MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by visarga | 2025-07-03 01:37:16+00:00
> everything we do online has, until this point, been free training to make OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. richer while cutting humans--the ones who produced the value--out of the loop

I think on the contrary, who sets the prompts stands to get benefits, the AI provider gets a flat fee, and authors get nothing except the same AI tools as anyone else. That is natural since the users are bringing the problem to the AI, of course they have the lion share here.

AI is useless until applied to a specific task owned by a person or company. Within such a task there is opportunity for AI to generate value. AI does not generate its own opportunities, users do.

Because users are distributed across society benefits follow the same curve. They don't flow to the center but mainly remain at the edge. In this sense LLMs are like Linux, they serve every user in their specific way, but the contributors to the open source code don't get directly compensated.
by mayneack | 2025-07-03 01:37:30+00:00
What does this have to do with government mandated websites? Seems that the US had a government website about climate and few heat deaths. If the number of heat deaths goes up this year without the websites would you think that is because the website went away (obviously not).

Seems like a website with information about climate change without a mandate about max AC is a pretty conservative strategy all things considered.
by toast0 | 2025-07-03 01:38:19+00:00
> My money is that Facebook and Google spend far more compute than I do when I use their services.

It kind of depends. UI rendering and painting is actually a lot of work. TLS handshaking with eliptic keys is close to balanced (may be more work for the client). TCP connections are usually harder for the client than the server. Giant services have giant compute farms, but they're also doing work for millions of users at any one time.
by HaZeust | 2025-07-03 01:39:04+00:00
>"Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?"

Because they pay for the same benefits you get, that they might not reap as often as you. That's the foundation of socialization, everyone's resources - that they fork over from taxation - is shared for various activities and settlements that give as many individuals (past, present and emerging) as much of an acceptable baseline of living as it can.

To be sure, the goal of socialization is also not usually to make everyone rich or give immense quality of life, it's to make sure everyone has the same "lowest" bar for things that members of society deem as essential, and that the bar set as "lowest" is as humane and efficient as possible.
by ethan_smith | 2025-07-03 01:39:07+00:00
As a rule of thumb, each billion parameters requires about 4GB of VRAM in FP16 (2 bytes per parameter), so a 7B model needs ~28GB, 70B needs ~280GB, while the 405B models need ~1.6TB of VRAM - though quantization can reduce this by 2-4x (4-bit models use only ~0.5GB per billion parameters).
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-03 01:39:18+00:00
> Don't think unions will happen in the tech industry because the workers are too selfish to have solidarity with one another. Just look at how hiring is done compared to the job duties required.

Tech skews low on socioeconomic-political intelligence. It would benefit this group greatly, but too many avoid it or are thoroughly indoctrinated to sabotage their own interests.

> Do you have experience with unions yourself?

Tech, no. Corporate America and a good fraction of academia are heavily anti-union.
by linguae | 2025-07-03 01:39:28+00:00
Right; a professor's tenure at many research universities depends on the professor's publication and grant-raising success, with less of an emphasis on a professor's teaching performance.

That's one of the things I like about teaching at a community college; whether or not I get tenure is based largely on my teaching performance, with service to the college and community making up the remainder of my evaluation. While I don't have upper-division undergrads, grad students, or postdocs, I have no research pressures whatsoever, which, interestingly enough, is the ultimate form of research freedom. I don't have a lot of time during the school year since I teach a 4-4 load, but I'm officially off duty during my one-month winter break and my 2.5-month summer break, which means I could do whatever I want during my breaks, including research (I'm actually in Japan right now as a visiting researcher at a Japanese university).

There are some teaching-oriented universities that have different balances regarding the importance of teaching and research in making tenure/promotion decisions, ranging from comprehensive masters-focused universities like those in the California State University system to private liberal arts colleges such as Swarthmore.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-03 01:40:30+00:00
If it’s anything like the AI expert systems I’ve heard about in insurance, it will be a tool that is optimized for low effort, but will be used carelessly by end users, which isn’t necessary the fault of the AI. In automated insurance claims adjustment, the AI writes a report to justify appealing patient care already approved by a human doctor that has already seen the patient in question, and then an actual human doctor working for the insurance company clicks an appeal button, after reviewing the AI output one would hope.

AI systems with a human in the loop are supposed to keep the AI and the decisions accountable, but it seems like it’s more of an accountability dodge, so that each party can blame the other with no one party actually bearing any responsibility because there is no penalty for failure or error to the system or its operators.
by moron4hire | 2025-07-03 01:40:59+00:00
No, again, that's not my point. The code from the article is O(2n) when it could be O(n). I know we're not supposed to care about constant factors, but I've lived in a world where not micro optimizing the ever loving shit out of my software could potentially make people throw up, so this sort of stuff kind of stands out to me.
by codeddesign | 2025-07-03 01:42:36+00:00
Sue for what and who? The lead pipes weren’t illegal and pipes being lead weren’t hidden from the public. Beyond that, the water travels through multiple counties to get the Flint. Regarding healthcare - that is actually run on a state level since Obama. Each state has the choice to subsidize healthcare or not. There is no “nationalized” in this, unless you are talking about Medicaid? In that case, all medical is private and can choose which insurers they want to accept, including Medicaid. For those that have Medicaid know it’s absolutely horrible to work with and even worse for doctors. The only real solution is that each state exponentially increases income taxes to cover private insurance. However, if they did that it would be a political death sentence.
by FridgeSeal | 2025-07-03 01:43:32+00:00
Assuming the airport runs from 6am to 11pm, 2.9m people a day works out to be about ~47 reqs/second. Which is not terribly much.

Even if we check them at both ends, and effectively double the load, thats only ~100reqs/second. A single machine would happily handle that.
by mindslight | 2025-07-03 01:43:41+00:00
That same deadweight class in power right now, pushing this narrative that the meager benefits we have are still too high for what we're worth. As they begin the next phase of destroying and looting our country - Make America Poor Again.

Your narrative completely missed all of the monetary inflation that was created to keep prices from going down due to cheaper manufacturing. That was the wealth received from offshoring, having been centralized as monetary creation. But rather than this wealth being spent on deliberate goals to mitigate the economic damage of that offshoring (individual and industrial), a rallying cry of fake "fiscal responsibility" prevented most such public spending. So the new money was instead simply given away to banks to bid up to the asset bubble, ultimately putting that centralized wealth into private hands of asset holders while pricing wage earners out of the asset markets.

That was the political con of the past thirty+ years. Now that it has run its course, the game shifts to the next con - which seems to be turning America into some kind of impoverished authoritarian work camp where we appreciate being able to do unskilled factory work that China no longer wants to do. Acknowledging the last con gets the rubes to buy right into it. Finally some validation, what a breath of fresh air! Oh, and don't you know the real problem right now is actually them "illegals" ? Definitely not these elites, nope. This current bunch is totally different than that last bunch. See how they don't even respect those laws or norms the previous elites respected? So refreshingly different!
by alberth | 2025-07-03 01:43:56+00:00
For those that don't have the context ...

The Younger Dryas theory supporters is controversial across multiple disciplines because it challenges the idea that human progress has always been linear (gets better over time).

Some believe that ~13,000 years ago, humans were highly advanced, but a massive flood (Younger Dryas) wiped out & reset civilization.

Supporters of this theory often point to two things: nearly all major religions reference a great flood, and there’s a current lack of understanding how ancient megalithic sites were built with tools thought to be available at the time (primitive bronze tools, etc).

---

Unfortunately, it seems like folks from both sides of the topic talk-past each other ... and at least I haven't seen a balanced debate on the subject. If someone has seen a balanced assessment, please share.
by phs318u | 2025-07-03 01:44:33+00:00
If I have back-to-back meetings, I'll leave a few minutes early (with apologies) and also apologise to the next meeting if I'm late. If anyone calls me out, I'll apologetically claim "biological imperative". If they don't understand, I tell them that my bowels wait for no one. That is enough to get everyone to move on. No one wants to talk about someone else's bowels.
by lmm | 2025-07-03 01:46:09+00:00
> If all monad instances work differently what is the value of the Monad interface? What kind of usefull generic code can one write against the Monad interface.

Code that composes a bunch of operations, for whatever kind of composition those operations need (some people call Monad "programmable semicolons", because it's a lot like sequencing). E.g. traversals of datastructures, or some kind of "do this in a context" operation. Essentially any function you pass a "callback" to should probably be written in terms of monads so that it can accept callbacks that need different kinds of composition beyond just being called at different points in the control flow.
by GianFabien | 2025-07-03 01:46:41+00:00
It appears to me that the vision has transmuted into small Linux boxen running HomeAssistant and other services being accessible by any laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc around the home.

Tip note: instead of chucking old (Android) smartphones in a drawer to be forgotten, update Chrome on them, configure WiFi and use them as general purpose thin-clients.
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-03 01:46:53+00:00
"xor ax, ax" is still in use today. The main advantage is that it is shorter, just 2 bytes instead of 3 for the immediate, the difference is bigger in 32 and 64 bit mode as you have to have all these zeroes in the instruction.

Shorter usually mean faster, even if the instruction itself isn't faster.
by piplio | 2025-07-03 01:47:10+00:00
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by danans | 2025-07-03 01:47:11+00:00
> If my real wealth doubles and Elon's real wealth doubles, inequality went up, yet everyone is tremendously better off.

What's this universe that only contains you and Elon? Or do you think that everyone's real wealth has doubled?

> I can set an argument about political influence that's gotten really strong lately but maybe that's better addressed by strengthening the politically system

Citizens United has practically dismissed that possibility in the near term.
by 0xilis | 2025-07-03 01:47:13+00:00
Location: Indiana, United States

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C/C++, Swift, Objective-C, Python, UIKit, IOKit, git, Xcode, Core Animation, Core Text, Vulnerability Research

Resume: https://snoolie.gay/private/assets/resume-general.pdf

Email: QuickUpdateShortcutSupport@protonmail.com

GitHub: https://github.com/0xilis

I am a current university student who has also had plenty of self taught macOS and iOS experience. I have also had experience with open-source C development for unix devices. I have previously taken a Software Engineering internship as well, and have some credited CVEs on Apple Security Updates.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-03 01:47:36+00:00
> Yet, in many ways, the world we are in today is actually intensely terminal based.

At the same time, I feel that in many cases that’s because it’s easier to bill users as a provider of terminals instead of a provider of personal computers. Depending on interest rates, being billed for connecting by terminal can also be more attractive to a business.

For the absolute overwhelming majority of businesses, there is zero reason to deal with the failure modes and resulting tremendously complex engineering that comes with running the infrastructure for Amazon. (It’s not that, for example, the small number of computers they need can’t fail, it’s that, unlike Amazon, they’d need to plug a lot of other much more probable disaster-planning holes before the probability of such failure rises above the noise.) Yet many do. For the absolute overwhelming majority of individuals, their file-sharing needs do not require a distributed storage system sized for Google. Yet many use one. And then they have to deal with the fact that they are small enough that Amazon’s and Google’s infrastructure could literally never work for them and still not cause even the slightest dent in the overall uptime percentage[1].

[1] http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/07/15/giant/
by m463 | 2025-07-03 01:47:55+00:00
"I always use an after-shave lotion with little or no alcohol because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm, followed by a final moisturizing "protective" lotion..."

Bateman stares into the mirror. The masque has dried, giving his face a strange distorted look as if it has been wrapped in plastic. He begins slowly peeling the gel masque off his face.
by jameshart | 2025-07-03 01:48:00+00:00
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand entirely what you are trying to express by

Func<A, B>, List<A> -> List<B>

That said, in C#, you can write:

List<A> listA; Task<A> taskA; Func<A, B> func; List<B> listB = from i in listA select func(i); Task<B> taskB = from t in taskA select func(t);

And if it can resolve a method on List<T> called 'Select' that takes a Func<T, S> that returns a List<S>, and a method on Task<T> called 'Select' that takes a Func<T, S> that returns a Task<S> this will compile.

In other words, I kind of think that Select methods (which can be Select extension methods, of course) amount to functors in C#?
by lurking_swe | 2025-07-03 01:48:39+00:00
> I do not understand the hostility

Unfortunately I don’t think they were participating in the conversation in good faith. People can have an extreme view on _anything_…even internet / tech. They buy into a dream of 100% open source, or “open internet”, or 100% decentralized, whatever.

When this happens they may be convinced that “others” are crazy for not sharing their utopian vision. And once this point is reached, they struggle to communicate with their peers or normal people effectively. They share their strong opinions without sharing important context (how they reached those opinions), they think the topic is black and white (because they feel so strongly about the topic), or they become hostile to others that are not sharing that vision.

You are their latest victim lol. Ignore them, and carry on.
by afc | 2025-07-03 01:48:56+00:00
My thinking is that over time I can incrementally codify many of these individual "taste" components as prompts that each review a change and propose suggestions.

For example, a single prompt could tell an llm to make sure a code change doesn't introduce mutability when the same functionality can be achieved with immutable expressions. Another one to avoid useless log statements (with my specific description of what that means).

When I want to evaluate a code change, I run all these prompts separately against it, collecting their structured (with MCP) output. Of course, I incorporate this in my code-agent to provide automated review iterations.

If something escapes where I feel the need to "manually" provide context, I add a new prompt (or figure out how to extend whichever one failed).
by GianFabien | 2025-07-03 01:50:11+00:00
The problem with the Windows home computer vision was that it comprised of a bulky beige box with numerous power and data leads snaking out of it and a monstrous CRT based monitor (usually on top) and a huge clacky keyboard. Typically taking 6+ sq ft of table/bench space.

Today's tablets are far more convenient to locate where they are needed and portable as well.
by eviks | 2025-07-03 01:50:59+00:00
> The platform conventions when used properly allow the user to entirely skip reading those button labels.

No it doesn't since you don't know whether the app is following that convention, so you need to read the label. Besides I don't think it's even possible to avoid reading a short label while looking at it.

> Consider ... how to arrange the "OK"

This isn't the topic, though, this is:

> Apple's committed to taking their UI in the direction of illegibility

> which doesn't usually include anything about your app's brand identity

Do you have a good example here as to me dentity in design is mostly about color theme and maybe a few shape tweaks, which has almost no usability impact?
by theobr | 2025-07-03 01:51:22+00:00
This article makes ME feel like I'm going insane. Have you even read the React docs?

The article you linked about "patterns" in React is explicitly referencing patterns that are 7+ years out of date. Hooks were built to REPLACE those patterns, and they did a phenomenal job.

90% of this article is immediately invalidated by introducing a simple, 20loc "useQuery" hook (or, god forbid, looking at ANY of the libraries that provide similar. Shoutout React Query)

I really wish we could get more valid critique of React from people who actually understand the framework, instead of this drivel from devs who spend more time complaining in blog posts than reading the docs.
by rm999 | 2025-07-03 01:51:25+00:00
A really short version of it is that you don't need an agent if you have a well-defined solution that can be implemented in advance (e.g. the 'patterns' in this article). Programmers often work on problems that have programmatic solutions and then the advice is totally correct: reach for simpler more reliable solutions. In the future AIs will probably be smart enough to just brute force any problem, but for now this is adding unneeded complexity.

I suspect a reason so many people are excited about agents is they are used to "chat assistants" as the primary purpose of LLMs, which is also the ideal use case for agents. The solution space in chat assistants is not defined in advance, and more complex interactions do get value from agents. For example, "find my next free Friday night and send a text to Bob asking if he's free to hang out" could theoretically be programmatically solved, but then you'd need to solve for every possible interaction with the assistant; there are a nearly unlimited number of ways of interfacing with an assistant, so agents are a great solution.
by wglb | 2025-07-03 01:51:34+00:00
> Do you remember the actual Heartbleed bug?

Vividly. I spent a full week on remediation, even though the risk we had was traced to a single linux box exposed to the internet that had tens of kb of traffic over the last year.

Being proactive, we reissued all certificates for all of our internally deployed ssl points.

> In my own experience, seasoned engineers often remind me that every line of code is a liability. Tens of millions of lines of C++ that work closely with the internet sounds like quite the surface area.

No question. I don't question the wisdom of rewriting all of it in Rust. Having spent 60 years in the software business, I have a feeling for the size of the effort. And for what it is worth, I don't have any doubt about the competency of the teams involved.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-07-03 01:51:35+00:00
One example: as a trial, I wanted to work out how frequently an 1400 rated chess player can get a particular opening trap. I intended to check this for all the traps, so it needed to be fast. With a surprising amount of handholding, claude code downloaded the relevant file from lichess. Its method of computing the probability was wrong, so I told it the formula to use and it got the right answer, but incredibly slowly. I asked it to precompute and cache a datas structure for accelerating these queries and it splashed around ineffectually for a long time with sqlite while I made dinner. I came back and clarified that just sorting all the games in the rating range and pickling that list of strings was a fine datastructure, then use binary search to do the probability in log(n) time. It managed to use binary search in o(n) time so I folded and wrote the hot loop myself. this got the query back to ~1 ms.

In the end the agentic coding bit was garbage, but i appreciated claude’s help on writing the boilerplate to interface with stockfish
by rtpg | 2025-07-03 01:51:48+00:00
Given the N64-PS1 era is filled with first party games that run at like 20 fps, I'm having a hard time saying things are worse now.

I am a bit uncomfortable with the performance/quality stuff that people have set up but I personally feel that the quality floor for perf is way higher than it used to be. Though there seem to be less people parking themselves at "60fps locked", which felt like a thing for a while
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-03 01:51:56+00:00
I'll have to bookmark it for later to spend more time than just skimming, but I find 2 things interesting. The lack of any Egyptian archeologists on most interesting and significant findings about Ancient Egypt is one. The other is the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian which is pretty cool.

Egyptians don't like the notion that "they moved there from somewhere". They claim their own unique, uninterrupted, history and connection to the land as well as their civilizational independence from Mesopotamian, Asia Minor, Europe, and Africa.

It's also the same you rarely find Egyptian archeologists/scholars on scientific papers. While this might be a matter of ancient history and science to everyone, it's a matter of current day politics for Egyptians and especially the Egyptian government. The "findings" of the paper has to agree with the narrative built and proposed by the ministry of antiquities or they will literally charge whoever publishes it with a national crime.