MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mattnewport | 2025-07-31 19:16:07+00:00
What's the basis for your claim that it is on an exponential growth trajectory? That's not the way it feels to me as a fairly heavy user, it feels more like an asymptotic approach to expert human level performance where each new model gets a bit closer but is not yet reaching it, at least in areas where I am expert enough to judge. Improvements since the original ChatGPT don't feel exponential to me.
by goku12 | 2025-07-31 19:16:24+00:00
You have my admiration and support for this work! I guess it goes without saying how monumental and critical the work on alternative engines like servo and libweb are. We are genuinely tired of the current duopoly (I'm starting to lose hope with Firefox and gecko as well. They seem to have priorities different to our expectations.) But I guess we now have one more to look forward to, thanks to you and the rest of the team! Personally, I hope to pitch in as soon as I have some spare time available. Regards!
by Mouvelie | 2025-07-31 19:16:41+00:00
I like what you wrote, thanks for that comment.

>because I'm drawn to the project of creating a certain kind of space in the world, and having control over it so that it can stay close to my vision.

So you have multiple success conditions. You just want a space, maybe it's a restaurant ? A bar ? A pub ? Maybe it's actually just decorating it, not owning it ? Co-managing it ? Could be as well a hackerspace ? A school ?

> it's much harder for the meaning in your life to come from the work itself, because there are so many things waiting to punish you if you try to live that way. But there are still certainly ways to do it.

I'd say untrue. I see many colleagues identifying with their job even though they are "just" employees. The global economy, to some extent I'd say, run because of such people. Managers, directors, lead whatevers...

>In my opinion it should be a major goal of society to remove as many barriers to doing meaningful work as possible.

I'd argue the barriers are a feature, not a bug : how do you know you truly want something ? Make it hard to get. So only deserving people will get it, and we will have the best of it.
by TrackerFF | 2025-07-31 19:16:50+00:00
I know exactly what I want to do, if I had the money to retire today: I'd build instruments for a living, which is something I already do as a side gig/hustle, and is something I have done for years now.

It is one of those things that fall under the category "very enjoyable, but financially difficult". If you're already set financially, living a FIRE lifestyle, you can run a shop at a scale that:

- Doesn't burn you out

- Doesn't force you to cut corners

- Keeps it somewhere between a hobby and a "job"

Me and my partner are both both chasing FIRE, and I think we should get there within 4-5 years. So-called "Fat FIRE" in 10-12, if we decide to push on. We have both our dreams of focusing on the things we care most about. We both also know very well that the things we love to do, don't pay much.
by trynumber9 | 2025-07-31 19:16:59+00:00
And I don't dispute that. Simply that Ferrari is the Ford of super cars, building in large quantity for that market.

And I really doubt the applicability of the luxury approach to software. People will vastly overpay to have a 5% faster automobile because it's a personally-owned status symbol and has racing-pedigree. I don't recommend building a company around a new 5% faster database since it isn't a source of prestige for anyone. For many potential customers it'd barely put a mark in their bottom line. And it might be negative if it compromised in any other aspect to obtain it. Benchmarking isn't a reliable winner-take-all marketing approach like racing-based marketing (and it sure isn't as popular).
by jasode | 2025-07-31 19:17:28+00:00
>To my knowledge, a radio station or music streaming service doesn't have to negotiate with the record label to play a given song, they just have to pay a small royalty as defined by law.

The copyright holders can legally prevent their recordings from being streamed by Spotify. Famous examples were Taylor Swift and Neil Young withholding their music from Spotify.

For extra nuance, copyright holders can't stop cover songs from appearing on Spotify. So the Taylor Swift cover songs do have to pay compulsory license fees to her and her record label.
by Talanes | 2025-07-31 19:17:37+00:00
Writing is interesting, though, because there's also a steady stream of writers regurgitating the "I don't like writing, I like having written" line too.

George RR Martin possibly the most famous/contemporary example, but here's a page tracing back recorded instances of it. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/10/18/on-writing/
by pron | 2025-07-31 19:17:43+00:00
Given that Carbon's space is "languages with full interoperability with C++," I don't think D and Zig are in that space.

As to "getting it right" - things are not so simple. The emphasis on memory-safety soundness is based on some empirical hypotheses, some better founded than others, and it's unclear what "getting it right" means.

From a software correctness perspective, the road to sound memory safety is as follows: 1. We want to reduce the amount of costly bugs in software as cheaply as possible, 2. Memory unsafe operations are a common cause of many costly bugs, 3. Some or all memory bugs can be eliminated cheaply with sound language guarantees.

The problem is that 1. memory safety refers to several properties that don't all contribute equally to correctness (e.g. out-of-bounds access causes more serious bugs than use-after-free [1]), and 2. soundly guaranteeing different memory safety properties has different costs. It gets more complicated than that (e.g. there are also unsound techniques that have proven very effective to consider), but that's the overview.

It is, therefore, as of yet unclear which memory safety properties are worth it to soundly guarantee in the language, and the answer may depend on the language's other goals (and there must be other goals that are at least as important, because the empty language guarantees not only all memory safety properties but all (safety [2]) correctness properties, yet nobody uses it as it's useless, while a language like ATS can be used to write many useful programs, but few use it because it's just too costly to use well). The goal is always to find the right balance.

For example, Java soundly guarantees lack of use-after-free at the cost of increased memory footprint; that may be "getting it right" for some programs but not all. Rust soundly guarantees lack of use-after-free at the cost of imposing strong and elaborate typesystem constraints (that, as is often the case, are more constraining than the property they guarantee); that, too, may be "getting it right" for some programs, though not all. Zig guarantees lack of out-of-bounds access in a simple language at the cost of not guaranteeing lack of use-after-free, and that may also be "getting it right" for some programs but not all.

So what "getting it right" means always depends on constraints other than safety (Rust and Zig want to consume less memory than Java; Java and Zig want to be simpler than Rust; Java and Rust want to guarantee more memory safety properties than Zig). If Carbon wants to be more interoperable with C++ than Java, Rust, or Zig, then it will have to figure out what "getting it right" means for Carbon.

[1]: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_cwe_top25.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_and_liveness_properties
by nwienert | 2025-07-31 19:18:17+00:00
Let's look:

GPT-1 June 2018

GPT-2 February 2019

GPT-3 November 2021

GPT-4 March 2023

Claude tells me this is the rough improvement of each:

GPT-1 to 2: 5-10x

GPT-2 to 3: 10-20x

GPT 3 to 4: 2-4x

Now it's been 2.5 years since 4.

Are you expecting 5 to be 2-4x better, or 10-20x better?
by AlotOfReading | 2025-07-31 19:19:11+00:00
Why not install the cameras and simply never connect them if the point is mere visual deterrence? Similarly, it's not hard to imagine an ALPR system that doesn't save anything unless there's a match with a stolen car database. You don't need to go all the way to the privacy nightmare of flock to improve the situation. Municipalities do because there's no care given to privacy rights.
by DrNosferatu | 2025-07-31 19:19:12+00:00
My understanding was that Ferrari was in the business of selling a very specific badge, a very specific engine purr, a very specific shade of red and a certain relative level of dynamic performance - the absolute value of this last one changes with time. All this on 4 wheels.

Are you telling me that selling branding rights to Acer laptops and to cheap cologne is (an important) part of their core business?
by EliRivers | 2025-07-31 19:19:15+00:00
Unhelpful but related; back in the day (15 or so years ago), Netflix had a truly excellent back catalogue of old movies. Over a hundred thousand titles. A DVD collection that we just didn't realise was going to vanish as quickly as it arose.

The current offering is just... less. I don't know if I mean in terms of sheer number of titles, but a million episodes of slop is just more slop. Netflix peaked 15 years ago and we didn't even notice.
by CM30 | 2025-07-31 19:19:22+00:00
As someone who's also posted quite a bit on sites like YouTube over the years, I wouldn't say the amount of negative comments have been that overwhelming. They certainly exist, but they've always been a minority of the comments on my own videos.

But it's definitely dependent on the topic you're posting videos about, the audience you're aiming at and I guess how unlucky you are when it comes to attracting trolls and other troublemakers.

You definitely do need a thick skin though.
by LeftHandPath | 2025-07-31 19:19:31+00:00
There are some things that you still can't do with LLMs. For example, if you tried to learn chess by having the LLM play against you, you'd quickly find that it isn't able to track a series of moves for very long (usually 5-10 turns; the longest I've seen it last was 18) before it starts making illegal choices. It also generally accepts invalid moves from your side, so you'll never be corrected if you're wrong about how to use a certain piece.

Because it can't actually model these complex problems, it really requires awareness from the user regarding what questions should and shouldn't be asked. An LLM can probably tell you how a knight moves, or how to respond to the London System. It probably can't play a full game of chess with you, and will virtually never be able to advise you on the best move given the state of the board. It probably can give you information about big companies that are well-covered in its training data. It probably can't give you good information about most sub-$1b public companies. But, if you ask, it will give a confident answer.

They're a minefield for most people and use cases, because people aren't aware of how wrong they can be, and the errors take effort and knowledge to notice. It's like walking on a glacier and hoping your next step doesn't plunge through the snow and into a deep, hidden crevasse.
by markus_zhang | 2025-07-31 19:19:39+00:00
Thanks, it's a good clip and TBH I completely agree with what he says. It is just that the complete agree does not turn into complete change of my mindset. I guess it's because being the stage is less fun than I thought. My mindset is -- OK I'm going to be the stage, so I'm going to learn a lot of stuffs that I wanted to learn, so then teach them to my son. But apparently 5-year old boy has little in common with a 40+ years old grown up, regarding hobbies and interests, so the mindset doesn't actually work.

I definitely don't want to ever trade my kid away, but sometimes I just wonder the what-ifs.
by pengaru | 2025-07-31 19:20:09+00:00
I spent several years rebuilding a property in the Mojave desert, never had AC.

If you don't sweat / get dehydrated, the fanned hot air is just a blast furnace and instead of feeling relief you can tell it's making things worse.

But if I were elderly and that somehow affected my ability to perspire correctly even if hydrated, I'd just use a misting bottle to spray myself or repeatedly enter a cold shower.

It's obviously more effective in lower humidity ambient conditions, but the body must have moisture at the surface to carry the heat away evaporating in the wind.
by tayo42 | 2025-07-31 19:20:45+00:00
I was thinking about this sentiment on my long car drive today.

it feels like when you need to paint walls in your house. If you've never done it before you'll probably reach for tape to make sure you don't ruin the ceiling and floors. the tape is a tool for amateur wall painters to get decent results somewhat efficiently compared to if they didn't. If your an actual good wall painter, tape only slows you down. You'll go faster without the "help".
by godelski | 2025-07-31 19:22:22+00:00
> documentation is that it inevitably goes stale.

Of course! Just like the code itself.

There's two helpful and minimal mitigating strategies here

1) dating/versioning Provides hints that they might be stale if we can identify if they're old. Easy to diff a function between versions when something seems wrong 2) In code documentation (e.g. docstrings) While not as good as a manual, it's not too difficult to write docstrings *while* coding.

But the unfortunate thing is that you just need to keep documents up to date. Docstrings only go so far.

Also, I'm pretty certain we've all experienced a choice between two tools where our choice prioritized documentation. Docker is a great example (it's even RedHat's business model!). There's many container systems, many that can even do more! But take systemd-nspawn (and vm). Very poorly documented stuff and not many examples to learn from.

I wanted to make that reminder because UX is important to the business.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-31 19:22:26+00:00
That is what many of us have done moving into managed languages, with native libraries when required to do so.

The remaining people driving where the language goes have other priorities in mind like reflection.

The profiles that were supposed to be so much better than the Safe C++ proposal, none of them made it into C++26, and it remains to be seen if we ever will see a sensible preview implementation for C++29.
by nicce | 2025-07-31 19:22:28+00:00
It is not about what is supported now, but what will be supported in the future? Google is pushing most of the web standards and has a huge influence. Other, less used browsers must support them if they want to have any chance.

You should ask that how many of the standard features are brought by someone else without huge influence of Google. If you cannot get anything new, when it is enough that Google says "no", then in reality there is only one browser.
by incomingpain | 2025-07-31 19:22:56+00:00
Trying this out.

Qwen Code just straight up fails to use it. Fails to use tools and crashes it. I dunno.

Aider was a huge waste of time.

Openhands is working really well but occasional:

Parameter 'command=str_replace</parameter' is not allowed for function 'str_replace_editor'. Allowed parameters: {'view_range', 'path', 'command', 'o│ │ld_str', 'insert_line', 'file_text', 'new_str'}

Jury is still out on whether this is better than Devstral.
by tim333 | 2025-07-31 19:22:57+00:00
No it's not.

>So you know for a fact that intelligence comes from token prediction, do you, Mark?

He never said that for a start nor much of the other stuff. I mean I can accuse him of say pigs fly but it's kind of silly if he didn't say that.

I mean it's like before powered flight someone says powered flight is coming that the critic say how can you claim steam engines will take off? It's kind of silly and about the same as the superintelligence won't happen because LLMs aren't very good argument.
by victor_vhv | 2025-07-31 19:23:01+00:00
I love the idea of centrally managing network infrastructure that can be ‘self-contained’ in a local service (whether a device, VM, or container).

TP-Link offers a similar solution via their ‘Omada’-enabled devices. Unfortunately, mixing different brands can feel counterproductive, so there’s significant vendor lock-in.

Does anyone know of a similar solution for OpenWrt devices?
by thefourthchime | 2025-07-31 19:23:31+00:00
This is actually a larger problem that has to do with lost licensing negotiations and residuals. For a place to offer up streaming, they have to know they can license the content.

But oftentimes, that production company is closed shop. They've sold the licenses off to someone else, who split it into something else. And then there's the music rights. The whole thing becomes extremely complicated.

There's a whole set of movies that were somewhat popular that you just cannot find streaming. 100 cigarettes and Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors are good examples.

I'd say if they can't figure out the rights, just put it on YouTube.
by Certhas | 2025-07-31 19:23:32+00:00
Not sure that's a realistic assessment of the cost of developing a browser. Mozilla gives Software Development exp names as by far the single largest expense at 260M$ in 2023. According to DuckAI 700 out of 750 Mozilla Co employees work on Firefox.

I am sympathetic to the idea that a global remote team, that doesn't pay Silicon Valley salaries could get this done cheaper, and thus would be a better candidate for such an Invest and live on interests approach but 15M$ budget seems infeasible.

Reading directly from the 2023 financial report: Revenues were 653M, Software Dev was 260M and change in net assets was 142M, so 402/653 is spent on the core activities you favour (and that is ignoring that you do need a legal and HR department, and some management, and some marketing if you don't want Firefox market share to fall further).
by hn_user82179 | 2025-07-31 19:23:52+00:00
> Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.

This is awesome, I love the way you phrase this and having that mindset.
by blinkbat | 2025-07-31 19:24:16+00:00
this is bizarre on many levels. you initially traced the cause to the CEO and _banned him_?

> This kind of error has bitten me before, far before LLMs were around. But this problem is exacerbated by LLM coding agents. A human doing this refactor would select the original text, cut it, move to the new file, and paste it. Any changes after that would be intentional.

huh! it's almost like a human SHOULD make that change...

> // Log error but continue with other installations

was this comment also written by LLM? if so, maybe simply stripping comments from the codebase the LLM works on would help? I've not studied enough if comments are more helpful or toxic for context. I do know that they rot...
by ben_w | 2025-07-31 19:24:22+00:00
> Lemme know when EU creates its own You Tube.

March 15, 2005.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dailymotion

> Who's taking who's researchers? Got any examples. From what I saw Linus Torvalds is still in US.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00938-y

I wouldn't call Linus a "scientific researcher". He's an engineer, and that's also a group that economies need, but he's not a scientist, and not a researcher.

Unfortunately for the "engineering" part: https://archive.ph/xChye
by sleepyguy | 2025-07-31 19:25:17+00:00
META Glasses have been a godsend for my elderly mother-in-law, who is visually impaired and slowly losing her sight. They can read labels for her, answer spoken questions (she can’t use a computer), play music, help her locate items in her immediate surroundings, and even handle phone calls. She’s gradually discovering new ways to use them.

It would be even better if they could integrate with smart home systems—such as turning on lights, adjusting the thermostat, or providing reminders for appointments, etc. There’s enormous potential for devices like this to serve the elderly and the visually impaired. My father-in-law was so impressed, he bought himself a pair even though he doesn't need any assistance.
by M95D | 2025-07-31 19:25:24+00:00
You won't be able to switch it off for long. See how many phones still have that option! [1]

In the end what matters is always money. Always.

What brings more money? TiVo or buyer-owned device? You think 5% of technically competent potential buyers would make a difference when the 95% illiterate users will just replace the product no questions asked?

It started as a fight against piracy and half-competent users that break their own systems (and the company's systems too, like you said). But slowly the industry sees that there's more money to be made if the same technology can provide a belivable argument in right to repair and planned obsolescence court cases.

[1] https://github.com/melontini/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame
by stillpointlab | 2025-07-31 19:25:43+00:00
This mirrors insights from Andrew Ng's recent AI startup talk [1].

I recall he mentions in this video that the new advice they are giving to founders is to throw away prototypes when they pivot instead of building onto a core foundation. This is because of the effects described in the article.

He also gives some provisional numbers (see the section "Rapid Prototyping and Engineering" and slides ~10:30) where he suggests prototype development sees a 10x boost compared to a 30-50% improvement for existing production codebases.

This feels vaguely analogous to the switch from "pets" to "livestock" when the industry switched from VMs to containers. Except, the new view is that your codebase is more like livestock and less like a pet. If true (and no doubt this will be a contentious topic to programmers who are excellent "pet" owners) then there may be some advantage in this new coding agent world to getting in on the ground floor and adopting practices that make LLMs productive.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNJCfif1dPY
by drewg123 | 2025-07-31 19:26:10+00:00
The primary advantage of QUIC for things like congestion control is that companies like Google are free to innovate both sides of the protocol stack (server in prod, client in chrome) simultaneously. I believe that QUIC uses BBR for congestion control, and the major advantage that QUIC has is being able to get a bit more useful info from the client with respect to packet loss.

This could be achieved by encapsulating TCP in UDP and running a custom TCP stack in userspace on the client. That would allow protocol innovation without throwing away 3 decades of optimizations in TCP that make it 4x as efficient on the server side.
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