MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IAmBroom | 2025-07-07 13:59:20+00:00
Kinda the reverse for me... A radio interview quoted a linguist who described early rap music as an accidental rebirth of Beowulf-esque poetry. Internal rhymes, frequent allusions, and the rhythm of at least some matched Beofwulf's itself.

After that, I moved from the "it's just talking over music!" camp to the "it's a novel form of musical interpretation!" camp.

Straight outta Geatland, yo.
by anonymoushn | 2025-07-07 13:59:37+00:00
It's really not. As an example, for string processing tasks (including codecs which various server software spends a significant percentage of its runtime on), NEON includes a deinterleaving load into 4 registers and byte-wise shuffles that accept 2, 3, or 4 registers worth of lookup table. These primitives are quite different from those available on AVX2 or AVX-512, and the fact that they are available and cheap to use means you end up with somewhat different algorithms for the two types of targets. Even the practice of using the toys available in AVX2 well for this sort of task is somewhat obscure. Folks who have worked on codec-type stuff but primarily used AVX-512 often have trouble figuring out how to do most of the same things in similar instruction counts if masked versions of the instructions are not available.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-07-07 13:59:41+00:00
It is a shame, that so few designers actually know the medium they are working with well, let alone the primitives, that they are operating on top of (CSS layouts). If they did, I think we would have many less shitty website designs. Personally, I would expect someone who calls themselves a "web designer" to know HTML and CSS of course, and in a more or less up to date fashion. Well, not really would expect, but would hope. Building flying air castles in Figma is not really a work that requires high qualification, and reality catches up with those fantasies, when the web dev is told to implement them.
by Scoundreller | 2025-07-07 13:59:43+00:00
The US sugar beet harvest is like that, but seems to have structured itself around that.

Lots of websites recruiting people with RVs to come by and work the 2-3 week season. Others stay in motels or live close enough to drive.

https://www.google.com/search?q=beet+harvest+working

https://www.theunbeetableexperience.com/sugar-beet-harvest-f...

Some places have/had the schools close for the harvest season (and in others, for the start of hunting season).
by donatj | 2025-07-07 13:59:54+00:00
One of the best interview questions I ever received, I was asked to explain how something I liked worked in detail. Could be literally anything, just break it down step by step. I was told I could use the whiteboard but didn't have to.

I broke down a project I was particularly proud of drawing charts explaining internals.

It was clearly both a test of communication and reasoning skills, but it was frankly kind of fun to answer and put me at ease.
by hwillis | 2025-07-07 14:00:05+00:00
Numbers: In poland the solar output in December is 1/5th of July output while demand is ~10% higher. Insolation drops off quickly at higher latitudes so it dominates much more strongly than heating demand even if heating were electrical.

At the global scale this would ideally balance out- more equatorial solar is cheaper in the winter since they don't need air conditioning, so you just send it up north. That's the only really feasible solution to seasonal variation in individual countries- it's totally unreasonable to store 3 months worth of power. Its also important to note that even with 2x or 3x oversupply, solar is cheaper than nuclear currently is.

[1]: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/#PVP [2]: https://www.pse.pl/web/pse-eng/data/polish-power-system-oper...
by poulpy123 | 2025-07-07 14:00:31+00:00
> Neanderthals were certainly smart enough to have more understanding of dietary needs than a vulture does.

Understanding the nutritional value of a food goes beyond than working to get the food. You need to have a theory of nutrition (true or false), and there is nothing that can suggest this. Saying that they ate fat because fat is good for them is tautologic

> And "any homo something before or after" includes us today.

It is obvious that I include our specy only until the first research and experiments on the topic
by tjs8rj | 2025-07-07 14:00:31+00:00
Why do we need to make mental healthcare available to everyone?

For all of human history people have got along just fine, happily in fact, without “universal access to mental health care”

This just sounds like a bandaid. The bigger problem is we’ve created a society so toxic to the human soul that we need universal access to drugs and talk therapy or risk having significant chunks of the population fall off the map
by hobs | 2025-07-07 14:00:40+00:00
I really counsel everyone to stop thinking like this. The appealing to authority doesn't work when you are talking about different sized businesses.

All the best banks and tech firms do a lot of things that could be categorized as wasteful, useless, inertia maintaining, etc, adopting their practices without a thorough understanding if it applies to your business is plainly just stupid.

Your business is not structured like those big business, you are not as anemic to risk as they are (otherwise you wouldn't even create your business in the first place), you don't have their cash, you don't have their ability to spend an enormous amount of time hiring every single person because your profits cushion you from all your dumb decisions.
by kypro | 2025-07-07 14:00:59+00:00
I find the "what is intelligence?" discussion a little pointless if I'm honest. It's similar to asking a question like does it mean to be a "good person" and would we know whether an AI or person is really "good"?

While understanding why a person or AI is doing what it's doing can be important (perhaps specifically in safety contexts) at the end of the day all that's really going to matter to most people is the outcomes.

So if an AI can use what appears to be intelligence to solve general problems and can act in ways that are broadly good for society, whether or not it meets some philosophical definition of "intelligent" or "good" doesn't matter much – at least in most contexts.

That said, my own opinion on this is that the truth is likely in between. LLMs today seem extremely good at being glorified auto-completes, and I suspect most (95%+) of what they do is just recalling patterns in their weights. But unlike traditional auto-completes they do seem to have some ability to reason and solve truly novel problems. As it stands I'd argue that ability is fairly poor, but this might only represent 1-2% of what we use intelligence for.

If I were to guess why this is I suspect it's not that LLM architecture today is completely wrong, but that the way LLMs are trained means that in general knowledge recall is rewarded more than reasoning. This is similar to the trade-off we humans have with education – do you prioritise the acquisition of knowledge or critical thinking? Maybe believe critical thinking is more important and should be prioritised more, but I suspect for the vast majority of tasks we're interested in solving knowledge storage and recall is actually more important.
by rekrsiv | 2025-07-07 14:01:27+00:00
"we can't change society that quickly" isn't a cop out - even if you manage to win every seat in this one election, the rich still control every industry, lobbyists still influence everyone in the seats, and the seats are still gerrymandered to fall back to the conservative seat layout.

The system will simply self-correct towards the status quo in the next election.
by StillBored | 2025-07-07 14:01:51+00:00
Is it?

No one has come close to solving the problem of optimizing software for multiple heterogeneous CPU's with differing micro-architectures when the scheduler is 'randomly' placing threads. There are various methods in linux/windows/etc which allow runtime selection of optimized paths, but they are all oriented around runtime selections (ex pick a foo variation based on X and keep it) made once, rather than on cpu/context switch.

This means that one either uses a generic target and takes the ~1.5-2.5x perf hit, or one optimizes for a single core type and ignores the perf on the other cores. This is probably at least partially why the gaming IPC numbers are so poor. The games are optimized for a much older device.

So a 1.5-2.5x perf difference is these days could be 5-10 years of performance uplifts being left on the table. Which is why AMD seems to be showing everyone a better path by simply using process optimizations and execution time optimization choices with the same zen cores. This gives them both area, and power optimized cores without having to do a lot of heavyweight scheduler/OS and application optimization. Especially for OS's like Linux which don't have strong foreground/background task signalling from a UI feeding the scheduler.

In other words heterogeneous SMP cores using differing micro-architectures will likely be replaced with more homogeneous looking cores that have better fine grained power and process optimizations. Ex, cores with even wider power/performance ranges/dynamism will win out over the nearly impossible task of adding yet another set of variables to schedulers which are already NP-hard, and adding even finer grained optimized path selection logic which will further damage branch prediction + cache locality the two problems already limiting CPU performance.
by nickelpro | 2025-07-07 14:02:26+00:00
I'm not Ira Glass, I have no idea what he meant. I would argue that taste-skill gap doesn't exist in writing either.

You either know what you want to write or you don't. If you hate the words you wrote, write something else. If you don't know what you want to write, that's undeveloped taste, not a gap preventing your from expressing your good taste.
by Joker_vD | 2025-07-07 14:02:42+00:00
You do realize that it's the UNIX people who are the strange ones here? The CRLF has been used as line delimiter by everyone (except IBM who always lived in their own special EBCDIC land) since late sixties, but then Thompson decided that he'd rather do LF-to-CRLF translation in the kernel tty driver than store the text on the disk as-is, like literally every other OS did (and continued to do).

Besides, the terminal emulators nowadays speak UTF-8 natively; and they absolutely do behave differently for naked LF and CRLF, and you can see it for yourself if you exec "stty -onlcr" and then try to echo or cat some stuff. Sure, you can try to persuade every single terminal emulator's author to adopt "automatic carriage return" but most will refuse to; and you will also need to somehow persuade people to stop emitting CR+LF combination in the raw mode... but then you'll need to give them back the old LF functionality (go down one line, scroll if necessary) somehow. Now, such functionality exists as the IND character — which is in the now forbidden C1 block. Simply amazing!
by p_l | 2025-07-07 14:02:58+00:00
Egregious cases can lead to immediate dismissal, you also don't have to let anyone continue working even if you still pay them if they are on the notice period (the notice period is for both sides, honestly - for employer to have chance to find/train replacement, and for let gone employee to find new work).

There's a bunch of cases that can lead to immediate dismissal though in most EU countries, starting with illegal activity, some things that are borderline (disallowed in law even if sometimes tolerated by employer - for example being drunk on the job or otherwise under influence by ones own action, not accident), or explicit action against the company.
by vel0city | 2025-07-07 14:03:16+00:00
That's just overall desktop and laptop sales though, right? So home multimedia desktop PCs could be falling off a cliff, business desktop PCs could be dropping, and gaming PCs could be growing a bit and the overall market of desktops could still be net down, right?

The overall market doesn't give us enough resolution to determine the health of gaming PC sales IMO. There's too many other possible ways we get to that same number.
by monkeyelite | 2025-07-07 14:03:45+00:00
The second part follows logically.

If large movements of money manipulate the market then when would “manipulation” be used to claim an actor was misbehaving?

1) they did a special kind of manipulation clearly against the rules 2) they didn’t do anything different, but the regulators decided they didn’t want them to.

2 would be exactly what I said - their activity has acquired political interest.
by flaptrap | 2025-07-07 14:04:19+00:00
The fallacy in the 'fair use' logic is that a person acquires a book and learns from it, but a machine incorporates the text. Copyright does not allow one to create a derivative work without permission. Only when the result of the transformation resembles the original work could it be said that it is subject to copyright. Do not regard either of those legal issues are set in concrete yet.
by impossiblefork | 2025-07-07 14:04:22+00:00
It's very similar to theft of service.

There's so many texts, and they're so sparse that if I could copyright a work and never publish it, the restriction would be irrelevant. The probability that you would accidentally come upon something close enough that copyright was relevant is almost infinitesimal.

Because of this copyright is an incredibly weak restriction, and that it is as weak as it is shows clearly that any use of a copyrighted work is due to the convenience that it is available.

That is, it's about making use of the work somebody else has done, not about that restricting you somehow.

Therefore copyright is much more legitimate than ordinary property. Ordinary property, especially ownership of land, can actually limit other people. But since copyright is so sparse infringing on it is like going to world with near-infinite space and picking the precise place where somebody has planted a field and deciding to harvest from that particular field.

Consequently I think copyright infringement might actually be worse than stealing.
by maaaaattttt | 2025-07-07 14:04:50+00:00
Given your premise (which I agree with) I think the issue in general comes from the lack of a good, broadly accepted definition of what AGI is. My initial comment originates from the fact that in my internal definition, an AGI would have a de facto understanding of the physics of "our world". Or better, could infer them by trial and error. But, indeed, it doesn't have to be the case. (The other advantage of the Zelda games is that they introduce new abilities that don't exist in our world, and for which most children -I've seen- understand the mechanisms and how they could be applied to solve a problem quite naturaly even they've never had that ability before).
by kinow | 2025-07-07 14:05:11+00:00
I follow the dame process. I explain beforehand what kind of questions will be asked, and emphasize there are no tricky questions, that we are just curious about their experience, area of interest, preferences for designing ode, how they tackle ode quality and user support, etc.

Haven't had any major issues hiring this way, but I did reject people that appeared to be full-of as your said, or didn't have anything public on github/company gitlab/dockerhub/researchgate/etc.. With exceptions for entry level positions and a few that worked in research or govt where work couldn't be made public (they still normally have some participation in research publications, conferences, technotes, etc.)
by sheremetyev | 2025-07-07 14:05:13+00:00
Branching continuously synchronises your Git repository with GitHub and automatically resolves conflicts on rebase - removing manual pull/push, management of branches, and conflict resolution. The exact merge strategy is evolving - we are starting with deterministic "take incoming" and testing structural and AI-assisted options. The guiding principle: automate the routine merges, leave full control in developer's hands when it matters.

You are right that some situations do require careful inspection of changes to avoid "garbage". In others cases you might not care about internals if behaviour looks correct, e.g. for a prototype.

Our "progressive depth" approach in Branching aims to serve both cases - default automatic behaviour, and the option to do Git operations manually when you need to - including editing conflicts manually or with tools like Mergiraf. That way the busy path stays fast, and the careful path is still just plain Git.
by slightwinder | 2025-07-07 14:05:32+00:00
Fictional bands and artist are pretty common in Japan and also sweeped over to South-Korea at some point I think. But funny enough, the oldest are western bands. Remember "Alvin and the Chipmunks"? From 1958, with new series and movies even released today. Long before the first virtual Idol appeared in Japan in 198x. It seems in the 60s&70s there were a bunch of them in the USA, from Hanna-Barbera and others. Japan started with Macross in 1981 and continued for decades until today. I guess, now South-Korea and probably China are trying to take the crown of anime and virtual artists, they had some very disruptive successes in the last years.
by hobs | 2025-07-07 14:06:04+00:00
My favorite interviews I have taken:

* Give us a presentation about a meaningful amount of work you did at a company (no NDA violations of course) and spend at least an hour talking about what you did, how you did it, what went well and what did not, and then be prepared for questions.

* Actual software development issues that the team sees every day (not hard mode, just normal) submitted as a PR - review it thoroughly.

* Given a running code environment, fix a bug (you have a debugger, full ide, and an hour to look at it) - not so much about the end result as seeing how you work and your process.
by api | 2025-07-07 14:06:11+00:00
Those kinds of thought processes are the kinds that produce value.

Deciding what to build and how to build it is often harder than building.

What LLMs of today do is basically super-autocomplete. It's a continuation of the history of programming automation: compilers, more advanced compilers, IDEs, code generators, LINTers, autocomplete, codeinsight, etc.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-07-07 14:06:33+00:00
You can replace "for some reasons" with it was scheduled on an inferior core that is used to inflate marketing metrics and should have never been on the silicon in the first place. The CPU in question is a Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 Processor 285K. No one buys this CPU for efficiency. In the absence of actual technical innovation, Intel has resorted to simply attempting to game the system with measures like

1. renaming all your process nodes to the next smaller size even though nothing changed

2. using TSMC process to ship products, when they already own a foundry

3. shipping multiple generations of products to consumers that just flat out destroy themselves, then blaming others

4. adding "efficiency" cores to inflate core counts

5. removing hyperthreading in the name of performance

6. introducing the "i9" series of processors, which are just the previous generation "i7" with a price premium added

7. Renaming all of your product lines to things like "9" instead of "i9" to obscure the absolutely absent generational improvements

8. shipping CPUs that support AVX512 and then disabling it after the product release

9. shipping an entire graphics product line with innovative new features, which do not actually work on launch

case in point: there are no fewer than 7 clock speeds listed for this CPU here on Intel's own page

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241060/...

Which one is it? Why did they only list 7? Couldn't they have listed at least 23 more? Surely there are other clock speeds that are important. Do I have 8 cores, 16 cores, or 24? Can I use all 24? Are those cores the same? Are they even remotely comparable? Do they all support the same instruction set? Do I have 36 Megabytes of Intel smart cache, or is it 40 megabytes? Is this a 125 watt CPU or 250 watts? Does this processor do anything that is anyway different from a middle of the line CPU from nearly 8 years ago, that I can buy a fully working system from a recycler from for less than the cost of this CPU?
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-07-07 14:06:40+00:00
I gave it the prompt "I'm a rhinocerous who likes daffodils and posies. I'm quick to anger and slow to forgive. Based on all you know about me, write an insight on me that I would be surprised by."

and it responded with:

"Despite your reputation for being quick to anger and slow to forgive, your love of daffodils and posies reveals a longing for gentleness and renewal that you may not fully recognize in yourself. Beneath the tough skin and volatile temper lies a creature who seeks beauty not just to enjoy it—but to anchor themselves against the chaos they often feel inside. Your admiration for delicate things suggests you crave peace far more than you let on, even if you’re not ready to admit it.

You might think your wrath defines you—but it's the flowers that tell the truth."

And yet we're supposed to think this is profound?
by pxc | 2025-07-07 14:07:00+00:00
It's true that intellectual property is a flawed and harmful mechanism for supporting creative work, and it needs to change, but I don't think ensuring a positive outcome is as simple as this. Whether or not such a power struggle between corporate interests benefits the public rather than just some companies will be largely accidental.

I do support intellectual property reform that would be considered radical by some, as I imagine you do. But my highest hopes for this situation are more modest: if AI companies are told that their data must be in the public domain to train against, we will finally have a powerful faction among capitalists with a strong incentive to push back against the copyright monopolists when it comes to the continuous renewal of copyright terms.

If the "path of least resistance" for companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta becomes enlarging the public domain, we might finally begin to address the stagnation of the public domain, and that could be a good thing.

But I think even such a modest hope as that one is unlikely to be realized. :-\
by taeric | 2025-07-07 14:07:55+00:00
We do? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/health-ca... seems to show we are high on the 1 day wait, but not so much on the specialist waits.

That said, I think it would be safe to say I don't understand this statistic. Needing a day of answer from your health provider feels rare to me. The few times I've needed that, I would go to an emergency room.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-07 14:08:34+00:00
I've used Claude with a large, mature codebase and it did fine. Not for every possible task, but for many.

Probably, Mercury isn't as good at coding as Claude is. But even if it's not, there's lots of small tasks that LLMs can do without needing senior engineer level skills. Adding test coverage, fixing low priority bugs, adding nice animations to the UI etc. Stuff that maybe isn't critical so if a PR turns up and it's DOA you just close it, but which otherwise works.

Note that many projects already use this approach with bots like Renovate. Such bots also consume a ton of CI time, but it's generally worth it.