MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abeppu | 2025-07-12 01:04:56+00:00
Ok, so ericmay was not entirely explicit and perhaps we read his point differently.

> then I don’t want to hear a peep about us taking any other actions in the world that we deem just

I think the noteworthy peeps are not about the mere fact that we involve ourselves in the world outside our borders but that we often do it pretty badly. We attack Iraq with "shock and awe" over WMDs that do not exist, and create the Abu Ghraib prison. We drone strike weddings. We set up puppet governments ... for a while. We sign up for climate accords and then back out (multiple times).

I read his point as, "if we have an obligation to fix other people's problems, we shouldn't be subject to complaints when our foreign adventures go wrong".

And I think that's crap; we have both an obligation to try to fix the important problems that wealth or force can fix, and we have an obligation to use both carefully and ethically.

> which I would rephrase as "We can't be police and not police at the same time.

To be clear, in this turmeric story, they did an ad/leaflet campaign about the issue, and then Bangladesh's own Food Safety Authority cracked down. This wasn't about the US enforcing its laws or standards anywhere else. Getting involved and helping to solve a problem doesn't need to mean being the police. And I'm not an expert, but I think almost none of the stuff that flowed through USAID was about being "police".
by netsharc | 2025-07-12 01:05:10+00:00
Googling it, one of the results was https://library.bldrdoc.gov/ , for Boulder Labs Library.

More googling gave me https://www.boulder.doc.gov

> Boulder is the home of scientific laboratories for the U. S. Department of Commerce’s NOAA, NIST and NTIA. Clustered on the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder Colorado, these labs are the home of scientific research and engineering in the fields of electromagnetics, materials reliability, optoelectronics, quantum electronics and physics, time and frequency, earth systems, weather and telecommunications.

Looks like a place full of scientific knowledge. I hope they haven't suffered much DOGEing.
by topspin | 2025-07-12 01:05:13+00:00
> I can't imagine why it behaves this way.

The warning implementation must be simple minded: if the variable is ever read then it isn't "unused." The compiler need only set a flag on every read, and later scan all the flags. What you wish it did is track the lexical position of the last assignment and detect when pointless assignment occurs. This is clearly more complex and also has a higher performance cost. So for reasons of laziness and/or performance, the developers just haven't bothered.

That's what I imagine. Having dealt with C compilers for a long time now, it doesn't occur to me to expect better, so I guessed correctly that Wunused was not applicable here.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-12 01:05:33+00:00
Sure, but that can happen with too much efficiency, too. See, for example, supply chains during COVID. We had a very good handle on how much (for example) toilet paper we needed in normal times, and produced almost exactly that much.

Having some extra power generation capacity means you're not freezing to death in a cold snap or frying all the elderly in a heat wave.
by kragen | 2025-07-12 01:05:35+00:00
Specifically what I'm talking about was this, from my bookmarks file, which is mentioned in your CNN story:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de... #news from March 10, 02020 how Helen Chu at the University of Washington discovered that covid had spread to #USA. She was running the Seattle Flu Study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in association with the Washington State Department of Health, whose state epidemiologist Dr. Scott Lindquist requested her to test for #covid, but was blocked by the FDA from telling the people who had it, because “the group was not certified to provide test results to anyone outside of their own investigators.” The FDA's repeated refusal was “because the lab was not certified as a clinical laboratory [just a research laboratory, which has much higher standards] under regulations established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a process that could take months.”

The CDC was also trying to develop tests, but the tests they shipped were defective. Meanwhile the Seattle Flu Study sequenced the genome of the virus and discovered that a new variant had arisen. All of this was in late February.

> On March 2, the Seattle Flu Study’s institutional review board at the University of Washington determined that it would be unethical for the researchers not to test and report the results in a public health emergency, Dr. Starita said. Since then, her laboratory has found and reported numerous additional cases, all of which have been confirmed.

But then:

> on Monday night [presumably March 8], state regulators, enforcing Medicare rules, stepped in and again told them to stop until they could finish getting certified as a clinical laboratory, a process that could take many weeks.

Describing this as "unvetted experimental tests" is in some sense technically correct, but it's like describing me checking the voltage at a test point in my power supply with my multimeter as an "unvetted experimental test". Nobody has vetted my test plan, my multimeter may be out of calibration, and I might even not be checking circuit node I think I'm checking.

But if you think that's a valid criticism of what I'm doing, you need to be locked up where you can't harm others.

The main difference is that Helen Chu is the Allergy and Infectious Disease Program Lead at an R1 university, and literally the person who discovered that covid had spread to the US, while I'm not the lead of anything, and nobody will die if I don't find out why this power supply doesn't work until next week, so I don't have an IRB telling me that it's my ethical obligation to measure that test point.

The Trump Administration's handled the covid pandemic like a fucking bunch of clowns, but the CDC and FDA are mostly civil service, and most of the numbskulls who did this are career civil servants, not political appointees.

The US government is a motherfucking glioblastoma of incompetence, and that seriously interferes with well-intentioned, sensible plans like the one proposed by londons_explore.
by RestlessAPI | 2025-07-12 01:05:40+00:00
I use Windsurf so I remain in the driver's seat. Using AI coding tools too much feels like brain rot where I can't think sharply anymore. Having auto complete guess my next edit as I'm typing is great because I still retain all the control over the code base. There's never any blocks of code that I can't be bothered to look at, because I wrote everything still.
by zamadatix | 2025-07-12 01:06:52+00:00
I think the goalposts are solid but maybe there is some misunderstanding/disagreement of what's going on with the chipped physical keys vs fobs causing it to seem as if I must be trying to move them.

There were early generation keys for VATS/Pass-Key I/II style systems in the ~~80s-late 90s which weren't actually "chipped" but had some protection mechanisms mostly based around resistance. They were a bit useless in that they were very limited in possible values so even without a key one could just guess through them. Beyond that, there were also just cheap bypass modules https://www.the12volt.com/installbay/forum_posts.asp?tid=845.... Really, these were not much different than going after a normal physical key car because of the lack of actual chip. I don't think you were referring to these for these reasons, but I thought I'd cover them anyways.

Actual chipped-but-physically-inserted keys https://www.key4.com/gm-transponder-key-b111pt?srsltid=AfmBO... using chips like Hitag2 https://www.nxp.com/products/rfid-nfc/hitag-lf/hitag-2-trans... started to hit the market towards the late 90s. These still don't signal the chip communication through the metal of the key into the ignition though, they use 125 KHz RFID wireless transponders. The difference between these keys and fobs is, at most, the maximum range and they lack the buttons a fob would have. The underlying operation of the chip operate on the same principle though, there was no such thing as "wired"/"physically transmitted" chipped keys. As such cloning them was indeed as easy as buying some random RFID cloner and beaming it at someone's purse to then drive away. Of course the other attacks on the car systems themselves (i.e. without the key) also still exist but that's beside the point.

If you think you know of a chipped physically inserted key which you believe does not ultimately use an RFID transponder I'd be curious what make/model/year. Maybe there is just some key I've never heard of.
by d00mB0t | 2025-07-12 01:07:01+00:00
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Our stack:

Multimodal LLM-as-a-Service (LLMaaS) On-chain inference orchestration via smart prompt contracts Self-healing vector DBs optimized by swarm-based meta-learning API-first LangChain RAG pipelines over hybrid AI-native blockchains

Join the movement—build the singularity with sovereign compute and AI-native DAOs.
by mdaniel | 2025-07-12 01:09:26+00:00
> enhancing it to detect more ad formats using lightweight local LLM.

So you're going to boot up my_llm.prompt("is this request an ad? %s" % request.copy_as_curl()) for every XHR on the page?!

I know this comment is on a page about an AI web browser, but let's turn down the "LLMs cure all problems" a notch
by void-star | 2025-07-12 01:09:37+00:00
Really valid points. I agree with the bits about “expertise in getting the computer to do what you want” being the way of the future, but he also raises really valid points about people having strong domain knowledge (a la his colleague with extensive art history knowledge being better at midjourney than him) after saying it’s okay to tell people to just let the LLM write code for you and learn to code that way. I am having a hard time with the contradictions, maybe it’s me. Not meaning to rag on Dr. Ng, just further the conversation. (Which is super interesting to me.)

EDIT: rereading and realizing I think what resonates most is we are in agreement about the antithetical aspects of the talk. I think this is the crux of the issue.
by AJ007 | 2025-07-12 01:10:19+00:00
Pretty easy to hit $100 an hour using Opus on API credits. The model providers are heavily subsidized, the datacenters appear to be too. If you look at the Coreweave stuff and the private datacenters it starts looking like the telecom bubble. Even Meta is looking to finance datacenter expansion - https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-seeks-29-billion-priva...

The reason they are talking about building new nuclear power plants in the US isn't just for a few training runs, its for inference. At scale the AI tools are going to be extremely expensive.

Also note China produces twice as much electricity as the United States. Software development and agent demand is going to be competitive across industries. You may think, oh I can just use a few hours of this a day and I got a week of work done (happens to me some days), but you are going to end up needing to match what your competitors are doing - not what you got comfortable with. This is the recurring trap of new technology (no capitalism required.)

There is a danger to independent developers becoming reliant on models. $100-$200 is a customer acquisition cost giveaway. The state of the art models probably will end up costing hourly what a human developer costs. There is also the speed and batching part. How willing is the developer to, for example, get 50% off but maybe wait twice as long for the output. Hopefully the good dev models end up only costing $1000-$2000 a month in a year. At least that will be more accessible.

Somewhere in the future these good models will run on device and just cost the price of your hardware. Will it be the AGI models? We will find out.

I wonder how this comment will age, will look back at it in 5 or 10 years.
by iLemming | 2025-07-12 01:10:40+00:00
> still convince absolutely no one who wasn't already convinced.

I don't know, people change their opinions all the time. I wasn't convinced about many ideas throughout my career, but I'm glad I found convincing arguments for some of them later.

> wanting an editor which is intuitive to use

Are you implying that Vim and Emacs are not?

Intuitive != Familiar. What feels unintuitive is often just unfamiliar. Vim's model actually feels pretty intuitive after the initial introduction. Emacs is pretty intuitive for someone who grokked Lisp basics - structural editing and REPL-driven development. The point is also subjective, for some people "intuitive editor" means "works like MS Word", but that's just one design philosophy, not an objective standard.

Tools that survive 30+ years and maintain passionate user bases must be doing something right, no?

> the new technology doesn't absolutely perfect fit their own way of working.

Emacs is extremely flexible, and thanks to that, I've rarely complained about new things not fitting my ways. I bend tools to fit my workflow if they don't align naturally — that's just the normal approach for a programmer.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-07-12 01:11:59+00:00
The basic concept plus a lot of money spent on compute and training data gets you pretraining. After that to get a really good model there’s a lot more fine-tuning / RL steps that companies are pretty secretive about. That is where the “smart decisions” and knowledge gained by training previous generations of sota models comes in.

We’d probably see more companies training their own models if it was cheaper, for sure. Maybe some of them would do very well. But even having a lot of money to throw at this doesn’t guarantee success, e.g. Meta’s Llama 4 was a big disappointment.

That said, it’s not impossible to catch up to close to state-of-the-art, as Deepseek showed.
by Shorn | 2025-07-12 01:12:25+00:00
Summary: new free tier accounts that get automatically cleaned up after a while.

Initially I thought AWS were guaranteeing this wouldn't cost you money, but:

> What happens if I exceed the free usage limits of always-free services? > > If you exceed the free usage limits, your account will begin incurring charges

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...
by mdaniel | 2025-07-12 01:12:58+00:00
> We really need some better way of preserving open source stuff I guess

Not some rando's blog engine in C++, or other kinds of stupid throw-away code

Anyway <https://web.archive.org/web/20241122030659/https://github.co...> -> $(fossil clone https://code.rosaelefanten.org/blogcpp) which takes a stunning amount of time but then reports

Round-trips: 15 Artifacts sent: 0 received: 2751 Clone done, wire bytes sent: 4127 received: 124543126 remote: 2a03:4000:34:5e::1 Rebuilding repository meta-data... 100.0% complete... Extra delta compression... none found Vacuuming the database... project-id: 40a055cb170ae83c46b4ed9bf3b6a60e6e541aa0 server-id: cee9059305219c887fd29c677cbafb372252518a admin-user: mdaniel (password is "x2hEAaXUDj") opening the new ./blogcpp.fossil repository in directory ./blogcpp... 3rdparty/ConfigParser/ConfigParser.cpp ... project-name: BlogC++ repository: /home/runner/blogcpp.fossil project-code: 40a055cb170ae83c46b4ed9bf3b6a60e6e541aa0 checkout: fbea390316bc3aace7de0a9ccdba90ecc1949a10 2024-12-17 22:03:16 UTC parent: 9e604d205e7922ef1af87952fe1bebef0cbac336 2022-01-15 02:22:33 UTC tags: trunk comment: fuck you github (user: Cthulhux) check-ins: 20
by ericd | 2025-07-12 01:14:45+00:00
Yeah, I've seen this with our own solar installation - when the grid frequency dips even a bit, our house cuts itself off from the grid, including whatever power it was feeding back. It seems like a recipe for instability - grid is overstrained, so the frequency dips, and suddenly tons of distributed solar generation drops off and makes the grid even more strained.

And with UPSes that beep when they kick on, it's become very apparent that this happens basically daily during the summer, when power demand for air conditioning is high.
by dewey | 2025-07-12 01:15:04+00:00
I did the same a few weeks ago (https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/ssd-upgrade-for-mac-mini-m...), usually I’m far into the “just pay for convenience” camp but this was so easy to do and the price difference was just too big.

Saving $500 for 30 min of actual work that’s also easily reversible if needed for a support case is too good to ignore.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-12 01:15:24+00:00
Which is 1,615 applicants per US franchise.

Seems totally reasonable to me.

2 shifts of 12 employees is 24 employees per day. Assume they all work there for 6 months on average, then if the system's been up for 10 years, that's 480 employees per franchise over a decade. Which means for every employee they hired, 2 were either rejected or chose not to work there.

Working at McD's is something a lot of people do for a few months when they're young.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-12 01:16:15+00:00
Kinda funny because my act of resistance against having a slack standup at the beginning of the day was to fill mine out at the end of the day when I have a clear memory of what I did and (at best) am raring to go with what I need to tomorrow and ready to write it down.

So far as anybody else knows I became the first person to post a standup rather than the last…. But after a few years of this subversion it hit me that 80% of the team now does it my way.
by deaddodo | 2025-07-12 01:16:41+00:00
If you’re integrating/being an “expat” in a society, you’re going to develop familiarity. The “average” Korean won’t know anything about you and continue to just treat you like a tourist (unless you speak fluent Korean), but your social and professional circle won’t. You can’t go very far into relationships in a foreign country without people knowing your background.

Less importantly but somewhat obvious: many Koreans are fairly competent in English and familiar with common American accents. They’ll know pretty quickly if you aren’t speaking with one.
by bradly | 2025-07-12 01:17:05+00:00
In DJB's paper on software quality he identifies actionable strategies for code quality and code security that were born out of frustration to sendmail's exploit after exploit. Very accessible and fun read: https://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf

I would expect this conf to expand on those types of concepts and strategies.
by e1g | 2025-07-12 01:17:25+00:00
Yes, a lot of usage, I’d guess top 10% among my peers. I do 6-10hrs of constant iterating across mid-size codebases of 750k tokens. CC is set to use Opus by default, which further drives up costs.

Estimating productivity gains is a flame war I don’t want to start, but as a signal: if the CC Max plan goes up 10x in price, I’m still keeping my subscription.

I maintain top-tier subscription to every frontier service (~$1k/mo) and throughout the week spend multiple hours with each of Cursor, Amp, Augment, Windsurf, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, but keep on defaulting to Claude Code.
by echelon | 2025-07-12 01:20:52+00:00
> Piss trickles down, nothing else has trickled down since Reagan made that up.

When businesses face hardship, they lay off. That's demonstrable. Employees are a luxury.

When Section 174 tax code ended, that set off a tidal wave of layoffs. And that's not even a new tax -- that's just amortization. When real taxes are levied on businesses, it'll be a blood bath.

> tariffs have done nothing except increase the price of everything by 10% across the board.

You're preaching to the choir. I'm not a fan of the administration or the tariffs. For a party that purports to be fiscally conservative, they're doing the opposite.
by derefr | 2025-07-12 01:21:56+00:00
> It seems quite likely that this is being done via a botnet - illegally abusing thousands of people's devices. Sigh.

Just because traffic is coming from thousands of devices on residential IPs, doesn't mean it's a botnet in the classical sense. It could just as well be people signing up for a "free VPN service" — or a tool that "generates passive income" for them — where the actual cost of running the software, is that you become an exit node for both other "free VPN service" users' traffic, and the traffic of users of the VPN's sibling commercial brand. (E.g. scrapers like this one.)

This scheme is known as "proxyware" — see https://www.trendmicro.com/en_ca/research/23/b/hijacking-you...
by crtified | 2025-07-12 01:21:57+00:00
I agree, there's a significant distinction between "the switches were (physically) flipped" and "the circuit was opened/closed".

In this case, it may be a moot distinction, particularly if no physical evidence of fault or tampering has been discovered in investigation. But, in theory, very important - there's a lot of potential grey-area between the two statements.

The proximity of the incident to the ground may also increase the possible attack vectors for simple remote triggers.
by munificent | 2025-07-12 01:22:53+00:00
> everyone remembers they can choose to shape their engagement with technology, and that naturally includes the right to disconnect from it

The thing that scares me the most about the times we are living in right now is that while I can choose how I shape my engagement with technology, I am still stuck living in a planet/country/society/democracy filled with people who may be making radically different choices and I still have to deal with the consequences of that.

It really doesn't matter that much if I figure out ways to avoid toxic disinformation when I'm outvoted by idiots who haven't. It doesn't matter that much if I spend less time staring at a screen so that I can spend more in-person time with people I care about when it's a grueling task getting anyone else to commit to hanging out because they are still enthralled by the glowing rectangle.

I'm doing my best to navigate this chaotic stressful time, but ultimately I share a boat with many many other people and have only my own tiny little oar.
by martinald | 2025-07-12 01:23:21+00:00
Two of the main ones actually aren't really DRAM related but how full the drive is.

For most (all?) SSD drives they need a good 20% of the drive free for garbage collection and wear levelling. Going over this means it can't do this "asynchronously" and instead has to do it as things are written, which really impacts speed.

Then on top of that on cheaper flash like TLC and QLC the drive can go much faster by having free space "pretend" to be SLC and write it in a very "inefficient" size wise but fast method (think a bit like striped RAID0, but instead of data reliability issues you get with that it only works when you have extra space available). Once it hits a certain threshold it can't pretend anymore as it uses too much space to write in an inefficient fast way and has to write it in the proper format.

These things are additive too so on cheaper flash things get very very slow. Learnt this the hard way some years ago when it would barely write out at 50% of HDD speeds.
by agnishom | 2025-07-12 01:24:37+00:00
> going to go through a difficult period of cultural erosion

I am not sure what cultural erosion you speak of. I am sure Japanese culture won't be replaced by a cultural vacuum. Japanese culture has evolved for centuries, both under external influences and because of its internal dynamics.

Many modern beloved Japanese cultural assets were formed in such manner, as noted in this article: https://archive.md/2c1WI