MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ZenoArrow | 2025-07-23 22:18:26+00:00
> What did I say[0]? I said you can't explain everything by the increasing die size. And added information that scaling is a non-trivial technological challenge than your previous comments suggest.

Scaling is a non-trivial challenge, but that doesn't mean the "Moore's Law" rate of progress is being kept up, or rather it isn't if you treat it as a way to track transistor density. In other words, I don't deny that progress is still being made, but the Moore's Law speed of progress is not.

As for die size not accounting for everything, I've already explained that it doesn't account for everything, but it does account for a large part in perceived technical progress. If you think about it it's quite simple, if the rate of transistor shrinkage has decreased in real physical terms (not in the "5nm", "3nm", etc... marketing terms), there's only a few different ways that can happen and you still end up with chips with a larger number of transistors...

1. You can build out vertically, i.e. stacking multiple transistor layers.

2. You can build out horizontally, i.e. increase the width of the die size.

3. You can try to optimise routing or remove non-transistor components from the chips to free up room.

All three are valid options, but they're not equal in terms of achieving a large boost in transistor count. Option 1 is being worked on and is likely to be more of a feature in upcoming process nodes. Option 3 is useful but limited, in the sense that the routing for these chips is already strongly optimised, and unless you couple it with Option 1 the scope for improvements are limited. This leaves you with Option 2, which is both the easiest and cheapest to achieve with current technology.

With these factors in mind, it's obvious that a large part of how transistor counts keep going up with a slowed rate of improvement in transistor size is going to be through increasing die size.

To help illustrate the point further, take a look at this table of Nvidia GPU die sizes. Note that although the growth is not linear, there is a clear trend towards larger die sizes over time.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/major-nvidia-die-...
by TZubiri | 2025-07-23 22:18:54+00:00
The US gets a lot of flak for still using forms instead of modernizing, but imagine the nightmare this would be with an inflexible system with dropdowns.

It seems so relaxing to just be able to write whatever you want or draw doodles on a form and expect the operator on the other side ot either grok it, coalesce it into whatever other system, or handle it in whatever way they see fit.

Never change America
by desas | 2025-07-23 22:19:01+00:00
> Terminating a train and turning it around takes a lot of space, space that is usually unavailable in a city center.

This doesn't happen in London in my experience. Trains don't turn around, instead every train is double-ended. The driver gets out of the cab at the terminus, walks to the other end of the train and gets in the other cab. They can do it faster than the passengers disembark.
by orblivion | 2025-07-23 22:19:16+00:00
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think there's an additional benefit.

Traditional process is:

OSM Database -> PNGs -> Your screen

The first arrow decides what data to pull out and how to draw it.

The new process is:

OSM Database -> Vector Tiles -> Your Screen

The first arrow decides what data to pull out. The second arrow decides how to draw it. So given your vector tiles, you can choose and tweak the style that it's drawn as, deciding how (and if) to display certain things. And you can tweak that in your browser. That's useful for devs and users. "Night Mode", "Show bike lanes" (maybe?), etc.

Also relevant is that the vector tile is not only in a couple formats (pmtiles, mbtiles) but conforms to a couple different schemas (Shortbread, OpenMapTiles) which determines what kinds of data shows up. For instance (I'm just making up this example) one schema might have "big" "medium" and "small" roads. Another schema might just have "big" and "small". The transformation process will decide which kinds of roads in the OSM database map on to which type of road in the schema. (I think it turns out that you can't realistically just pull out all of the OSM database data, you have to pare it down). And then certain styles (Americana, etc) work for specific schemas, deciding things like "big roads are black", etc.
by tptacek | 2025-07-23 22:20:35+00:00
I just don't want to engage with it; I'm willing to stipulate those points. I'm really fixated on the strange example Weakly used to demonstrate why these tools shouldn't actually do things, but instead just whisper in the ears of humans. Like, you can actually make that argument about coding! I don't agree, but I see how the argument goes. I don't see how it makes any sense at all for incident response.
by meander_water | 2025-07-23 22:21:10+00:00
I completely agree with this. I recently helped my dad put together a presentation. He is an expert in his field, so he already had all the info ready in slides. But he's not a designer, he doesn't know how to make things look "good". I tried a handful of "AI slide deck" apps. They all had a slick interface where you could generate an entire slide deck with a few words. But absolutely useless for actually doing what users need, which is to help them beautify rather than creating content.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-07-23 22:21:14+00:00
Something that has always sounded really stupid to me about resting meat could be summed up by asking, “Are all of you people seriously letting your freshly cooked food get cold for a quarter of an hour before eating it?”

I might be able to understand if you unintentionally rested meat because you poorly timed the finish of sides, but as soon as food is cooked, it should be served hot immediately, preferably with warmed plates from the oven if it wasn’t in use for your cook.

Completely asinine to me that people are letting food sit to get cold before eating it.
by bluesnowmonkey | 2025-07-23 22:21:56+00:00
We had a cluster of servers, dynamically scaling up and down in response to load, and one day started seeing errors where an enum string field had an impossible value. Imagine the field is supposed to be "FOO" or "BAR" but one day in the logs you start seeing "FOO", "BAR", "GOO", and "CAR". Impossible. "GOO" and "CAR" did not exist in the code, nothing manipulated these strings, yet there they were.

Long story short, a particular machine that joined the cluster that morning had some kind of CPU or memory flaw that flipped a bit sometimes. Our Elixir server was fine because we were matching on valid values. Imagine a typed language compiler that makes assumptions about things that "can't" happen because the code says it can't... yet it does.
by o11c | 2025-07-23 22:22:03+00:00
Note that I'm only talking about package-building itself here, not the practical distributions built thereupon; if that is considered, the tradeoffs are quite different. IMO the deb-using world is more useful than the rpm-using world, especially for non-server environments in particular. This is also where Nix beat Guix despite Nix's packaging language making TeX look sane.

But yes, RPM itself is better than Deb if only because there's a single .spec file rather than a sea of embedded nonsense. It's still not as nice as many "port" packaging systems (e.g. the BSDs, but also Gentoo), but most of those cheat by not having to deal with arbitrary binary packages. Still, binary packages are hardly an excuse for the ludicrous contortions the standard deb-building tools choose to require.
by miduil | 2025-07-23 22:22:17+00:00
I've watched this video the other day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWsL8ME3ruk and it somehow helped me breaking my YouTube addiction for the last several weeks. Quite random but it really helped.

I still muscle memory enter youtube.com and I'm blown away how incredible addictive everything is setup there to be, the "algorithm" has trained the content creators to maximize their reach with incredible captivating thumbnails (and of course great content).
by _heimdall | 2025-07-23 22:23:03+00:00
Well you're describing the chicken and egg problem. If there is high demand for this data a company would fill that niche, but they would have no reason to until the free data is gone.

I also think this chain of comments is a bit off the rails of my original point (maybe my fault). It honestly doesn't matter if there is pain to be felt by removing government services, we spend entirely too much money and any solution to that will hurt.

If we are only willing to remove spending that hurts little to no one we might as well throw in the towel already, we'll never cut spending with that as a gate.
by ubermonkey | 2025-07-23 22:23:16+00:00
>I'm sure you've never had the pleasure of working in a corporate environment where IT has banned Time Machine, external drives, and replacement machines that actually match your storage capacity.

Well, I mean, it kinda DOES seem like my critique was on point. It just wasn't YOU that was bad at backups. It's that your IT department is worthless.

But either way, it's not an Apple problem.

>Apple Silicon

The power management on the Apple chips is really just amazing. It's like nothing I've ever used before. This level of performance AND insane battery life feels like a magic trick.

Oh, and the heat management is all part of it. I've had this machine for 4 years, and a few weeks ago it started making a disturbing noise I'd never heard before. "WTF????", I thought.

And then I realized what it was: I'd finally triggered the fans, which had never come on before. Turns out, rendering a shitload of high-def 360-degree video down into a flat file for Youtube sharing is computationally intense enough to trigger the M1's cooling system.
by grillitob | 2025-07-23 22:23:27+00:00
"Increasing Surface Area for Luck? Don’t Just Show Up—Engage."

The advice to "increase your surface area for luck" by interacting more is half-right. The real leverage isn’t just volume—it’s receptivity.

Forced interactions ≠ luck. Dragging yourself to a party disengaged? Skimming a book you don’t care about? You’re not expanding opportunities—you’re a ghost in the room. Luck sticks to presence, not proximity. Serendipity favors the prepared. Ever meet someone transformative because you were primed to listen? Or stumble on an idea because you were actively searching? That’s not randomness—it’s alertness meeting opportunity. True "surface area" is neurological. It’s the difference between hearing and listening, attending and connecting. Optimize for depth of engagement, not just foot traffic.

TL;DR: Luck isn’t passive. It’s the collision of action and attention.
by umanwizard | 2025-07-23 22:23:31+00:00
The point is nothing has changed about the legality. It has always been allowed to go for one of these whitelisted reasons, you just had to apply in advance.

Now it is still legal to go for exactly the same set of reasons, they just don't bother actually checking. There's no "paperwork" you need to get; you just tell the check-in agent which legal reason you fall under.
by endgame | 2025-07-23 22:24:26+00:00
Hybrid LANs are also pretty good. During the Christmas-New Year break, old school friends would often have a LAN party with ZeroTier or similar set up, so people who couldn't make it could still drop in and out. You'd get a great LAN party vibe from the room full of PCs and ethernet cables everywhere, but you'd also get much higher player counts. Everyone wins.
by Jonovono | 2025-07-23 22:25:09+00:00
Since my job now is primarily a reviewer of (AI) code I find:

1) I'm able to work on more projects

2) The things I am able to work on are much larger in scope and ambition

3) I like to mentally build the idea in my head so I have something to review the generated code against. Either to guide the model in the direction I am thinking or get surprised and learn about alternate approaches.

It's also like you say, in the process, a lot more iterative and ideation is able to happen with Ai. So early on i'll ask it for examples in x language using y approach. I'll sit on that for a night and throw around tangentially related approaches in my head and then riff on what I came up with the next day
by WalterBright | 2025-07-23 22:25:22+00:00
You're confusing what you know with general knowledge. I read the WSJ every day and never saw this mentioned.

> you're wrong that people only think of tax cuts in terms of marginal rates

No evidence for your case, other than a vague notion of "loopholes".

Besides, there is no requirement for wealth in order to invest in a QSBS.

As for SALT, it starts getting phased out at $500,000 and goes to zero at $1m.
by jgb1984 | 2025-07-23 22:25:33+00:00
What worries me more is the steep decline in code quality. The python and javascript output I've seen the supposed best LLM's generate is inefficient, overly verbose and needlessly commented at best, and simply full of bugs at worst. In the best case they're glaringly obvious bugs, in the worst case they're subtle ones that will wreak havoc for a long time before they're eventually discovered, but by then the grasp of the developers on the codebase will have slipped away far enough to prevent them from being compete t enough to solve the bugs.

There is no doubt in my mind that software quality has taken a nosedive everywhere AI has been introduced. Our entire industry is hallucinating its way into a bottomless pit.
by dgunay | 2025-07-23 22:26:00+00:00
For Copilot the quality of the tab complete is less of an issue for me than the fact that it is often very slow, or doesn't trigger at all when I would expect it to. I'll sit there feeling like an idiot for 10 seconds and then glance at the bottom bar to discover that it's not even doing inference, and have to randomly move the cursor, or delete and retype code until it finally works.
by weavejester | 2025-07-23 22:27:29+00:00
That's fair. The government certainly shouldn't be acting like this, and if Slovakia is better in this area, then that's certainly something the UK should seek to emulate.

It may be that I'm conditioned to expect the Home Office to be authoritarian screw-ups that need to be babysat by the courts and principled backbenchers. But you're right that, ideally, the government shouldn't be doing this in the first place.

However, it seems to be the case that, even amongst conservatives, the view in the UK is that the government is infringing on free speech.
by BuyMyBitcoins | 2025-07-23 22:27:32+00:00
If they’re trying to measure skill, I can understand the rationale. The competition is more of a spectacle than an attempt at finding the most reliable and best tasting rib making process.

Imagine a glassblowing competition where participants were judged on how consistently they could make a certain piece. The people using moulds would end up winning, and they would do so with a fraction of the skill and effort.
by Alupis | 2025-07-23 22:27:33+00:00
I took Zed for a test drive about a year ago, and absolutely loved how butter smooth it felt to use. It's impossible to describe to others... you must experience it to understand what you're missing.

However, at least at the time, Zed's extension/plugin ecosystem prevented me from making the jump off vscode. Just like it took me a long while to ween myself off JetBrains and their workflow/plugins, it'll take a long while to do the same here - that's if an equivalent plugin exists (yet).

It seems to me, it would be a killer feature for new IDE's to just embrace vscode's extensions and make them "just work". It would remove a lot of the barriers people have with switching IDE's.

Maybe that's an impossible ask... I have no idea, but it would be pretty sweet.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-07-23 22:28:01+00:00
I completely understand brave predictions for a small startup - I believe we (as individuals and as society) should encourage risk taking.

But this is a mature company that's part of S&P 500. There are laws, and for very good reasons, that regulates what such companies and their CEOs can say. Somehow, those laws don't apply to Tesla and Musk so far, and they got to touch billions of public money by straight up lying.
by brudgers | 2025-07-23 22:28:09+00:00
microcosm of the story of the interaction of science and engineering over time.

Science requires measurement. Engineering requires cost benefit analysis.

Rules for resting meat are more like religion than science or engineering…resting meat is a morality play of socially acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Eating without resting is labeled crass because it is the sort of thing a starving peasant might do.

That’s how the results can be contrary to tradition.
by michaelt | 2025-07-23 22:28:47+00:00
> That's why pro crews don't use gears and ropes. [...] Instead what you see is the motors right on the joints.

The answer here, as with so many things in robotics, is: It Depends.

UR10e robot arm that can lift a 4kg object with a reach of 1m and has sub-1mm repeatability? Strain wave gears in the base and shoulder joints, 100:1 ratio.

MIT Mini Cheetah robot dog that can do backflips? 6:1 planetary gearbox.

Shadow Hand with 20 degrees of freedom? Tendon driven, with the 20 motors in the forearm to keep the fingers slim.

Little dinky Huggingface SO-101? Servo motors, integrating 1:345 gearing with a series of 6 tiny brass gears.

Mid-price CNC milling machine, if you call that a robot? Really long ballscrews, driven by stepper motors.
by clayhacks | 2025-07-23 22:29:11+00:00
What sources do you have for that?

Unionized employees make more than their non-unionized counterparts [0]. Even if the top earners to bottom earners gap shrank in relative terms, in absolute terms both would likely be higher.

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/weekly-earnings-of-nonunio...
by washadjeffmad | 2025-07-23 22:29:35+00:00
The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed.

Google AI has been listing incorrect internal extensions causing departments to field calls for people trying to reach unrelated divisions and services, listing times and dates of events that don't exist at our addresses that people are showing up to, and generally misdirecting and misguiding people who really need correct information from a truth source like our websites.

We have to track each and every one of these problems down, investigate and evaluate whether we can reproduce them, give them a "thumbs down" to then be able to submit "feedback", with no assurance it will be fixed in a timely manner and no obvious way to opt ourselves out of it entirely. For something beyond our consent and control.

It's worse than when Google and Yelp would create unofficial business profiles on your behalf and then held them hostage until you registered with their services to change them.
by duxup | 2025-07-23 22:31:12+00:00
This is not my area of expertise but I'm going to try to ask an intelligent question.

For me when I use an LLM for coding the value and accuracy comes from the conversation, I give context, I evaluate the response, I give more context and prompts, sometimes I correct it and get it back on task, and ... we get there (well not always but generally).

The idea being our interactions are what gets us towards the answer I was looking for / the "right" answer.

I imagine that without me being in the loop and the LLM given lots more time it's going to take those original words of mine, do it's "word math" (I like to think of it that way) as much as possible and ... maybe go down a rabbit hole that I wasn't headed to, possibly way down.

Is that rabbit hole kinda scenario what they're talking about?

Is it also possible that because of their training data, Q & A and Q and context and Q and A is just the better path than deep thoughts that produced some of that content?

I also wonder maybe just because I'm a simpleton, and for me the "right" answer really was the simplest first.
by adolph | 2025-07-23 22:31:16+00:00
The semantics of list types is an underrated problem that probably holds back the market of software tutorials.

A todo list is typically a set of unrelated things to be performed once and annotated as "done." Something may be performed periodically, like iOS reminders adds take out the garbage on a weekly basis, but each performance is really its own item. Sometimes a todo list will have parent-child tasks.

A checklist is a two lists: one a template and the other the record of performing the checklist. The template and performance instance records are a set of related things which may or may not be ordered or conditional. A special type of checklist is an inspection checklist which may include results from performing a particular checklist item as well as the fact that it was performed.
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-23 22:33:03+00:00
They're similar, lists of tasks/items to check off. However, when most people talk about checklists they're often talking about it in particular contexts and a more deliberate construct than todo lists. Pilots, for instance, have pre-flight checklists. This is not an ad hoc todo list (the more common sense of "todo list") with arbitrary and possibly unrelated tasks (go to grocery store, pick up dry cleaning, outline paper).

Checklists, especially in system operations and safety contexts, also tend to have a bit of a procedural characteristic, possibly including conditional and even looping constructs or sub-procedures.

- If HPA is energized - [ ] De-energize HPA - [ ] Enter radome

And order is important to many, but not all, checklists in a way that's not as clear in todo lists. You can probably pick up the dry cleaning before the groceries, or on a separate errand run, for instance. If you don't de-energize the HPA, you're possibly setting yourself up for some pain and suffering if you enter the radome while the system is energized.
by baron816 | 2025-07-23 22:34:21+00:00
> We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it. To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma

> This initial phase acknowledges the need to safeguard existing assets and ensures an uninterrupted and affordable supply of power. The United States must prevent the premature decommissioning of critical power generation resources

Yeah, they're going to do all they can to block cheap renewables and give handouts to fossil fuel companies.
by cycomanic | 2025-07-23 22:34:24+00:00
Note that this is mean wage not compensation, specifically it does not include stock bonuses [1]. Considering that the high CEO compensation is almost exclusively based on equity (there are several famous cases of CEOs taking only $1 of wage), arguments based on wage are pretty meaningless.

Also, I highly suspect that even if we take the ratio of top 1% CEOs compared to top 1% of non-executive employees the picture would not change dramatically (unfortunately I can't find easily accessible information).

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_ques.htm
by robocat | 2025-07-23 22:34:40+00:00
> A better way is to observe the people who failed and failed miserably, and learn from their failures

I've always wondered about this for startups: failure porn just feels so useful but my suspicion is that it is useless.

There's just too many different ways to fail.

Focusing time and energy on how to avoid failure just seems so wrong. Getting sidetracked. Unmotivated. However I do think one needs the right amount of fear, and one needs to avoid the failure modes for your particular startup and your particular personality.

Surely the right idea is to focus on competing to win.