MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wolrah | 2025-07-15 14:42:51+00:00
In a gasoline engine, engine speed is controlled by a throttle valve which meters the air entering the engine. A carburetor or fuel injection system then provides an appropriate amount of fuel for the incoming air. If you release the accelerator the throttle valve shuts and the engine effectively becomes a vacuum pump sucking air through small openings that only flow enough air to idle, which causes it to actively slow down.

A diesel engine does not have a throttle valve. Engine speed is controlled purely by the amount of fuel being injected. This is why diesel engines can "run away" if an uncontrolled fuel source such as oil leaking from a turbocharger enters the intake, and why older pre-computerization diesels can be smoky under hard acceleration (or any time if poorly tuned). When you release the accelerator the engine stops receiving fuel and thus stops producing power, but aside from friction there's nothing working to slow it down. Air is sucked in more or less unrestricted and some energy is spent compressing it as the pistons rise in the cylinders, but much of that energy comes back out as the pistons come back down so the only energy loss in the system is what's converted to heat. You would get the same effect in a gasoline engine if you shut off the fuel pump but kept the throttle wide open.
by JimmaDaRustla | 2025-07-15 14:43:31+00:00
> LLMs could hit an unsolvably hard wall next year and settle into a niche of utility

LLMs in their current state have integrated into the workflows for many, many IT roles. They'll never be niche, unless governing bodies come together to kill them.

> I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI

Straw man argument - this is in no way a metric for validating the power of LLMs as a tool for IT roles. Can you not find open source code bases that leverage LLMS because you haven't looked, or because you can't tell the difference between human and LLM code?

> If this is so foundationally groundbreaking, that should be a clear signal.

As I said, you haven't been paying attention.

Denialism - the practice of denying the existence, truth, or validity of something despite proof or strong evidence that it is real, true, or valid
by sigwinch | 2025-07-15 14:43:53+00:00
I think the reaction to BitCoin in 2011 had a mix of those four, in addition to “why?”. Back then, the why brought in some libertarian utopian theory on the heels of the 2008 collapse. So, what I’m saying is that conversations on the next explosive opportunity won’t start with “why?” but instead will look like a psychotic break, conspiracy theory, parody like FartCoin, or be obtusely cloaked in jargon.
by freedomben | 2025-07-15 14:43:59+00:00
> This is how we ran before smartphones, anyway.

Interesting, I started running with my Walkman -> eventually Discman (switched back and forth with some headphones that did FM radio when I got tired of CD skips) -> Early mp3 player (could only fit about 5 songs at a time lol) -> classic iPod. I got injured and stopped running around the time I got my first smart phone, so I never experienced running with a phone.
by mattfrommars | 2025-07-15 14:44:01+00:00
It's year 2025 and we have yet to have impact of CUDA like what Java had in the idea, "write once, run it anywhere"

Academia and companies continue to write proprietary code. Its as if we continue to write code for Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight in year 2025.

Honestly, I don't mind as Nvidia shareholder.
by i_love_retros | 2025-07-15 14:44:13+00:00
People and companies that use LLMs will be seen as tacky and cheap. They already are.

Eew you have an ai generated profile photo? You write (code) with ai? You use ai to create marketing and graphics? You use non deterministic LLMs to brute force instead of paying humans to write efficient algorithms?

Yuck yuck yuck
by hanlonsrazor | 2025-07-15 14:44:24+00:00
I have definitely noticed the same occurring in North American cinema, but I do not think this is a new phenomenon. Rather, it's just a symptom of the increased commercialization of indie cinema - commercialization requiring film for all to understand.

If one is to broaden their horizons, overseas cinema is still devoid of this literalism. European cinema, Korean cinema, and the famously show not tell Japanese cinema still produce ambiguous stories that compete for awards - just look at recent pictures in Anatomy of a Fall, Zone of Interest, Drive my Car, Decision to Leave.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-15 14:44:56+00:00
I don't tend to like generational analysis because it obscures the Diffusion of innovations analysis:

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

People think of anime as "for young people" and maybe it is -- but I first saw Star Blazers circa 1981 and thought it was the best thing I ever saw on TV, then about ten years later Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi Muyo and Guyver and I still watch it. Anime is actually the center of a "media mix" that includes manga, light novels, visual novels, video games, web novels. streaming and other channels. In Japan there must be plenty of people my age who had the same experience starting with Gundam or something like that.

Granted I don't talk to a lot of Xers who like anime, but I sure see it in 20-somethings. (To be fair I see a lot of people who have an obvious squick reaction when they say "I don't care for anime")

Another case where generational analysis goes wrong is in the analysis of TikTok vs YouTube. I'd argue that most of the cultural changes (personalization economy, filter bubbles, an environment where Zohran Mandami does well, ...) actually happened with YouTube but we didn't notice it because it had a broad base, happened slowly, and personalization is deceptive since you don't see what I see -- but TikTok seemed to come on so fast and was visible to people because it affected an "other".
by like_any_other | 2025-07-15 14:45:07+00:00
A universal counterargument that works on any data. But unlikely to be true, given that the UK sentenced a BME perpetrator to a short 2 years for one-punch-killing an 82-year-old veteran [1], while "threatening gestures" at police and chanting "who the f- is Allah" earn the White perpetrator 18 months in prison [2], and merely being present at a protest, while not engaging in any violence, earns 32 months in prison [3].

We also have to ask - if the biases in that study were flipped, if White jurors were far more likely to convict BME defendants, and pardon White defendants, and BME jurors were the more even-handed ones, would this not be trumpeted as conclusive evidence of racism?

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-derbyshire-66959198

[2] https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/24515551.london-disord...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/08/pens...
by rbanffy | 2025-07-15 14:45:42+00:00
I don’t think many hobbyists use LTO - for backups, being offline is a huge advantage, but for most hobbyists, it’s an issue. A lot of LTO tapes are written to never be read again. The closest thing to a lot of HDDs would be a tape library and, if a single LTO drive is expensive, a library is eye watering.
by Jugurtha | 2025-07-15 14:46:02+00:00
>If you have start again, what would be core of building saas that makes $5k per month?

1. Why $5k?

2. Find a market and customers you can reach who have a problem they are aware of, have spent money to solve, but are still unsatisfied.

>Remember, most niche are already saturated. Community building and social posting does not yield to immediate revenue.

Questionable premise.

>What would you do?

Same as always: find customers in a worthwhile, growing, market with a problem they're aware of and still dissatisfied with existing solutions.
by georgehe9 | 2025-07-15 14:46:42+00:00
This article offers a holistic, top-down perspective on Rust’s ownership, permission, and memory safety model. By rethinking Rust’s rules through this mental framework, it demystifies challenging concepts like lifetimes, Send/Sync, and interior mutability—making Rust’s safety guarantees easier to understand without memorizing a long list of rules.
by mattlondon | 2025-07-15 14:47:07+00:00
There was also a suggestion that more people knew about the titanic because there were more upper-class people on the titanic and no one cares about poor people or some other social commentary like that, which I think is disingenuous.

I suspect titanic is/was more well known is simply due to the sheer hubris of it all - a much-heralded and much-trumpeted "unsinkable ship" that sank on its maiden voyage. It was supposed to be this amazing new technical marvel and yet it did the very thing it that they were claiming was impossible on it's very first trip. Sticks in the mind somewhat, compared to the frequent "ordinary" ship sinkings that happen all the time (then and yes ships still sink now, although fewer passenger ships I expect but probably just down to their being fewer of them)
by dicroce | 2025-07-15 14:47:09+00:00
Most of us that are somewhat into the tech behind AI know that it's all based on simple matrix math... and anyone can do that... So "inevitibalism" is how we sound because we see that if OpenAI doesn't do it, someone else will. Even if all the countries in the world agree to ban AI, its not based on something with actual scarcity (like purified uranium, or gold) so someone somewhere will keep moving this tech forward...
by joshmarlow | 2025-07-15 14:47:16+00:00
> Right now those with assets are compelled to transfer them to those without because they have a need for the labor.

Yes - and those without are compelled to trade their labor for assets.

My point is that the assets themselves mean less when the average person can use AI to design anything - that makes the costs of production go down.

In a world where production is cheap, the money required to produce has relative less value.
by camel-cdr | 2025-07-15 14:47:48+00:00
So sadlt no "V" support, but RVA22 with the 1.0 hypervisor extension and UEFI support. Four issue 2GHz OoO core.

vs 1.8GHz SiFive P550: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/23667112?baseli...

Is about 30% faster ST, but a lot faster MT. It's 400% faster on the MT clang compilation benchmark, so this may be a good build server.

vs 1.8GHz Pi4: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/23667112?baseli...

vs 2.4GHz Pi5: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/23667112?baseli...

The lack of vector support really shows, as most geekbench benchmarks use SIMD, but MT performance is quite good.
by nluken | 2025-07-15 14:48:09+00:00
While I'm sure the author enjoyed their experience, she doesn't really explain why we should prefer "speedrunning" to the traditional timeline. It gets you into the workforce earlier? She never even makes clear that she accomplished the second goal she lays out at the beginning of the piece. Nothing about her optimization-dictated academic path indicates a particularly "illegible" or "unusual" life. To me, it actually slots in quite nicely with the now widely emergent hustle culture.

Notably, she doesn't discuss other people or social interaction at all minus couchsurfing "random internet friends" (a telling description of people you're ostensibly close with). What makes "travel" and "adventures" better than, say, living in a tight knit community for a few years, making very close friends by virtue of repeated, consistent interaction? I probably could have compressed my schooling as well, but I developed as much as a person academically during that time in my life because I made friends with people who were different than me, and had different life goals, which changed my perspective significantly.

I would also note that it's probably too early for her to actually assess in full what she's gained from the experience. She was in undergrad at UVA in the fall of 2022, which would make her at most 22 and only one year out of school assuming a normal two semester academic calendar.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-07-15 14:48:09+00:00
Why should we care what refurbishment costs? We know the installation cost. We know the cycle life as per the chosen depth of discharge. We also know the cost of capital.

What we are seeing today is many renewable projects built 20 years ago nearing the of their expected economic life as per their financing are seeing life extensions. They keep producing a valuable product and their loans are paid off making it pure profit.

Renewables don't stop working after 20 years. Just like old nuclear plants don't stop working after 20 years.

Nuclear powers problem is that it takes 20 years to get built. Then it needs to pay off its loans, and recent plants have hade insanely expensive 40 year PPAs attached to them.

Meaning for a project started today we will be paying for the boondoggle until 2085.

Why do you want to make us poorer by wasting money?

> Right now our intercept involves us polluting for decades beyond that nuclear power showing up. I propose doing more of everything low-carbon, including more nuclear.

Why waste money on the option costing 5-10x as much per kWh decarbonized if you truly care about decarbonization?

> Most charging happens overnight. Lots of transport loads will be forced to charge overnight, too. Yes, they have some flexibility to dispatch load, but not enough to substantially hold up a truck for cheaper electricity or shift the time in the day when it is driving.

Until you know, charging wherever you can stop essentially becomes standard? Or just let your home battery charge the car from your daytime rooftop solar?

With battery costs coming down to $50-100/kWh adding a sizeable battery to a house is a trivial cost. We are starting to enter an economic reality where the work done by professional installers is more expensive than the battery itself.

BEV transport and public transport is generally modeled as an inflexible load. But all in all their demand is quite small compared to the rest of society.

In California storage has already brought down fossil gas usage by 43%. But you say we should instead have kept the fossil gas, invested in nuclear power and waited until the 2040s.

It literally does not make sense to waste money on a dead-end technology like nuclear power.
by s28l | 2025-07-15 14:48:10+00:00
I find this article rather underwhelming because it spends so much time calling out bad examples and so little time highlighting examples of subtlety (in any era). Without positive examples, I don’t think they make the case that this is a new phenomenon or even a phenomenon at all: all the author has done is identify a lens to criticize through.

It may be the case that this is a recent phenomenon (though some other commentators disagree), but without providing detail on what movies the author feels avoid this pattern, they make their argument impossible to refute or engage with. (It also insulates the author’s tastes from criticism, which I suspect is part of the motivation)
by alexey-salmin | 2025-07-15 14:48:18+00:00
Tangent, but 1Mb pages aren't that absurd really. The x86-64 has hardware support for 4k, 2MB, and 1GB page sizes (because each level of the pagemap cuts 9 bits from the virtual address). Luckily it supports all 3 mixed together so normally you just keep most of your data in 4kb pages and use 2Mb/1Gb occasionally. But from my understanding nothings prevents you from forcing 2Mb on all userspace code even though Linux kernel doesn't support it.
by opello | 2025-07-15 14:48:42+00:00
> “If someone ran a script called ‘fix_servers.sh’ but it actually did something malicious then [escorts] would have no idea,” Matthew Erickson, a former Microsoft engineer who worked on the escort system

It sounds like you may have additional context or perspective, which makes me curious about the scope of "instructs." For example, I can imagine that the deployment sources of the public and Government clouds infrastructure are different, such that a bug fix on the shared base may need to be merged between these two branches. If a foreign national made the fix for the public version and then provided the expertise of resolving merge conflicts when applying it to the Government version, it presents an opportunity for subtle abuse unless the change is either further audited by the keyboard operator or another engineer before the merge result lands or is deployed.
by antognini | 2025-07-15 14:48:43+00:00
That's not exactly what is meant by luxury beliefs. Luxury beliefs aren't simply beliefs that rich people hold. It more refers to social opinions which would (allegedly) impose high costs on the poor, but from which the wealthy would be insulated from the consequences. Something like "defund the police" is usually pointed to as an example of a luxury belief. The poor, who live in high crime areas, would see crime go up and bear the brunt of the consequences. Whereas the rich, who live in pricey, low crime neighborhoods, wouldn't see much of a change and would be able to afford private security anyhow if they did.
by TheMagicHorsey | 2025-07-15 14:48:48+00:00
Amazing!

How was your experience using Rust on this project? I'm considering a project in an adjacent space and I'm trying to decide between Rust, C, and Zig. Rust seems a bit burdensome with its complexity compared to C and Zig. Reminds me of C++ in its complexity (although not as bad). I find it difficult to walk through and understand a complicated Rust repository. I don't have that problem with C and Zig for the most part.

But I'm wondering if I just need to invest more time in Rust. How was your learning curve with the language?
by freedomben | 2025-07-15 14:49:17+00:00
It still takes a lot of discipline to make yourself get out there, especially on days when you don't feel well. The "high" only comes after the exercise is well underway. You can definitely condition yourself to look forward to the high as motivation, but it's not a given and it will never be as appealing as booze, weed, or any other drug.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-07-15 14:49:24+00:00
Maybe it isn't displaying on mobile or something, but there's a grey box in the article that shows step-by-step what happens.

> A Microsoft engineer in China files an online “ticket” to take on the work.

> A U.S.-based escort picks up the ticket.

> The engineer and the escort meet on the Microsoft Teams conferencing platform.

> The engineer sends computer commands to the U.S. escort, presenting an opportunity to insert malicious code.

> The escort, who may not have advanced technical expertise, inputs the commands into the federal cloud system.
by dingnuts | 2025-07-15 14:50:14+00:00
> Can you not find open source code bases that leverage LLMS because you haven't looked, or because you can't tell the difference between human and LLM code?

The money and the burden of proof are on the side of the pushers. If LLM code is as good as you say it is, we won't be able to tell that it's merged. So, you need to show us lots of examples of real world LLM code that we know is generated, a priori, to compare

So far most of us have seen ONE example, and it was that OAuth experiment from Cloudflare. Do you have more examples? Who pays your bills?
Ask HN: OpenAI Agents SDK vs. LangGraph, CrewAI, etc.
by hanlonsrazor | 2025-07-15 14:50:16+00:00
Those building with OpenAI's Agents SDK, how would you describe your experience with the tech so far? LangGraph has recently been giving me trouble with debugging behind the scenes of their abstractions in some more complex multi-agent workflows, does Agents SDK solve this problem while still giving the tools for more complex workflows?
by raincole | 2025-07-15 14:50:17+00:00
The usual argument is that the tech leaders are saying that only because they've invested in AI.

...Like, you don't say? If one truly believes AI is inevitable than of course they're going to put money in AI.

I wonder how many people who claim we're in an AI bubble actually short AI stocks and $NVDA. Or they'd just stutter "uh you know the market can stay irrational longer than we can stay solvent..." when asked.
by arp242 | 2025-07-15 14:50:20+00:00
> I also do not understand why anyone would drop the GPL because Stallman does not like their licensing.

Because he can be so obnoxious that people want to sever all ties with him and anything that has to do with him so that they never ever have to talk to him ever again in any capacity.

This goes back a long time. For example Keith Packard on why X11 isn't GPL (from https://youtu.be/cj02_UeUnGQ?t=1705):

> Richard Stallman, the author of the GPL and quite an interesting individual lived at 5405 DEC square, he lived up on the sixth floor I think? Had an office up there; he did not have an apartment. And we knew him extremely well. He was a challenging individual to get along with. He would regularly come down to our offices and ask us, or kind of rail at us, for not using the GPL.

> This did not make a positive impression on me; this was my first interaction with Richard directly and I remember thinking at the time, “this guy is a little, you know, I’m not interesting in talking to him because he’s so challenging to work with.”

> And so, we should have listened to him then but we did not because, we know him too well, I guess, and met him as well.

There are many anecdotes like this over the years from many people, often people who in broad lines actually agree with Stallman.
by thrance | 2025-07-15 14:50:25+00:00
If you seek an interesting example of applied random selection to democratic processes, have a look at France's "Citizens Convention for Climate" [1]. It was a panel of ~150 citizens chosen at random among the general population to think about what could be done to reduce France's carbon footprint, and make proposals that could be implemented into law.

From an environmental POV, this was absolutely useless as the government ignored most of their proposals in the end, but from an experimentation POV, it did demonstrate the viability of "citizens focus groups". In a few sessions over the course of about a year, those 150 random citizens got to meet with actual experts of climate science and french law, and became knowledgeable enough to make informed proposals that actually looked quite good.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climat...
Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"
by bookofjoe | 2025-07-15 14:51:17+00:00
I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as a place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would have come across.

The increasing AI/LLM domination of the site has made it much less appealing to me.
by vikramkr | 2025-07-15 14:51:21+00:00
That's calculating value against not having LLMs and current competitors. If they stopped improving but their competitors didn't, then the question would be the incremental cost of Claude (financial, adjusted for switching costs, etc) against the incremental advantage against the next best competitor that did continue improving. Lock in is going to be hard to accomplish around a product that has success defined by its generalizability and adaptability.

Basically, they can stop investing in research either when 1) the tech matures and everyone is out of ideas or 2) they have monopoly power from either market power or oracle style enterprise lock in or something. Otherwise they'll fall behind and you won't have any reason to pay for it anymore. Fun thing about "perfect" competition is that everyone competes their profits to zero
by lwelyk | 2025-07-15 14:51:34+00:00
What tasks is it better at doing than other technologies we have available to us? I'm not being sarcastic, I generally want to know in which areas you think it is better.

I can't think of anything off the top of my head that isn't just doing the things that make it a generative AI. (It's better at generating an image that I describe to it, etc, but that's not something that another technology does.)