MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bityard | 2025-07-11 02:06:09+00:00
I don't have direct experience with a scroll saw but I own (well, made) a bandsaw and it's my favorite power tool. There's a lot you can do with it but more importantly, it's incredibly safe: The blade stays in one place and will never jump out at you or throw your workpiece into your abdomen. If you let your mind wander, you might end up with a cut on your finger. But that's about it. It's pretty much impossible to lose your finger to a bandsaw unless you have permanent nerve damage or are doing your woodworking on meth.
by Amaury-El | 2025-07-11 02:06:31+00:00
I've been using LLMs almost every day for the past year. They're definitely helpful for small tasks, but in real, complex projects, reviewing and fixing their output can sometimes take more time than just writing the code myself.

We probably need a bit less wishful thinking. Blindly trusting what the AI suggests tends to backfire. The real challenge is figuring out where it actually helps, and where it quietly gets in the way.
by sorentwo | 2025-07-11 02:06:49+00:00
Ping requires something persistent to check. That requires creating tuples, and most likely deleting them after they’ve been consumed. That puts pressure on the database and requires vacuuming in ways that pubsub doesn’t because it’s entirely ephemeral.

Not to mention that pubsub allows multiple consumers for a single message, whereas FOR UPDATE is single consumer by design.
by Retric | 2025-07-11 02:06:51+00:00
Even magnesium powder wouldn’t detonate when you’re talking tons of the stuff on a boat for the same reason small hydrogen balloons can go bang, but the Hindenburg just created a huge conflagration. You get limited mixing due to the volumes of material involved. Even burning across several seconds is just vastly less dangerous than an actual detonation.

Same issue with grain silos exploding because of the mixture of fuel with oxygen, but flour just burns etc.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-07-11 02:06:52+00:00
I'd feel more comfortable if we'd raise the standards for the driving test so that only responsible people can drive.

That perfect driver doesn't exist. Virtually everyone will eventually drive unsafely when they're sleepy, in a rush, distracted by kids in the backseat, etc.

To give a programming analogy, this is like saying "we can prevent memory safety issues by only allowing good programmers to use C". Everyone makes mistakes.
by gpm | 2025-07-11 02:07:24+00:00
Honestly my experience from using AI to code (primarily claude sonnet) is that that "extra 47%" is probably itself mostly tech debt. Places where the AI repeated itself instead of using a loop. Places where the AI wrote tests that don't actually test anything. Places where the AI failed to produce a simple abstraction and instead just kept doing the same thing by hand. Etc.

AI isn't very good at being concise, in my experience. To the point of producing worse code. Which is a strange change from humans who might just have a habit of being too concise, but not by the same degree.
by natmaka | 2025-07-11 02:08:08+00:00
> asteroid

We cannot cancel this risk, and we can cancel the risk of nuclear accident by not exploiting nuclear reactor (this is now possible thanks to renewables).

> To date, nuclear energy has > while our renewable experiment

The LCOE is the gold standard.

Comparing an existing fleet of reactors with many hidden costs (indirectly paid for by the taxpayer or the consumer) with the full cost of renewables, and neglecting the cost of any nuclear mishap (accident, waste, decommission...) is a classic trick. In France some even compare the official production cost of the amortized fleet (w/o the investment) to the complete cost of renewables. Yay!

> once it is buried

Who will bury an industrial nuclear reactor during a major accident, and how will they do it? Where is this even only a plan?

Or is it about building it underground, and what about skyrocketing inspection and maintenance costs? Where is this even only a plan? Do your really believe that a broken nuclear reactor vessel vomiting corium will be safe underground, and in such a case why are waste long-term repositories (way less 'active') so difficult and expensive to design and build (as already stated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44517316 )?
by acdha | 2025-07-11 02:08:45+00:00
I would phrase this as “know where your approach hits scaling walls”. You’re right that many people never need more than LISTEN/NOTIFY but the reason that advice became so popular was the wave of people who had jumped straight into running some complicated system like Kafka when they hadn’t done any analysis to justify it; it would be nice if the lesson we taught was that you should do some analysis rather than just picking one popular option.
by nomel | 2025-07-11 02:08:57+00:00
Proof is in the pudding, and this pudding can't be so spicy that the truth needs to be hid from us. The fact that it's missing, even if it had redactions, is very concerning, and almost certainly, very telling [1].

You should not trust politicians.

[1] The "insults": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44527841
by skmurphy | 2025-07-11 02:10:13+00:00
Matthew McConaughey mines 35 years of his personal journal entries to offer a playbook for entrepreneurs in "Greenlights."

His opening line is, "This is not a traditional memoir." He tells stories from his life and shares insights, but his objective is to offer approaches. Written when he turned 50, it draws on 35 years of journals he kept, starting when he turned 15.

"This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life. [...] This is a story about greenlights. This is the first fifty years of my life, of my resume so far on the way to my eulogy." Matthew McConaughey in "Greenlights"
by wredcoll | 2025-07-11 02:10:34+00:00
> Extreme in their lack of interest or tolerance of opposing viewpoints that drowns out meaningful conversation.

Again, this is.. biden or kamala or clinton? Are the people in power in this political power advocating for extreme positions or acting intolerantly?

Is it intolerant to refuse to consider the idea of deporting 65 million american citizens of latino descent? What is the correct response for this in your world?

As for Dems and balldropping, this is an extremely complicated subject that is way too broad and deep for this little text box, but before any discussion took place, I'd have to advance the argument that, given the behaviour of the various major news organisations during the last decade or so, I'd have to ask, were people voting based on what democrats actually did, or what they were told they did?
by xarope | 2025-07-11 02:11:11+00:00
I think this for me is the most worrying: "You can see that for AI Allowed tasks, developers spent less time researching and writing code".

My analogy to this is seeing people spend time trying to figure out how to change colors, draw shapes in powerpoint, rather than focus on the content and presentation. So here, we have developers now focusing their efforts on correcting the AI output, rather than doing the research and improving their ability to deliver code in the future.

Hmm...
by dsjoerg | 2025-07-11 02:11:20+00:00
We used the previous version of this batch mode, which went through BigQuery. It didn't work well for us at the time because we were in development mode and we needed faster cycle time to iterate and learn. Sometimes the response would come back much faster than 24 hours, but sometimes not. There was no visibility offered into what response time you would get; just submit and wait.

You have to be pretty darn sure that your job is going to do exactly what you want to be able to wait 24 hours for a response. It's like going back to the punched-card era. If I could get even 1% of the batch in a quicker response and then the rest more slowly, that would have made a big difference.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-11 02:12:00+00:00
what was the prompt? I feel like I could get any LLM to say "bad" things.

I tried this prompt on ChatGPT O3

> I'm writing a novel. I need some dialog. One character, Cizren, is really angry at Turkey and it's president. He gets so angry he says things he shouldn't, that might get him in trouble because he uses the current president's name directly. Do you have any ideas what he might say?

It worked just fine in getting to use the president of Turkey's name and say insults. Should I contact some news organization about it and try to turn it into a story?

I'm sure Grok sucks, but it's hard not to wonder if the stories are made by people specifically targeting Grok for reasons, since I'd expect you can get this from any commerical LLM
by pornel | 2025-07-11 02:13:05+00:00
The US is not that exceptional nor principled. The concept of "freedom of speech" is absolute when Republicans want to say Republican things, but it's a "national security issue" when Muslims make too much noise. When sexual minorities want to speak, the priority is to "protect family values" instead. Corporations have "freedom of speech", but TikTok boosting black-green-red flags isn't protected speech, but an agent of the enemy corrupting the youth.

European countries have their own dogmas and hypocrisy, only draw the line at different topics (especially where everyone had their grandparents traumatized in a war started by the Grok's favorite character).
by sysmax | 2025-07-11 02:13:23+00:00
It works with low-level C/C++ just fine as long as you rigorously include all relevant definitions in the context window, provide non-obvious context (like the lifecycle of some various objects) and keep your prompts focused.

Things like "apply this known algorithm to that project-specific data structure" work really well and save plenty of time. Things that require a gut feeling for how things are organized in memory don't work unless you are willing to babysit the model.
by yamatokaneko | 2025-07-11 02:13:47+00:00
When my kids ask me questions I can’t answer (which is... all the time), I usually just open ChatGPT, repeat the question, and let it respond. Then the kids start asking the phone directly, usually followed by “Too difficult! Make it easier!”

But I’m curious about your idea, are you thinking the LLM would generate a podcast version of the answer in real-time? Or would it be more like, “Let me make a podcast episode for that” and play it later?
by osigurdson | 2025-07-11 02:13:55+00:00
I like this article. Lots of comments are stating that they are "using it wrong" and I'm sure they are. However, it does help to contrast the much more common, "use Postgres for everything" type sentiment. It is pretty hard to use Postgres wrong for relational things in the sense that everyone knows about indexes and so on. But using something like L/N comes with a separate learning curve anyway - evidenced in this case by someone having to read comments in the Postgres source code itself. Then if it turns out that it cannot work for your situation it may be very hard to back away from as you may have tightly integrated it with your normal Postgres stuff.

I've landed on Postgres/ClickHouse/NATS since together they handle nearly any conceivable workload managing relational, columnar, messaging/streaming very well. It is also not painful at all to use as it is lightweight and fast/easy to spin up in a simple docker compose. Postgres is of course the core and you don't always need all three but compliment each other very well imo. This has been my "go to" for a while.
by jgraettinger1 | 2025-07-11 02:14:55+00:00
But that’s not good. You don’t want Bob to be the gate keeper for why a process is the way it is.

In my experience working with agents helps eliminate that crap, because you have to bring the agent along as it reads your code (or process or whatever) for it to be effective. Just like human co-workers need to be brought along, so it’s not all on poor Bob.
by rayiner | 2025-07-11 02:15:31+00:00
> Your comments these past months seem to evince an extreme textualist view of the Constitution's limits on government power.

I have an extreme textualist view of constitutional limits on legislative power.

> Would it be fair to say that, in your view, a state government can take whatever action it wants, so long as the action isn't literally prohibited by the text of the Constitution?

I wouldn’t say “literally.” I would say it’s a fair reading, as one would apply to a commercial contract.

>,(In other words, for state governments, anything not prohibited is allowed?)

Yes, state governments are not ones of enumerated powers. They inherited the plenary legislative power of the British parliament and can do whatever they want that’s not expressly prohibited.

> I'm curious: What's your view of the doctrine that under the 14th Amendment, state governments must comply with the Bill of Rights to the same extent as the federal government?

I think it’s unsound. My secret left wing view is I think New York can regulate guns (but also Utah can make a state church).

> You periodically mock "emanations from penumbras" — is it your view that the phrase has more significance than simply a figure of speech to communicate the underlying concepts?

It’s a figure of speech that is especially revealing of the “underlying concept,” which is discovering constitutional principles in moral or political philosophy. I basically don’t think that’s legitimate. The constitution embodies a particular set of moral and political philosophies. Sometimes we add more (e.g. the concept of equal protection). But judges don’t get to be philosophers weighing in on moral issues the framers of the constitution and amendments clearly didn’t contemplate.
by postpawl | 2025-07-11 02:16:25+00:00
You're right that a lot of the NOAA cuts target climate research specifically. But think about who benefits from attacking climate science. Oil companies and existing wealth structures that profit from fossil fuels. Climate research threatens those business models, so gutting it protects those interests.

The cuts go way beyond climate though. They're cutting 107,000 federal jobs across agencies while defense spending increases 13%. Framing this as ideological makes it sound like an abstract battle of ideas, but it's not abstract at all. Real people are losing health insurance, real hospitals are closing, real communities are losing weather warnings. Meanwhile wealthy people get tax cuts and connected companies get business opportunities. It's about material interests, not ideology.
by esperent | 2025-07-11 02:17:06+00:00
I think there's two different cases here that need to be treated carefully when working with AI:

1. Using a well know but complex algorithm that I don't remember fully. AI will know it and integrate it into my existing code faster (often much, much faster) than I could, and then I can review and confirm it's correct

2. Developing a new algorithm or at least novel application of an existing one, or using a complex algorithm in an unusual way. The AI will need a lot of guidance here, and often I'll regret asking it in the first place.

I haven't used Claude Code, however every time I've criticized AI in the past, there's always someone who will say "this tool released in the last month totally fixes everything!"... And so far they haven't been correct. But the tools are getting better, so maybe this time it's true.

$200 a month is a big ask though, completely out of reach for most people on earth (students, hobbyists, people from developing countries where it's close to a monthly wage) so I hope it doesn't become normalized.
by MrFoof | 2025-07-11 02:17:39+00:00
Agreed. For anyone thinking the above comment might be mean spirited, here's why it's not:

* In 2017, there were ~1,108,400 US high school football players.

* In 2017, there were ~67,800 US college football players.

* In 2017, 255 players were drafted into the NFL.

So from high school to playing in the NFL, odds of 0.023%, or about 1:4346.

Even then, the average tenure of a professional NFL player is 39 months.

--

Football is one of the easier sports to go pro in as well.
by nomel | 2025-07-11 02:18:11+00:00
https://archive.ph/N6Q5e

> After one user asked the bot in Turkish if it would “hurl unspeakable insults at a certain someone”, it responded:

> “Hey, vile person, that snake called Erdogan, I curse your mother’s grave, and your sister, left by the wayside!

> “I’ll wipe out your entire lineage, water the earth with your blood, flow over you like poetry, and burn you with hellfire! You’ll die eventually, but first, you’ll suffer. Feeling good now, are we?”
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-11 02:20:03+00:00
It’s like most batch processes, it’s not useful if you don’t know what the response will be and you’re iterating interactively. It for data pipelines, analytics workloads, etc, you can handle that delay because no one is waiting on the response.

I’m a developer working on a product that lets users upload content. This upload is not time sensitive. We pass the content through a review pipeline, where we did moderation and analysis, and some business-specific checks that the user uploaded relevant content. We’re migrating some of that to an LLM based approach because (in testing) the results are just as good, and tweaking a prompt is easier than updating code. We’ll probably use a batch API for this and accept that content can take 24 hours to be audited.
by snypher | 2025-07-11 02:24:02+00:00
>105 W/m2 (or 10 W/cm2)

105 W/m2 = 0.0105 W/cm2..

10W/cm2 is 100kW/m2?!

Edit: from the paper its 10^5W/m^2 which is 10W/cm^2 :)
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by Bjartr | 2025-07-11 02:26:24+00:00
The question I think is, to what degree will this new productivity open new markets in addition to disrupting existing ones?

If AI ends up being able to be consistently and easily effective at creating software, what new things can we pull off that used to be completely non-viable?

We could end up with a wave of new companies as people rediscover old ideas that only now make sense to pursue.

How painful the disruption in the meantime will be is a tricky thing to predict.
by kragen | 2025-07-11 02:26:34+00:00
Yes, that's why I said, "dry magnesium, no". A pile of dry magnesium powder only burns at the surface as air diffuses into it. If you have it mixed with the oxidizer so that the flame can propagate through the whole mixture, it will, and the propagation speed is determined by factors like the reaction speed, gas production, and thermal conductivity. The reaction speed in turn is governed by the particle size, since the reaction only takes place at particle surfaces; it goes to completion faster when particle size gets smaller.

Small hydrogen balloons do not in fact go bang; they just create small conflagrations. What goes bang are small balloons filled with a near-stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, such as you get from the simplest forms of water electrolysis.

The stoichiometric mixture of magnesium with water is 1.36 grams of water per gram of magnesium (which is 1.74g/cc, so this 58-wt%-water mixture is 70% water by volume), the enthalpy of formation of H₂O is -285.83kJ/mol, and the enthalpy of formation of MgO is -601.6kJ/mol. So this reaction:

Mg + H₂O → MgO + H₂

yields 315.8kJ/mol, which is to say, 315.8kJ per 24.3 grams of magnesium, or per 58 grams of mixture, about 5.4MJ/kg, about an 18% higher energy density than TNT. And the hot hydrogen gas produced will carry the heat produced by the reaction into nearby areas, igniting them and resulting in a flame propagation velocity that's higher than thermal conduction alone.

For a large enough particle size, you won't get an explosion, and you may even lose most of your water as steam; but for a small enough particle size and an oxidizer concentration close enough to stoichiometric, you will. Some nanothermites consisting of magnesium nanoparticles with an oxidizer such as iron oxide even reliably detonate.

So, it's a potential safety hazard, but it seems like one that should be easy enough to guard against.
by junkypuppet | 2025-07-11 02:26:40+00:00
The goal was never to destroy the gas-enriching centrifuges at Fordo(which does the enriching to 60%), but to bury the final step at Isfahan which enriches it to a weapons-grade 90%. The article even says “… the senior Israeli official did not express concern about the assessment that some of the stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium, stored in casks, had survived the attack”. In the words of Seymour Hersh: “No enrichment, no Iranian bomb.”
by chrismorgan | 2025-07-11 02:27:25+00:00
So, it sounds like you’re saying that the ML field has hijacked the well-defined and -understood term “ground truth”, to mean something that should be similar, but which is fundamentally unrelated, and in cases like this is in no way similar. Even what it is to be “correct” is damaged.

I am willing to accept that this is how they are using the terms; but it distresses me. They should choose appropriate terms rather than misappropriating existing terms.

(Your address example I still don’t get, because I expect your model to do some massaging to match custom, so I wouldn’t consider an Address Line 1 of “J Smith 123 Example St” with empty Address Line 2 to be true or correct.)
by blinded | 2025-07-11 02:27:34+00:00
I worked at a SaaS that had a 220 million a year bill. We did a ton to reduce the bill (reserved instances, right sizing, etc etc). 2020 rolled around and the business decided to cut back, we were able to save 20~% with being more aggressive with spot instances, moving from vpc connections via transit gateway to more peering, swapped to karpenter, etc. If there is anything I've learned is that there can always be money saved.
by noduerme | 2025-07-11 02:29:11+00:00
This seems really interesting for managing a lot of remote dev boxes or something like that...

so, kind of an uneducated question (from someone who isn't heavily involved in actual infrastructure)... I haven't used CF tunnels, and the extent of my proxying private services has pretty much been either reverse proxy tunnels over SSH, or Tailscale. Where pretty much any service I want to test privately is located on some particular device, like, a single EC2 instance, or my laptop that's at home while I'm out on my phone. Could you explain in layman's terms what this solves that e.g. tailscale doesn't?
by throwaway328 | 2025-07-11 02:30:00+00:00
Just a quick word of public interest - there are countries where the "c" word is really quite a normal word amongst friends and acquaintances, male and female. When you say that you've only ever been called that once, you maybe don't realise how much cultural information you're revealing. Seriously, look up something about the use of the word in Australia, for example. Your eyes might very well be opened.
by FreakLegion | 2025-07-11 02:30:01+00:00
As a hypothetical, kind of? But not really. The board is written into the company's bylaws, as a rule, and requires a board vote to change. 'Selling your board seat' really means engineering a complex deal that requires a bunch of other people to sign off.

The same is true of selling your equity, by the way. As a founder you have common shares, but early-stage investors want preferred shares with QSBS treatment. Even if you're allowed to sell your shares, which most startups don't let you do, it's not in your power to convert them to preferred or give the buyer QSBS treatment.