MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AngryData | 2025-07-06 21:19:02+00:00
Good radiator space was definitely some of it, part of the requirement for the engines and transmissions to last the like million+ miles truckers want out of them is to have more than merely sufficient cooling in order to keep both the engine and transmission to stay the same temperature no matter how hot it is outside or how hard they need to run the engines to get up a hill. Of course that is along side other semi-truck specific equipment like bypass oil filters that have a MUCH finer filter to remove smaller metal particles that would otherwise just pass right through the main oil filter. More variable operating temperatures and worse oil filtration might be fine for consumer vehicles that are mostly rusted out trash out by time they hit 300,000 miles, but you wouldn't want to have to buy a brand new semi-truck engine every 3 years.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-06 21:19:04+00:00
> You ARE hurting the underpaid, exploited worker.

What? No, you're not hurting anyone. You're going out to eat and expecting to pay for what you ordered, not the life subsidy of someone whose employer can't be bothered to pay them well enough. Either way, it's not and shouldn't be your obligation even if it does screw with the waiter's finances. I too might have financial squeezes that make it difficult for me to fork over an extra 14 to 20% every damn time I've already paid for all that I bought.

Your claim just keeps reinforcing the foolish notion that it's a consumer's fault/responsibility if wait staff aren't paid enough by their employers.

>You're not hurting the big wigs who exploit workers. They don't care if you don't tip.

And I shouldn't have to care if they don't care. At bottom, like I said in my point above, it's not my job to subsidize their wages either way. I didn't make my argument as a description of protest, instead i'm saying it as a practical thing anyone should and has a right to do.
by mmarian | 2025-07-06 21:19:38+00:00
Similar age, similar feelings, and it's totally fine. We hear about success stories online, so we think it's always going to work out. The reality is that it may never; so you need to enjoy validation/selling process if you want to continue; it's totally fine if you don't.

Whatever you do, do it because you don't want to regret not doing it when you're on your death bed. That's how I prioritize trying the startup lottery over leet coding every evening.
by hughw | 2025-07-06 21:20:09+00:00
We need to rewire the economy in a zillion different ways. Nobody should be using fossil fuels if they can avoid it, but so many cannot at present e.g. air travel, steel mills. Shell and Exxon aren't forcing people to burn their product. If they shut down tomorrow, millions worldwide would starve. We better keep them going as long as we need them. Edit: I work in oilfield services and probably am a little biased.
by GauntletWizard | 2025-07-06 21:20:15+00:00
This makes a ton of evolutionary sense. Success begets success. Those that don't need outside help are successful; those that cooperate and build on it are more successful. Unfortunately, it also leads to local maxima- those that are good at gathering from neighbors and happen to have good neighbors reach highest success, regardless of their own intrinsic ability.

Neither "Attempt to split success equally so everyone gets the same results" nor "Give all the resources to those that have the most" are good ways to run a society, or good long term evolutionary strategies.
by pvtmert | 2025-07-06 21:21:09+00:00
Besides the hard-coded cache, shouldn't DNS infrastructure already help with the caching just by the TTL value itself? Given quite many & large public DNS resolvers out there, like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 and Google's 8.8.8.8

I overall like the DNS, it is a global database with eventual consistency. Possible to store transient data. Usually not blocked by firewalls just by the sheer innocent nature. (Although gets intercepted quite a lot...)
by sokoloff | 2025-07-06 21:21:22+00:00
Selling naked puts doesn’t seem particularly outrageous. About half the time that I want to buy a position, I’ll sell a series of put options just OoM until I get assigned the shares I want, collecting small premium along the way.

My “hedge” in this case is that I want to own the shares. (I’m short vs where I want to be.)
by oblio | 2025-07-06 21:22:45+00:00
> people like you

I'm a regular Joe on the internet, with a regular job.

And regarding agriculture and your comment, that's how people with actual power think.

Think of almost all major advances we've had, especially in terms of reducing costs. The vast majority of cost savings (and therefore improving quality of life for the average person) can be summarized as:

* put plastic (and fossil fuel derived materials) in EVERYTHING: if you don't believe this me, go to Amazon (or any supermarket, really) and pick a random product category and see how much the non-plastic version costs, frequently it's much, much more expensive (kudos to stainless steel and aluminum products frequently still holding the flag; but coming with other downsides, obviously)

* (more relevant to our discussion): industrialize human suffering and/or general environment degradation (push production to countries where labor and environmental/sustainability laws are lax and abuses are rampant): if you don't believe me, go to Amazon (or any supermarket, really) and pick a random product category and try to research their supply chain to see if it's produced ethically and sustainably

Oh, for bonus points, a huge percentage of the world economy works on BOTH at the same time.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-06 21:22:54+00:00
Yes, my family was raised in the southern US.

I didn't use it much growing up since they moved west when I was young. but it turns out that "y'all" is surprisingly nifty: a gender neutral, 2nd person pronoun for a group of peope. So I picked it up more in adulthood and put it into my daily vernacular.
by tpmoney | 2025-07-06 21:24:12+00:00
I doubt the purpose here is so much to prevent someone from intentionally side stepping the block. It's more likely here to avoid the sort of headlines you would expect to see if someone was suggested "I wish ${politician} would die" as a response to an email mentioning that politician. In general you should view these sorts of broad word filters as looking to short circuit the "think of the children" reactions to Tiny Tim's phone suggesting not that God should "bless us, every one", but that God should "kill us, every one". A dumb filter like this is more than enough for that sort of thing.
by xg15 | 2025-07-06 21:24:14+00:00
This is what makes me uneasy the most right now: The promise of reduced payroll can only materialize if there are no replacement jobs created by AI - otherwise the labor cost would just shift to a different position. So mass unemployment it is then?

At the same time, the same people are also hard at work dismantling the social security net that makes prolonged unemployment survivable.

So what exactly is the endgame here?
by didibus | 2025-07-06 21:24:15+00:00
I did read the article, appart for that it sounds like a terrible place to work, I'm not sure I see what's the big deal?

No one knows how any of the models got made, their training data is kept secret, we don't know what it contains, and so on. I'm also pretty sure a few of the main models poached each others employees which just reimplemented the same training models with some twists.

Most LLMs are also based on initial research papers where most of the discovery and innovation took place.

And in the very end, it's all trained on data that very few people agreed or intended would be used for this purpose, and for which they all won't see a dime.

So why not wrap and rewrap models and resell them, and let it all compete for who offers the cheapest plan or per-token cost?
by izzydata | 2025-07-06 21:24:15+00:00
Not only do I not think it is right around the corner. I'm not even convinced it is even possible or at the very least I don't think it is possible using conventional computer hardware. I don't think being able to regurgitate information in an understandable form is even an adequate or useful measurement of intelligence. If we ever crack artificial intelligence it's highly possible that in its first form it is of very low intelligence by humans standards, but is truly capable of learning on its own without extra help.
by BeetleB | 2025-07-06 21:24:36+00:00
> I'm not on the political right, but it's plain that they don't give it equal time.

OP said it's a "slice", not a "statistically accurate representation". I think his intent was to say "They cover everything", not "They cover everything in due proportion".

And, BTW, I've yet to find any show (news or entertainment) that is even close to being statistically accurate representation of society. Such shows will not survive - not enough people will listen.
by librasteve | 2025-07-06 21:24:42+00:00
occam (MIMD) is an improvement over CUDA (SIMD)

with latest (eg TSMC) processes, someone could build a regular array of 32-bit FP transputers (T800 equivalent):

- 8000 CPUs in same die area as Apple M2 (16 TIPS) (ie. 36x faster than an M2) - 40000 CPUs in single reticle (80 TIPS) - 4.5M CPUs per 300mm wafer (10 PIPS)

the transputer async link (and C001 switch) allows for decoupled clocking, CPU level redundancy and agricultural interconnect

heat would be the biggest issue ... but >>50% of each CPU is low power (local) memory
by HocusLocus | 2025-07-06 21:24:57+00:00
As a kid I stressed our Olivetti divisumma 24 ( https://www.ithistory.org/sites/default/files/hardware/Olive... ) with a million times a million. It entered a perpetual mechanical cycle that even unplugging it could not break. Finally Dad had to attack its innards and tug and twiddle until he pulled out a spring loaded gear and it caught a cog on the next go-round. It lifted its digit arms and printed out a 'partial answer' that was a series of random numbers as wide as the whole mechanism.

He said "please don't do that again." I moved on to torture computers.
by zem | 2025-07-06 21:25:11+00:00
scala is intended to provide full support for both functional and object oriented programming. the positive side is that it will support programming in whatever style you like, or any mix in of styles. the negative side is that it is a huge language with a complex type system, and that the library ecosystem has a mix of various styles, e.g. there is scalaz which is heavily inspired by more purely functional languages like haskell, and scalaz code will look totally bizarre to you if you have mainly been using the object oriented features of scala. (contrast with go, which is on the opposite end of the spectrum in that a design goal is that go code should look familiar no matter where you see it, because the language supports a very constrained style of programming)
by tonymet | 2025-07-06 21:25:32+00:00
counterintuitive UIs are causing so much unconscious angst. People expect clear feedback from their tools. Out of a dozen gadgets ( earbuds, flashlights, calculators, smartphones, clocks, measurement tools) there are a dozen different ways to turn them on or off. Long press, double, triple tap. I feel like I'm casting spells just to try to use my tools.

My wife's Pixel was hung and I was trying to reboot it. Long press, double tap, triple tap. up-down volume, then power was the answer.

We are at the point where our gadgets expect bespoke Konami codes before they respond to input.

It's maddening!
by miohtama | 2025-07-06 21:25:36+00:00
On Indian options markets

> India retail investors make up 35% of options trades. Institutions, seeking to hedge their risk or profit for their companies’ accounts, handle the rest. Regulators are alarmed that regular folk are bypassing the tried-and-true way to build wealth: buying and holding stocks and mutual funds.

> Instead they’re engaging in pure speculation. The average time an Indian trader holds an option is less than Instead they’re engaging in pure speculation. The average time an Indian trader holds an option is less than 30 minutes, according to data from mutual fund provider Axis Asset Management Co. “If you want to gamble, if you need diabetes and high blood pressure, then go into this market,” Ashwani Bhatia, a board member on the nation’s top stock market regulator, said last year.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/options/indias-...
by apical_dendrite | 2025-07-06 21:26:05+00:00
When I've talked to startup CEOs or execs building AI products at larger companies, their sales pitch is usually some form of:

"Right now X is expensive because you have to hire people to do it. That means that access to X is limited. By using AI, we can provide more access to X".

X could be anything from some aspect of healthcare, to some type of business service, or even something in the arts.

It's very clear that the people building AI companies, and the people investing in those companies, think that there is an enormous market to use AI to automate a wide variety of work that currently requires human labor. They may not be explicitly framing it as "we get to reduce our payroll by 50%" - they may be framing it as "now everyone in the world will get access to X" (often tech executives will use a grand mission to justify horrible things), but the upshot is that companies are 100% putting money behind AI because they believe it will help them get more work out of fewer and fewer people.
by behnamoh | 2025-07-06 21:26:36+00:00
Startups and AI shops: "AGI near, 5 years max" (please give us more money please)

Scientists and Academics: "AGI far, LLMs not gonna AGI"

AI Doomers: "AGI here, AI sentient, we dead"

AI Influencers: "BREAKING: AGI achieved, here's 5 things to know about o3"

Investors: stonks go down "AGI cures all diseases", stonks go up "AGI bad" (then shorts stonks)
by ralferoo | 2025-07-06 21:26:43+00:00
> If an EV has the power to sustain highway speeds, it'll also have the power to go up a steep hill at a snail's pace.

Most EVs are direct drive from the motor without a gearbox. There absolutely is a minimum speed depending on how the motor is wound. If you imagine, say 12 magnets around the motor driven by 3 phases, the idea is to have one winding attracting the magnets, and this phase is the one the motor is "trying to get to". In this situation, this winding is active until the motor is in the correct position (actually slightly before) when it is depowered and the next phase is powered. The longer the motor stays in that position, the hotter the winding gets for the same current. At the point where the motor stops being able to rotate at all, that winding is receiving 100% duty cycle.

There are strategies that you could try - the simplest is cutting power and letting it cool down, but then the motor will stop where it is, and starting the motor from stationary requires even more power than keeping an already moving motor going. You might apply a reverse polarity to the previous winding for a bit to repel the magnets and then swap back. If the motor has passed the mid point this will be less effective, but still better than nothing.

If you ignore feedback from the axle and just cycle through the windings at the desired speed, then there definitely is a minimum speed. Because when the load is too great and the motor doesn't move and you cycle to the next phase, then next phase won't exert much magnetic field on your magnets and the next phase after that, you're working against the direction you want to go.

It's true that if you gear an EV motor, the torque should be able to be geared down to any speed. But typically pure EVs are direct drive, because usually they have enough torque for the low speeds and adding a gearbox just adds inefficiencies. But for a heavy load, maybe gearboxes are required. As a disclaimer, I don't know if EV trucks have gearboxes or not, but certainly EV cars tend not to have except for hybrids.
by zkmon | 2025-07-06 21:27:00+00:00
In developing countries, farming is left for those who has no opportunity or ability to do any other better work. Often uneducated, poorer, living in remote places without basic facilities.

Result? The farmers are forced to do extensive use of chemicals in farming, low nutrition, high yield GM/hybrid varieties and adulteration of whole foods. The food that comes out is laced with chemicals, poor quality varieties. And the urban consumer pays for their negligence of the farmer.
by cornholio | 2025-07-06 21:27:14+00:00
Again, the point was to compare apples to apples, a completely new system that both parties need to adopt, cryptocurrency vs one of the modern fintech options available to both, not the entrenched incumbents which abuse their market position.

Now, it's plausible no such modern option existed in this specific case, but if that's the case, it's almost certainly a regulatory issue, since all big fintechs are under competitive pressure to expand aggressively. So, this, again, proves the crypto use case as primarily a circumvention tool.

There are definitely bad governments out there and I can sympathize with people trying to evade capital controls, mandatory exchange rates etc., but this is not a reason to dismantle the financial regulatory powers in any of the stable democracies of the free world.

To make an analogy, machine guns are definitely a powerful tool when you are fighting a tyrannical government, but nonetheless I don't want them to become available on my street. It's hard to even make a dual use argument for cryptocurrency, as a money transfer system it doesn't have substantial legal utilization after more than a decade of hitting the mainstream, it's still primarily a vehicle for money laundry, regulatory evasion and speculation.
by QRY | 2025-07-06 21:27:54+00:00
That's an interesting idea! I struggle with the same issues you've mentioned, that space between the IDE integrated option and pure CLI. Your comment sparked an idea of using something like vim or similar where you can edit the config on the fly and reload it. I wonder how hard it would be to bolt a prompt interface to the front to have it build the editor for you?

It would likely quickly devolve into typical editor config bikeshedding, only AI powered? At least for me, maybe someone smarter could streamline it enough to be useful though!
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-06 21:29:36+00:00
Not weird really. On the one hand, you have a flagging policy that lets any random man-child with some specific bias and enough karma completely eliminate a post for whatever bullshit emotional reaction of their own, and at the same time, you have a bunch of people here who suffer from AI-fanboy derangement and hate to see any criticism of their fantasies about a glorious future in which current LLMs are just a hop away from making all things wonderful.
by Cieric | 2025-07-06 21:29:36+00:00
This is pretty cool and it's surprising how well it works on mobile. I think the shuffle puzzle game has a bug where it can generate unsolvable puzzles. I ran into a parity issue. I solved it with the blank in the upper left but got no response from the game so I don't believe that was the intended solution.

Also checked with an online solver and it verified that there was no solution.
by timbray | 2025-07-06 21:29:42+00:00
Relevant: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-bray-unichars-15.html - IETF approved and will have an RFC number in a few weeks.

Tl;dr: Since we're kinda stuck with Uncorrected UTF-8, here are the "characters" you shouldn't use. Includes a bunch of stuff the OP mentioned.
by andy99 | 2025-07-06 21:29:59+00:00
Maybe - anecdotally, HN at least is not very receptive to the idea that transformers are not (or with more data will never be) sentient somehow, and almost every post I see about this is followed up by the idiotic "how do we know human intelligence isn't the same thing", as if there's some body of commentators whose personal experience with consciousness somehow leads them to believe it might be achievable with matrix math.

Anyway, I don't think we're over the peak yet, the tech adjacent pseudo intellectuals that feed these bubbles (VCs etc) still very much think that math that generates a plausible transcript is alive.
by thedude14 | 2025-07-06 21:30:15+00:00
As a self promoting post I think the author did a good job. As an interview format, I would rather work somewhere less ego driven development and more real problem oriented workplace. But that is just me. Someone could prefer these kind of interviews. I also did a set of questions for java engineers in the past and I always felt there is something really icky. I also noticed the engineers with huge ego revel in these kind of candidate assessments as it makes the feel good, but the candidate performance is poorly tested. Thats what the probation period is for. Just ask the candidate whats his experience. Asking these "cleverly" designed problems is nice for the interviever importance of keeping his job, but is not really usefull. You could even miss a good engineer. Perhaps i see this too narrow and you just really want to observe what the candidate is thinking, but you could make a couple of not really complicated questions and you could see where he is at. I dont bite this head-game at all.
by sbierwagen | 2025-07-06 21:30:19+00:00
Yes, proper nouns are capitalized.

And of course it's much worse for a company's published works to not respect branding-- a trademark only exists if it is actively defended. Official marketing material by a company has been used as legal evidence that their trademark has been genericized:

>In one example, the Otis Elevator Company's trademark of the word "escalator" was cancelled following a petition from Toledo-based Haughton Elevator Company. In rejecting an appeal from Otis, an examiner from the United States Patent and Trademark Office cited the company's own use of the term "escalator" alongside the generic term "elevator" in multiple advertisements without any trademark significance.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
by userbinator | 2025-07-06 21:30:21+00:00
I think the most surprising thing from this article is that microSD cards may not even have a decimal amount of space; while all the hard drives I've encountered have at least that much if not somewhat more, apparently the expectation that a 32GB microSD card be able to store 32,000,000,000 bytes isn't the norm. How do the manufacturers find a way to explain that? It's definitely bordering on fraud at that point.
by plasticeagle | 2025-07-06 21:32:14+00:00
Certainly Gen AI is being marketed to business leaders as being capable of reducing their payroll, but I don't believe that's what it's for as such. And as several comments have mentioned, its energy use is not even especially significant.

Gen AI exists to wrest control of information from the internet into the hands of the few. Once upon a time, the Encyclopaedia was a viable business model. It was destroyed as a business model once the internet grew to the point that a large percentage of the population was able to access it. At that point, information became free, and impossible to control.

Look at google's "AI summaries" that they've inserted at the top of their search results. Often wrong, sometimes stupid, occasionally dangerous - but think about what will happen if and when people divert their attention from "the internet" to the AI summaries of the internet. The internet as we know it, the free repository of humanity's knowledge, will wither and die.

And that is the point. The point is to once again lock up the knowledge in obscure unmodifiable black boxes, because this provides opportunity to charge for access to them. They have literally harvested the world's information, given and created freely by all of us, and are attempting to sell it back to us.

Energy use is a distraction, in terms of why we must fight Gen AI. Energy use will go down, it's an argument easily countered by the Gen AI companies. Fight Gen AI because it is an attempt to steal back what was once the property of all of us. You can't ban it, but you can and absolutely should refuse to use it.