MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1dom | 2025-07-19 10:36:03+00:00
I wonder if this is a problem with the author or the design. I'm not a designer. But I often overthink when programming or writing, and it feels like someone's done the equivalent for design here.

I thought the first picture was pretty good: it seemed like a clean, functional design for a sports game type thing, albeit not hugely original

One way of describing it is "boring", another is "functional, familiar, easy to make sense of, intuitive".

The article reads like teams of people going through millions of tokens and weeks and weeks of manufactured suffering. Maybe it's the writing style, but the time and effort that's gone into "fixing a boring design" - IMO - seems completely disproportional to the scale of the problem, if there even really was one.

Maybe this is why I'm not a designer though.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-19 10:36:41+00:00
It matters at web scale though.

Like how industrial manufacturing are the biggest carbon consumers and compared to them, I’m just a drop in the ocean. But that doesn’t mean I don’t also have a responsibility to recycle because culminate effect of everyone like me recycling quickly becomes massive.

Similarly, if every web host did their bit with static content, you’d still see a big reduction at a global scale.

And you’re right it shouldn’t the end of the story. However that doesn’t mean it’s a wasted effort / irrelevant optimisation
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-19 10:37:11+00:00
Which would be impressive if we knew those problems weren't in the training data already.

I mean it is quite impressive how language models are able to mobilize the knowledge they have been trained on, especially since they are able to retrieve information from sources that may be formatted very differently, with completely different problem statement sentences, different variable names and so on, and really operate at the conceptual level.

But we must wary of mixing up smart information retrieval with reasoning.
by f1shy | 2025-07-19 10:37:23+00:00
Wow. You really are interesting person. You obviously have no idea what you talk about, but keep insisting…

Man… you are really a nice case.

Let me make a last attempt, even when I know it will fail:

1) “Ohm's law doesn't magically stop working with a transistor”

Ohm’s law works only with linear components, is a linear relation. So NO it does not work in a transistor or a diode. No it doesn’t. No because of your magic ignorance, but because they are not frigging linear! Go study some physics.

2) No, I was certainly not referring to ESD diodes, but the rectifier, at the end of any SMPS. Some may have a last stage linear regulator, in that case the diode is part of the juncture of the output transistor. At any rate, ANY wall mounted power supply, and 99% of all supplies in the world, when the output is higher that the target voltage will just shut down. GO TEST IT AND STOP with your nonsensical replies.

BTW: the 1% of supplies that do regulate down are called “4-cuadrant-supply” are much more complicated, and expensive, and makes no sense to use in a USB charger.

I don’t care which degree you have, if you really do, and was expensive, ask for your money back. In case is not a degree in prompt engineering…
by ozim | 2025-07-19 10:37:34+00:00
I see you mistake html/css for what they were 30 years ago „documents to be viewed”.

HTML/CSS/JS is the only fully open stack, free as in beer and free and not owned by a single entity and standardized by multinational standardization bodies for building applications interfaces that is cross platform and does that excellent. Especially with electron you can build native apps with HTML/CSS/JS.

There are actually web apps not „websites” that are built. Web apps are not html with sprinkled jquery around there are actually heavy apps.
by xebulon | 2025-07-19 10:38:00+00:00
My main gripe - and I cannot sufficiently emphasise how fundamental this is - is that it seems, just as with Comet, this is not actually the integration of LLM agency into the browser. it's using LLMs to pretend to be humans doing things with a browser as a human would, using [a limited subset of] it's UI - the least powerful way to use the web, which is the source of the problem to begin with.

I set the same simple task as I set Comet: examine the code resposible for choosing language captions and displaying them with a view to enhance the functionality to display multiple language captions in parallel. This is a high-school exercise, except for how atrocious the HTML can be for any given media-player page.

BrowserOS, like Comet, pretends it isn't capable of actually working with the DOM. This is because bad - or, at best, unambitious - design choices have been made as to how the LLM interfaces with the browser.

I even made a local HTTP API for Comet to use the MacOS accessibility API (which ironically gives greater scriptable browser control) and it couldn't even make a background HTTP get request with AppleScript to localhost. I suspect BrowserOS will be similarly crippled, although at least I can in theory fix it, unlike with Perplexity's closed-source half-assed Chromium bundling.

Can we try a little bit harder, dream a little bigger, imagine how to train, tune and instruct language modes to realistically fight the complexity of web bloat and give the user full programmatic natural-language power to interface with digital services?

I don't believe it would take any more effort than has already been employed.
by lpapez | 2025-07-19 10:38:25+00:00
Being concerned about page sizes is 100% wasted effort.

Calculate how much electricity you personally consume in total browsing the Internet for a year. Multiply that by 10 to be safe.

Then compare that number to how much energy it takes to produce a single hamburger.

Do the calculation yourself if you do not believe me.

On average, we developers can make a bigger difference by choosing to eat salad one day instead of optimizing our websites for a week.
by saghm | 2025-07-19 10:39:10+00:00
If I've copied someone else's copyrighted work on my Xerox machine, then give it to you, you can't reproduce the work I copied. If I leave a copy of it in the scanner when I give it to you, that's another story. The issue here isn't the ability of an LLM to produce it when I provide it with the copyrighted work as an input, it's whether or not there's an input baked-in at the time of distribution that gives it the ability to continue producing it even if the person who receives it doesn't have access to the work to provide it in the first place.

To be clear, I don't have any particular insight on whether this is possible right now with LLMs, and I'm not taking a stance on copyright law in general with this comment. I don't think your argument makes sense though because there's a clear technical difference that seems like it would be pretty significant as a matter of law. There are plenty of reasonable arguments against things like the agreement mentioned in the article, but in my opinion, your objection isn't one of the.
by noduerme | 2025-07-19 10:39:56+00:00
Yes, about 90%. I would have had maybe the 6th or 7th biggest online casino in the world - let's say that my software was about 5th (somewhere between Galewind and Microgaming) - but I ended up being one which catered only to early adopters of cryptocurrency, who were not necessarily gamblers on roulette or blackjack but had nothing better to do with their coins. It was an interesting experience, and it didn't leave me as wealthy as I could have been if the barriers to entering the larger market hadn't already been negotiated between CC companies and governments. That said, at least I'm not in prison like a lot of people who followed and tried to do what I did.
by throwup238 | 2025-07-19 10:40:19+00:00
> Not a biologist, but I'd think it depends what you then do with your stories.

You’re not an evolutionary biologist so you probably don’t even know what it means to formulate or test a hypothesis in that field (I have only a peripheral involvement in that field and even I wouldn’t care to hazard a guess because bioinformatics is complicated and full of deadly traps). What are you going to do with it beyond use it as a speculative just so story?

And hey, there’s nothing wrong with doing that on an internet forum, as long as you’re aware just how little predictive value there is. The closest equivalent I can think of is all those fantastical sea monsters and land masses cartographers used to draw in old maps instead of just saying “I don’t know.” As long as no explorer ever ventured there, they could come up with any story they wanted to.
by lcnielsen | 2025-07-19 10:40:41+00:00
> Looking at Latex, I don't think hand tuning some parameters until you get right look in every single case is much better user experience...

Having written many papers, reports and my entire Ph. D. thesis in Latex, and also moved between LaTeX classes/templates when changing journals... I'm inclined to agree to an extent. I think every layout system has a final hand-tweaking component (like inline HTML in markdown for example), but LaTeX has a very steep learning curve once you go beyond the basic series of plots and paragraphs. There are so many tricks and hacks for padding and shifting and adjusting your layout, and some of them are "right" and others are "wrong" for really quite esoteric reasons (like which abstraction layer they work at, or some priority logic).

Of course in the end it's extremely powerful and still my favourite markup language when I need something more powerful than markdown (although reStructuredText is not so bad either). But it's really for professionals with the time to learn a layout system.

Then again there are other advantages to writing out the layout, when it comes to archiving and accessibility, due to the structured information contained in the markup beyond what is rendered. arXiv makes a point about this and forces you to submit LaTeX without rendering the PDF, so that they can really preserve it.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-19 10:40:43+00:00
No need. Renewables are already the cheapest way to power them. Companies like X using gas generators aren't doing that because it's cheaper but because it's faster. They need power now, not in five years. They will in the end replace those with something cleaner as a cost optimization. But they just don't want to wait for that.

Data centers and energy infrastructure investments go hand in hand. A lot of that money is actually being allocated for energy infrastructure. Because a data center is useless if you can't power it. That is also why companies like Amazon and MS are investing in nuclear. They need large amounts of cheap power to lower their energy bills long term and they need to secure access to energy supply. They see nuclear as a way of getting that. Coal and gas is just too expensive and undesirable. There's not enough of it and it's expensive to operate. Renewables & clean power (including nuclear here) is what they want really.

What would actually help is making the permitting around renewables and nuclear faster and more efficient. The energy demand is there. And that includes from data centers. And the capital is there. It's just that energy projects are bottle-necked on bureaucracy. Many countries have loads of viable energy projects stuck in their planning pipelines. For example, it takes years to get a grid connection for new wind or solar plants that can otherwise be built and delivered in less than a year. And likewise it takes years to get construction projects approved. This also affects investments in grid infrastructure. That's nuts. These countries have energy shortages that are slowing down their economic growth. And the capital to fix that. It's just that they are blocked on their own bureaucracy.

Unlike data centers, investments in energy infrastructure provide decades of return of investment. These are long term investments. Even if AI flops (which I think is hard to argue given how useful it is already), we get to keep the energy infrastructure. And we'll find a way to repurpose those data centers. I don't see that as a write off either.
by impossiblefork | 2025-07-19 10:41:11+00:00
Yes, I know that the Russians looked the other way.

However, Baerbock has absolutely monstrous statements and the German gas-guzzling contingent are the obvious culprits for the EU partership agreements with Azerbaijan and for the incorrect statements treating this whole thing as somehow restoring Azerbaijani territorial integrity and the numerous statements by the EC falsely claiming that Armenia had attacked Azerbaijani (i.e. these 'we call on both sides...' in the aftermath of Azerbaijani attacks). Furthermore, it is German influence on the EC that made the implementation of the ICJ decision subject to negotiation, and it is likely German influence on the EC that forced the agreement whereby mine maps were exchanged for the release of PoWs. These mine maps naturally enabled further Azeri attacks. It is also very apparent that there was government influence on media organizations to not report the starvation in the NKAO beginning after the Azeri blocking of the Lachin corridor-- for example in Sweden state television reported nothing, and reported of the ethnic cleansing itself only that 'Armenian separatists have agreed to leave Azerbaijan'. This shows co-ordination between Swedish government, Swedish state television (SVT) and Turkey or Azerbaijan, indicating a secret deal either for the sake the Swedish NATO entry or on the EU level. Certain phrases 'lightning offensive' which sound decidedly Turkish are also repeated in many newspaper articles, indicating a larger deal rather than something specific to Sweden.

The CSTO is absolutely irrelevant, as everybody who matters in any way knows completely. France would not be selling weapons to Armenia if they believed that their CSTO membership were relevant.

There were excellent opportunities to intervene even as the Azeri troops were rolling down the Agdam road to Stepanakert, and it's very unlikely that the Germans were unaware. SAR satellite imagery of the region is so readily available that unclassified images can be obtained on a commercial basis and I'm not even sure it was cloudy.
by hackerman_fi | 2025-07-19 10:42:11+00:00
The article has IMO two flawed arguments:

1. There is math for how long it takes to send even one packet over satellite connection (~1600ms). Its a weak argument for the 14kb rule since there is no comparison with a larger website. 10 packets wont necessarily take 16 seconds.

2. There is a mention that images on webpage are included in this 14kb rule. In what case are images inlined to a page’s initial load? If this is a special case and 99.9% of images don’t follow it, it should be mentioned at very least.
by Jolter | 2025-07-19 10:42:43+00:00
That’s exactly the point: getting Valve to remove illegal content would not have caused any headlines. These themes go against common moral standards and so Visa et al don’t want to be seen selling them.

You can find the list of removed titles if you go looking for it. Feel free to point out which ones you think are collateral damage. I’m not looking at that list with my eyeballs though. I need them for later.
by surgical_fire | 2025-07-19 10:43:34+00:00
> GPs main point is that you (need to) learn to specify (and document) very, very well. That has always been a huge factor for productivity

That's the thing, I do. At work we keep numerous diagrams, dashboards and design documents. It helps me and the other developers understand and and have a good mental model of the system, but it does not help LLMs all that much. The LLMs won't understand our dashboard or diagrams. It could read the design documents, but it wokdn't help it to not make the mistakes it does when coding, and definitely would not reduce my need to review the code it produces.

I said before, I'll say it again - I find it unacceptable in a professional setting to not review the code LLMs produce properly, because I have seem the sort of errors it produces (and I have access to the latest Claude and Gemini models, that I understand to be the top models as of now).

Are they useful? Yeah. Do they speed me up? Sort of, especially when I have to write a lot of boring code (as mentioned before, glue code for APIs, unit tests, scaffolding for new modules, etc). Are the productivity gains massive? Not really, due to the nature of how it generates output, and mainly due to the fact that writing code is only part of my responsibilities, and frequently not the one that takes up most of my time.
by jbreckmckye | 2025-07-19 10:44:05+00:00
I think that makes sense.

I have done the hyper optimised, inline resource, no blocking script, hand minimised JS, 14kb website thing before and the problem with doing it the "hard" way is it traps you in a design and architecture.

When your requirements change all the minimalistic choices that seemed so efficient and web-native start turning into technical debt. Everyone fantasises about "no frameworks" until the project is no longer a toy.

Whereas the isomorphic JS frameworks let you have your cake and eat it: you can start with something that spits out compiled pages and optimise it to get performant _enough_, but you can fall back to thick client JavaScript if necessary.
by youngtaff | 2025-07-19 10:44:32+00:00
It’s not really relevant in 2025…

The HTTPS negotiation is going to consume the initial roundtrips which should start increasing the size of the window

Modern CDNs start with larger initial windows and also pace the packets onto the network to reduce the chances of congesting

There’s also a question as to how relevant the 14kb rule has ever been… HTML renders progressively so as long as there’s some meaningful content in the early packets then overall size is less important
by pyman | 2025-07-19 10:46:27+00:00
I agree. This is what I tell my students:

1. Stop living other people's experiences. Start having your own.

2. Stop reading blogs. Start building apps.

3. Everyone's experience depends on their use case or limitations. Don't follow someone's opinion or ideology without understanding why.

4. Don't waste time chasing employees or researchers on Twitter or Substack. Most of them are just promoting themselves or their company.

5. Don't let anxiety or FOMO take over your time. Focus on learning by doing. If something important comes out, you'll find out eventually.

6. Being informed matters, but being obsessed with information doesn't. Be smart about how you manage your time.

That's what I tell them.
Show HN: Vlm in 3D PC, 16 shot scanobjectnn top1 acc: 99.91
by genji970 | 2025-07-19 10:46:27+00:00
I'm not sure this accuracy is possible. But when i do 4 shot then val acc for scanobjectnn drops to about 90%. And for modelnet40 16 shot, it shows 96 val acc in top1. So I share my experiment result.
by internet_points | 2025-07-19 10:46:32+00:00
The ideals of Illich's work are so far removed from the centralized, institutionalized Soviet socialism, I really doubt the Soviets would've been very happy if people in the USSR started talking that way. Anyone who is swayed by Illich will loathe the idea of five year plans, concerted efforts for more technological progress, and the propaganda that goes with it ("Plan is law, fulfillment is duty, over-fulfillment is honor!").

But who knows, maybe the communist spooks just saw someone geographically close to the US propounding ideas that were radically different from capitalism and didn't mind that they were also radically different from communism. The same has happened enough times in the other direction.
by jesteve7 | 2025-07-19 10:46:41+00:00
Before I joined the team, they built a Python FastAPI service to serve recommendations. The setup was simple: ScyllaDB and DynamoDB for storage, plus a few external APIs. But it couldn’t scale beyond 1% of traffic and was already slow (p99 around 100–200 ms).

Here’s what worked for us:

Async vs Sync. All path operations were async, but all I/O was sync, blocking the event loop. I switched I/O to be truly non-blocking: thread pools for blocking calls, asyncio libraries (aiohttp, aioboto3). Result: 40% latency reduction, 50%+ throughput increase.

Avoid fan-out. Fanning out dozens of DB calls per request killed the event loop. Massive batching improved latency by 50%.

Watch Pydantic — Pydantic is great but expensive if overused. It validates at input, output, and during object creation. We removed it everywhere except input validation and used dataclasses with __slots__. That cut latency by 30% more.

Tune the GC. After these changes, we saw a weird bimodal latency: most requests were 5–10 ms, but some spiked to 60–70 ms. Root cause: garbage collection. We tuned GC thresholds — this gave another 20% overall latency cut. p99 latency for homepage recommendations dropped from 52 ms to 12 ms.

Takeaways.

- Debugging concurrency in Python under the GIL is tricky.

- No free lunch. FastAPI/Python are great for fast dev, but you must understand what’s happening under the hood at scale.

Final result: the service now handles all traffic with p99 < 10 ms.
by tuatoru | 2025-07-19 10:49:28+00:00
Some rather flippant dismissal going on in the other comments here.

The reasons that this sort of things is frowned on by corporate governance are firstly the non-merit-based promotions that happen, and secondly the power imbalance. It's a reputational risk for the corp.

Especially with women in lower positions on the org chart and men in higher ones, there is a risk of coercion if intimate relationships are allowed.
by Mawr | 2025-07-19 10:49:53+00:00
> As for being stressed -- if this is too much, how will you do when asked to solve even harder problems with tight schedules and/or demanding customers?

There's no such single "stress". It's all different. Being yelled at by mom is "stress", and so is being held at gunpoint. Not the same kind of stress.

Making the slightest mistake or wrong impression during an interview pretty much ends it right there and by extension kills your chances of employment. Your entire future career and financial stability for the next 5-10 years hangs in the balance at all times during an interview.

Not comparable in any way to "the customer is being annoying today".
by donatj | 2025-07-19 10:50:19+00:00
I absolutely agree, and would like to add I feel like the ergonomics of the new interface are just very awkward and almost leaky.

Buffered and unbuffered IO should just be entirely separately things, and separate interfaces. Then as you mention the standard library can provide an adapter in at least one direction, maybe both.

This seems like a blunder to me.
by evrimoztamur | 2025-07-19 10:50:33+00:00
From what I've seen, IMO question sets are very diverse. Moreover, humans also train on all available set of math olympiad questions and similar sets too. It seems fair game to have the AI train on them as well.

For 2, there's an army of independent mathematicians right now using automated theorem provers to formalise more or less all mathematics as we know it. It seems like open conjectures are chiefly bounded by a genuine lack of new tools/mathematics.