companies are run

Velti and a number of other mobile AdTech and app vendors were clustered in Greece+Balkans. Greece was also in the process of spinning up a tech investment promotion policy comparable to what Israel and India did in the 1990s right before the Eurozone crisis happened.

Velti was the largest AdTech platform in the late 2000s and early 2010s - outcompeting Google AdSense and what became Google AdMob, but they went under due to their heavy European presence. Same with plenty of other European startups.

An entire generation of potential unicorns died out.

> Correct me if I'm wrong

I'm talking about corporate bankruptcy. It's much harder to shut down a business or go thru bankruptcy and arrears when you maybe to deal with a state collections agency due to the associated compliance and red tape hurdles.

Consumer Insolvency tends to be pro-consumer in the US, and Business Insolvency tends to be pro-business in the US.
by sunrunner | 2025-07-24 18:28:17+00:00
> You spend a lot of time memorizing note sequences, a good amount of time nailing the exact timing of lines to make them sound right and usually some time working out the challenging technical aspects of a song you're not at the level to play yet.

> it's much faster to do a combination of scale/chord/arpeggio and technical challenge drills.

Classical musicians that wasted their time training on existing note sequences learning pieces intentionally picked to be at the edge of their current skill level are going to _hate_ when they hear about this one weird trick ;)
by janalsncm | 2025-07-24 18:28:19+00:00
If that is the case, the $300 billion question is whether someone can create a product experience that is as good as OpenAI’s.

In my mind there are really three dimensions they can differentiate on: cost, speed, and quality. Cost is hard because they’re already losing money. Speed is hard because differentiation would require better hardware (more capex).

For many tasks, perhaps even a majority right now, quality of free models is approaching good enough.

OpenAI could create models which are unambiguously more reliable than the competition, or ones which are able to answer questions no other model can. Neither of those has happened yet afaik.
by godelski | 2025-07-24 18:28:35+00:00
Sorry, I should clarify

> The expectation is that training on a larger resolution will worsen performance in the second sense. > downsampling images will destroy information, hence FastVLM should also perform worse in the first sense

I do not think these are in contention. By training on larger images or embedding subnetwork can better learn to embed the requisite information. It need not hurt performance, in the sense of inference speed. This would require wise inference speeds were everything held equal or we just naively scaled. But it can actually be better if the learned algorithm is more efficient at extracting information, where there's the advantage of having access to more information. The larger resolution photo simply contains more information. On the other hand, if you train a model for a different downsampling task that information may not transfer well to the new downsampling task, which makes finetuning tricky and insufficient for a hard conclusion.

Note that their model is smaller. That actually can give us good analysis opportunities, as this suggests what I'm implying: more efficient embedding.

> Three CNN layers with two transformer layers is just good product engineering. The real insight to be had here is that writing your own custom downsampling algorithm is a waste of time. You should make the downsampling learnable and part of the model.

Actually that's the reason I linked [3] is because it reminded me of that paper. They used an overlapping (convolution) patch-and-embed method in the ViT model as opposed to the hard standard partitioning. Which in effect, is the same conclusion: learn your downsampler (embedder)

I think we're pretty much in agreement. I just really want to see more ablations
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-07-24 18:28:46+00:00
I don't see how this follows.

Besides, "subjectivity" concerns the subject, "objectivity" the object. The former is a matter of how an object is received by the observer, and so all perception is subjective in that sense; it can't be otherwise. But the subject can become an object of another subject. We can infer with varying certainty what someone is more or less likely to enjoy based on our knowledge of what they like.
by seanhunter | 2025-07-24 18:28:53+00:00
It’s such a weird pitch when you think about it. “Vote for us to be the government because: 1) governments are useless so we won’t do anything to help you. 2) you don’t really want the government to help you anyway because we’d just mess things up. 3) The other guys would try to help you. Do you want that? Of course you don’t. That would be socialism probably. So what we’ll do instead is just help our rich friends, because that’s what capitalism and fiscal prudence is all about.”
by 9rx | 2025-07-24 18:29:02+00:00
> Plenty of very interesting ideas

Is there? When you get down to it, it is really just a faster Python. Which is exactly what it was said to be when it was released. Their goal was to create a "dynamically-typed" language that was more performant. It is likely that it wouldn't have had a static type system at all if they figured out how to achieve on the performance end without needing types.

You can tell who is clueless when you hear someone say its type system is lacking. I mean, technically it is, but it is supposed to be. Like saying Javascript or Ruby's type system is lacking.
by uecker | 2025-07-24 18:29:26+00:00
It is also not what the C community has chosen. It is what was imposed on us by certain optimizing compilers that used the interpretation that gave them maximum freedom to excel in benchmarks, and it was then endorsed by C++. The C definition is that "undefined behavior" can have arbitrary concrete behavior, not that a compiler can assume it does not happen. (that form semantic people prefer the former because it makes their life easier did not help)
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-24 18:29:27+00:00
One of the biggest hurdles is just getting all the iOS/macOS/etc APIs up to speed with the thread safety improvements. It won’t make refactoring all that application code any easier, but as things stand even if you’ve done that, you’re going to run into problems anywhere your code makes contact with UI code because there’s a lot of AppKit and UIKit that have yet to make the transition.
by sjducb | 2025-07-24 18:29:32+00:00
Maybe, I think the tyre shop is encouraging premature tyre changes. My local tyre shop recommends changing the tyres at 3.9mm. The tyre’s data sheet says it’s ok down to 1.6mm. You’re wasting 2.3mm of tyre, which is 30% of the life of the tyre.
by mnahkies | 2025-07-24 18:29:40+00:00
Related https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/54925

My specific use case is pattern matching http status codes to an expected response type, and today I'm able to work around it with this kind of construct https://github.com/mnahkies/openapi-code-generator/blob/main... - but it's esoteric, and feels likely to be less efficient to check than what you propose / a range type.

There's runtime checking as well in my implementation, but it's a priority for me to provide good errors at build time
by kbelder | 2025-07-24 18:29:42+00:00
>it's pretty easy to believe your own experience over even a well-constructed "randomised controlled trial".

In my youth, I would have argued this was bad. Now, I tend to agree. Not that studies are worthless; but they are just part of the accumulation of evidence, and when they contradict a clear result you are directly seeing, you need to weight the evidence appropriately.

(Obviously, replicated studies showing clear effects should be more heavily weighted.)

Everything is just shifting odds.
by pqtyw | 2025-07-24 18:30:09+00:00
> BMI isn't a useful metric

People these days are generally also significantly taller than malnourished Belgians were back in the 1840s. That skews it a bit since the formula itself is still the same.

I guess it's still a marginally useful metric in some case but now that when can accurately measure body fat, muscle weight etc. there is no point paying attention to it that much.
by 20k | 2025-07-24 18:30:38+00:00
I think a lot of these use cases for AI are incidental byproducts of the actual goal, which is to replace software developers. They're trying to salvage some kind of utility. Because I agree that the AI tools in use are marginal improvements, or downgrades in a lot of cases

I've heard people say they use AI agents to set up a new project with git. Just use tortoisegit or something, its free and takes one click - its just using AI for the sake of it
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-07-24 18:30:42+00:00
Yes I mean that too. I have no idea how you can "measure" programming ability. The whole concept confuses me. I've been coding since I was a kid and have contributed to FOSS and closed codebases. There's certainly programmers out there that I consider bad, but beyond that there's no way to measure how "good" someone is at coding. The fact that people can identify around their perception of programming skill is deeply confusing to me and makes these sorts of reactions even harder to understand.
by delecti | 2025-07-24 18:30:45+00:00
I've seen some breakdowns, and (depending on the content, because different ad segments can be more or less lucrative) view time from Premium users tends to be worth more, and often way more.

As I understand it, a chunk of your membership fee is divided amongst all monetized creators you watch on a monthly basis, proportional to your watch time. A different chunk of your membership fee is divided between the creators and record labels, for your watch/listen time of Shorts and Youtube Music.

So the size of the creator is only relevant insofar as it can determine whether the channel is eligible for monetization. View time is not worth a different amount depending on the size of the creator.
by bgro | 2025-07-24 18:30:45+00:00
I think the current default knowledge you could expect a random average person to understand is limited to approximately the following single sentence: “A balance of diet and exercise is the key to losing weight.”

This is technically correct, but is so misleading that I classify it as incorrect.

That statement is exploitative of how the English language is understood, even if not intentionally so, that the lack of any other key points or instructions is itself used as contextual information.

In other words, the sentence likely translates something similar to the following incorrect statement: “A perfectly level 50-50 effort balance of both lowering daily calories to the [2000] calorie limit for [your demographic], because this is the stated necessary calories to support a healthy [demographic] for 1 day, as well as achieving the minimum daily recommended exercise limit of [1 hour for your demographic] plus [1 hour per 100 calories] consumed over [2000 calories] are both of equal value in the goal of losing weight, and are equal requirement to support the other such that one holds no value without the other.”
by dylnuge | 2025-07-24 18:31:02+00:00
I've never heard anyone define memory safety that way. You can segfault by overflowing stack space and hitting the guard page or dereferencing a null pointer. Those are possible in languages that don't even expose their underlying pointers like Java. You can make Python segfault if you set the recursion limit too high. Meanwhile a memory access bug or exploit that does not result in a segfault would still be a memory safety issue.

Memory safe languages make it harder to segfault but that's a consequence, not the primary goal. Segfaults are just another memory protection. If memory bugs only ever resulted in segfaults the instant constraints are violated, the hardware protections would be "good enough" and we wouldn't care the same way about language design.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-24 18:31:02+00:00
The problem is that it doesn't actually matter if it really makes a programmer more productive or not.

Because productivity is hard to measure, if we just assume that using AI tools is more productive we're likely to be making stupid choices

And since I strongly think that AI coding is not making me personally more productive it puts me in a situation where I have to behave irrationally in order to show employers that I'm a good worker bee

I am increasingly feeling trapped between a losers choice. I take the mental anguish of using AI tools against my vetter judgment or I take the financial insecurity (and associated mental anguish) of just being unemployed
by codedokode | 2025-07-24 18:31:44+00:00
This shows how bad things are in Linux land and how unfriendly Linux is for third-party apps. The idea that someone will package every application for every Linux distribution is delusional. The proper solution is to provide a standard API and make applications against this API. And of course there should be a sandbox for third-party apps.

Compare this to Windows where there is a standard API, standard set of pre-installed fonts and libraries, you download an exe and it "just works". However Windows has no sandbox and is not secure at all if you install any third-party apps. There are antiviruses, but they cannot guarantee detection of malicious code, and do not even try to block less malicious code like tracking and telemetry.

One might notice that there are Snap/Flatpak, however the issue with them is that the applications there mostly not work properly and have lot of bugs. Also they do not sandbox properly, for example, do not prevent reading serial numbers of equipment.
by freshtake | 2025-07-24 18:32:16+00:00
The article captures the two agendas at work. The reality is somewhat dependent on your situation.

If you understand _how_ you should be using AI in engineering, then AI can speed you up because you know what you're trying to build, you understand the fundamentals, and you are the pilot delegating granular tasks. When bugs pop up or requirements change, you'll have the knowledge required to frame and steer the AI to ensure goals are met, and met properly. When AI gets stuck, you'll be able to quickly jump in and work the problem. Your experience will continue to evolve and improve over time because you're plugged into the work and the code. You'll leverage your experience in unexpected ways in future projects, and perhaps your communication skills will improve as well.

Alternatively, if AI is used improperly, it may provide the illusion of velocity up until the point where you realize that your lack of knowledge or involvement actually prevents the AI from making progress. You want to move beyond a simple implementation, bugs pop up that can't be fixed, or new requirements can't be met. You aren't able to dive in yourself, either because you weren't paying attention to the work or were operating too far outside of your expertise. In either case, the progress you thought you were making might actually be a pile of wasted time and technical debt.
by tonymet | 2025-07-24 18:32:31+00:00
I'm one of the chill EV drivers too. but imagine the distribution over vehicles that are 30-75% heavier, and the range of drivers from chill to agro (leaning toward agro), and you can see the benefits and costs start to cancel out.

I still expect EVs to be a net improvement on brake dust. just not as massive as the study. maybe about 1/2 - 1/3 of the study's results
by ted_dunning | 2025-07-24 18:32:44+00:00
The answer depends on the kind of battery chemistry and how literally you mean "rare earth". If you take some slack on the definition and just mean "metal stuff in limited supply", then many battery chemistries have limited supplies.

There are, however, some chemistries with really nice supply chains. The Iron Redox Flow Battery (IRFB) really only needs iron and iron chloride as reactants. Those batteries are being commercialized, but they aren't common (yet?).
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-07-24 18:33:21+00:00
> This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from.

For people that are merely trying to lose weight, it's effectively true. When you're out of shape, you won't have the strength or endurance to exercise long and hard enough to actually burn significant calories.

For athletes that are running marathons or doing powerlifting, yes, it's certainly false. Massive bodybuilders that are already deadlifting hundreds of pounds will have massive diets because lifting that much weight takes significant energy.

But someone like me, with a BMI of 36, I can't outrun a bad diet. I go to the gym, set the treadmill at 5 mph, and I'm completely gassed after 3 minutes or 1/4 mile and have to slow down to 3 mph to recover. I'll go back and forth, but after about 20 minutes, I've gone about 1.3 miles, my legs are stiff and my ankles are sore because jogging at 240 lbs means high impact. Meanwhile, I've only burned probably ~100 calories. Not enough to offset the bad diet.

Given enough time of my routine, sure, my endurance might go up. Eventually I can do it longer, and maybe then I can start outrunning the bad diet. But that's going to take a long time.

Easier to just cut carbs.
by fladrif | 2025-07-24 18:33:48+00:00
I think this exposes a pattern, but not necessarily on the subject or antithetical to OP's point. I interpret the above passage to implicate that we lose abilities as we adopt tools that can do it for us, but writing specifically stunts our ability to memorize facts. I would argue that this enabled us to spend less mental energy on memorization but on processing information instead, able to do more complex calculations. This doesn't negate OP's point that by using LLM's we give up another kind of ability to a tool, in the case reasoning.

Now whether or not this will in the abstract become leverage for another type of skill or multiplier is to be seen.
by ameliaquining | 2025-07-24 18:34:01+00:00
https://blog.stalkr.net/2022/01/universal-go-exploit-using-d...

This example hardcodes the payload, but (unless I've badly misunderstood how the exploit works) that's not necessary, it could instead be input from the network (and you wouldn't have to pass that input to any APIs that are marked unsafe). The payload is just hardcoded so that the example could be reproduced on the public Go Playground, which sandboxes the code it runs and so can't accept network input.

Note that what tptacek is asking for is more stringent than this; he wants a proof-of-concept exploitation of a memory safety vulnerability caused by the data-race loopholes in the Go memory model, in a real program that someone is running in production. I do think it's interesting that nobody has demonstrated that yet, but I'm not sure what it tells us about how sure we can be that those vulnerabilities don't exist.
by tim333 | 2025-07-24 18:34:01+00:00
The carpentry analogy seems quite good

>Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw

I presume carpenters can make a given item much quicker than they could in centuries past but there are still presumably a lot still employed, just doing slightly different things, like maybe sorting fancy custom staircases for new housing rather than churning out chests of draws.
by grishka | 2025-07-24 18:34:16+00:00
On desktop I have one of those one-click JS toggle extensions, so the moment I see any attempts to interfere with me reading the goddamn article, that website gets its privilege of client-side interactivity revoked due to abuse.

Some annoyed me so much I even disabled JS for them on my phone. I do that more rarely because of how unnecessarily convoluted that setting is in Chromium browsers on Android. You have to navigate 4 levels deep in the settings and enter the domain you want to block into a text field!

For example, I have JS disabled on everything Substack (and it really annoys me when I end up on Substack hosted on a custom domain).
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-24 18:34:29+00:00
> and neither change that today the word alien has not the annotation of "foreigner", but one which inherently de-humanizes the described group of people

No, it doesn't. You keep saying that, over and over, and people keep trying to correct you, over and over, and you keep not listening. It's you who has that connotation of dehumanizing associated with the word. You. And yes, I admit that some other people do, too. But it's your group, not society as a whole. And that means that all your outrage is misplaced, because the offense you're railing against is in your imagination.

But I will give you this much: I can imagine a future (maybe in 50 years, maybe in 10, maybe even in 2) where you are right, where that is the connotation of the society as a whole. But we aren't there yet, and I refuse to let one zealot on HN dictate my use of a perfectly reasonable word.
by gchamonlive | 2025-07-24 18:34:34+00:00
Its Because I'm terrible at expressing myself sometimes...

What I'm trying to say is that not having Google services is a pain, but if getting a phone for grapheneOS was easy I'd be fine with that pain. But if on top of the inconvenience of not having Google services I'd also not have tech assistance and easy access to parts it's not worth it anymore if it's "just" for privacy reasons.

Here in Brazil it's mostly Xiaomi, Samsung, Asus and Motorola. And Apple, but it's a different story with iPhones.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-24 18:34:38+00:00
> Maybe there are less people in operations than before

Even that ended up not being true, and I'd argue we have even more people doing ops now than we did before all the buzzwords.

Going to change my job title to cockroach because no matter how many times companies and trends have tried to kill ops, I'm still around, and sometimes in larger numbers.