MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Deathmax | 2025-07-11 14:39:37+00:00
Vertex's offering of Gemini very much does implicit caching, and has always been the case [1]. The recent addition of applying implicit cache hit discounts also works on Vertex, as long as you don't use the `global` endpoint and hit one of the regional endpoints.

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20240517173258/https://cloud.goog..., "By default Google caches a customer's inputs and outputs for Gemini models to accelerate responses to subsequent prompts from the customer. Cached contents are stored for up to 24 hours."
by ptero | 2025-07-11 14:39:40+00:00
Every system has bugs, even deployed, high visibility accounting systems. Debian stable, which I personally view as the gold standard for a robust general purpose OS, has hundreds of bugs.

That is not to say that bugs are good. They are bad and should be squashed. But the Horizon failure, IMO, is with the management, that pretended that the system was bug free and, faced with the evidence to the contrary, put the blame on postmasters. My 2c.
by simonw | 2025-07-11 14:39:58+00:00
It does matter, because eventually xAI would like to make money. To make serious money from LLMs you need other companies to build high volume applications on top of your API.

Companies spending big money genuinely do care which LLM they select, and one of their top concerns is bias - can they trust the LLM to return results that are, if not unbiased, then at least biased in a way that will help rather than hurt the applications they are developing.

xAI's reputation took a beating among discerning buyers from the white genocide thing, then from MechaHitler, and now the "searches Elon's tweets" thing is gaining momentum too.
by JimmaDaRustla | 2025-07-11 14:39:59+00:00
Exactly - assuming the system prompt it reports is accurate or that there isn't other layers of manipulation is so ignorant. Grok as a whole could be going through a middle AI to hide aspects, or as you mention the whole model could be tainted. Either way, it's perfectly demonstrated in the blog that Grok's opinions are based on a bias, there's no other way around it.
by lynndotpy | 2025-07-11 14:40:29+00:00
Others have explained the confusion, but I'd like to add some technical details:

LLMs are what we used to call txt2txt models. The output strings which are interpreted by the code running the model to take actions like re-prompting the model with more text, or in this case, searching Twitter (to provide text to prompt the model with). We call this "RAG" or "retrieval augmented generation", and if you were around for old-timey symbolic AI, it's kind of like a really hacky mesh of neural 'AI' and symbolic AI.

The important thing is that user-provided prompt is usually prepended and/or appended with extra prompts. In this case, it seems it has extra instructions to search for Musk's opinion.
by timacles | 2025-07-11 14:40:35+00:00
I mean listen. If humans have to abstract a belief into something to get them through tough times then so be it.

It does not help anyone to pretend that the universe is some sort of pure logic and reasoning machine and that a human can operate that way, because we are governed by and a slave to our emotions.

Religion and God exist for a reason, and that reason is that the world is inconceivably complicated and if you dont create a mental and emotional reasoning system that helps see beyond the complexity then you are going to have a really tough time.

Now, churches and cults and all that preying on vulnerable people is a whole other subject. But God and religion is a powerful tool humans have turned to for millennia.
by renewiltord | 2025-07-11 14:40:57+00:00
From the wording of the description of the programmer who failed to debug and labeled it user error it appears that it is fairly typical Accenture-grade software where there is no single bug so much as the program itself approximates the correct result.

Their data model appears to have been akin to having a single accumulator sum up things rather than to use something like double-entry bookkeeping or an account graph so that the source of errors could be traced.

It’s less “a bug” and more a coincidence that the application worked when it did.
by ttoinou | 2025-07-11 14:41:12+00:00
What makes LLMs amazing (fuzzy input, fuzzy output) is exactly why they are hard to benchmark. If they could be benchmarked easily, they wouldn't be powerful by definition. I have no idea what's going on in the minds of people benchmarking LLMs for fuzzy tasks, and in the minds of people relying on benchmarks to make decisions about LLMs, I never looked at them. People doing benchmarks have to prove what they do is useful, not us public proving them they're doing it wrong.

Of course, for such tasks we could benchmark them :

* arithmetic (why would use LLM for that ?)

* correct JSON syntax, correct command lines etc.

* looking for specific information in a text

* looking for a missing information in a text

* language logic (ifs then elses where we know the answer in advance)

But by Goodhart's Law, LLMs that have been trained to succeed in those benchmarks might loose powerfulness in others tasks where we really need them (fuzzy inputs, fuzzy outputs)
by sgarland | 2025-07-11 14:41:36+00:00
FK Constraints on partitioned tables has been a solved problem for years for Postgres. MySQL still doesn’t support them, unfortunately.

For sharding, Vitess kind of supports them; Citus fully supports them.

You’re correct that they do impact performance to an extent, but as a counter argument, if your data is incorrect, it doesn’t matter how quickly you wrote it.
by timr | 2025-07-11 14:41:42+00:00
I don't know about the Ramen place (I can't believe that they wouldn't take cash?), but I agree with you that more places are doing this kind of "two markets" stuff -- it's even becoming official, in that now there's officially sanctioned "foreigner pricing" for certain temples, shrines, and parks. There's also Google Maps and Yelp vs. Japan's local version (pretty much any review on the former two are useless, and hopelessly biased by clueless tourists).

I'm of mixed minds. I really miss the days when it was possible to be welcomed pretty much anywhere as a foreigner and have almost universal expectations of high quality, scam-free experiences, but those days are pretty much gone now. Foreigners are lining up for mediocre tourist traps because of something they saw on TikTok or Instagram, and there are business people who are willing to take advantage of that fact.

It's also really difficult to serve your local clientele when tourists "discover" your establishment. I have a friend with a restaurant that has become known amongst foreign tourists, and it's nearly impossible for the locals in the neighborhood to visit now. I was talking about it with him a month or so back, and while he seemed happy to have the money -- and therefore unwilling to change the situation -- he also interacted with the tourists in a completely different way. He had a back-channel reservation mechanism for locals and people he knows, but it still requires advance planning for a place that used to be a casual, walk-in experience.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-11 14:42:03+00:00
Gabor Maté is popular, but he’s an example of an influencer who has one tool (trauma treatment) and applies it to everything. His approach is extremely reductive. Many people get addicted to drugs simply because they like taking the drugs and have poor self control, not because they’re avoiding trauma.

It’s another example of something that isn’t really correct for everyone but can be useful to get people to go to a therapist and get treatment.
by pydry | 2025-07-11 14:42:05+00:00
Lazard says utility solar and onshore wind is ~$40 per MWh while nuclear power is ~$200.

Offshore wind is more like $70, but also has double the capacity factor, so requires less matching storage.

We've been told for about 3 decades that any day soon microreactors/thorium/fusion will lead to cheaper, safer nuclear power and no doubt for the next 3 decades some people will continue to believe.
by nerdsniper | 2025-07-11 14:42:54+00:00
That would somewhat defeat the purpose of the LVT. The point is to force landowners to develop their land. A "fix" would be to make access to capital easier.

Optimum development in many areas isn't necessarily a large mid-rise or high-rise. For most areas, the maximum that the roads and other utilities could support would be dense townhomes, triplexes or quadplexes. Outside of the very highest-demand areas, the LVT would mainly encourage land owners to build additional units on under-utilized square footage or build up a bit. Increasing housing in an area necessarily requires access to capital - so that's what should be provided.

It's not perfectly fair to everyone; it would enrich current landowners. But lower-income/wealth individuals would also benefit because they'd get access to more affordable housing in the areas that they need to live.
by brookst | 2025-07-11 14:42:59+00:00
There’s about a 0% chance that kind of emergent, secret reasoning is going on.

Far more likely: 1) they are mistaken of lying about the published system prompt, 2) they are being disingenuous about the definition of “system prompt” and consider this a “grounding prompt” or something, or 3) the model’s reasoning was fine tuned to do this so the behavior doesn’t need to appear in the system prompt.

This finding is revealing a lack of transparency from Twitxaigroksla, not the model.
by horsawlarway | 2025-07-11 14:43:06+00:00
Ah, yes - tiny numbers like "Slightly less than the total GDP produced by 91 million people in Iran" or "Slightly more than the 6th most productive metro of the most populous country on the planet".

I agree - such a small player like checks notes "the 3rd most valuable company in the history of humanity" has no chance at implementing these troublesome rules.
by andrewla | 2025-07-11 14:43:28+00:00
I agree with many of the arguments here about the theoretical impacts of a land value tax, especially the section "an LVT implicitly taxes improvements to nearby land" which is often overlooked or glossed over in these discussions.

But my main argument is practical. I content that it is simply not possible to evaluate the "unimproved value" of a given parcel. Any discussion of a practical LVT has to start with the fact that it is an approximation to a theoretical ideal, and define exactly what the basis for "land value" estimation is, because it's really a tax on that process. While some of these may have overlap with the benefits and detriments of a theoretical LVT, they have to be looked at from first principles rather than by comparison with the LVT because the fundamental assumptions are often broken.
by IAmBroom | 2025-07-11 14:43:44+00:00
In at least one past version of Windows (circa 1990s), if you tried to replace the default web browser of IE with another choice you were given an Open File dialog window to choose the executable.

Funny quirk, though: that particular window wouldn't show files named firefox.exe. It would accept that as typed input, if you were at the correct folder, but the file listing omitted that particular file.

Maybe it was mozilla.exe; it was a long time ago. But that was the discovery that pushed me off IE forever.
by kragen | 2025-07-11 14:43:50+00:00
Yes, but remove the scare quotes; I'm talking about exporting those materials to people who burn them for energy, in most cases in batteries. The round-trip efficiency of that process is not great, but I think should be around 70% for aluminum, and better for iron and magnesium; and the specific energy (MJ/kg) for those metals is significantly better than for conventional hydrocarbon fuels.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-11 14:43:57+00:00
Of course, Apple is sabotaging Chrome and has been for years, and that's a much bigger problem than PWAs. The Safari team shouldn't need to implement PWAs against their will, Apple should instead let Google bring out a browser that does PWAs and then let the users decide if they want to use PWAs or not.

Google does something quite similar, though; Chrome can install applications into Android's app drawer, but that requires privileges other browsers can't attain, needing to resort to things like widgets instead. Firefox doesn't care about PWAs and Apple doesn't care about any platform but their own, so it's not as obvious a problem, but Android is full of "you must be the manufacturer or Google to compete" permissions. Android is just a lot better at fair competition than iOS, to the point you'd barely notice.
by outlore | 2025-07-11 14:44:01+00:00
<RANT>

I recently tried to downgrade Xfinity service. App did not have the button so I had to call. First, I had to battle my way out of the robotic loop. Then, when I finally got to a human support person, they kept trying to upsell me on additional services. I told them that I wanted to downgrade. Since this would probably would hurt their performance score, they redirected me to another rep after fiddling for 30 minutes.

When I was transferred, I became more angry. I finally got the new rep to downgrade my service when I threatened to cancel. All-in-all the whole thing took about an hour.

</RANT>

We absolutely need 1-click cancellation or plan change buttons on these service providers' websites.
by ramazandogna | 2025-07-11 14:44:17+00:00
Location: Turkey Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: React.js, Next.js, Vue.js, Node.js, Express.js, MongoDB, TailwindCSS, Docker, Puppeteer, Chrome Extensions, SEO Résumé/CV: https://ramazandogna.com/ Email: doganrmzn40@gmail.com

Frontend-focused Full Stack Engineer with 1.5+ years of experience building performant, scalable web applications. I’ve developed reusable design systems, browser extensions, and SEO-optimized platforms, and built internal tools and data services using Express, Puppeteer, and MongoDB. I’ve worked in Agile teams, shipping production-grade UI with React/Next and Vue. I also led the SEO/content strategy for a site that reached 2M+ organic visitors. Open to remote or relocation opportunities.
by quitit | 2025-07-11 14:44:20+00:00
I'm interested to see what this will all be in ~20 years time.

Policies with protectionist side effects (even if they're not marketed as such) have historically led to local businesses being less capable and less competitive over time. Whereby there is no need to compete or innovate as the business is insulated from genuine competition.

My assumption is that the EU believes this will lead to local businesses having the breathing space to grow to a critical mass where they could compete more robustly.

Looking back to historical examples we saw that businesses that benefitted from artificial protections were less competitive than ones that did not receive a benefit. We also saw that favoured businesses tended to be trapped inside the market where they receive those protections, i.e. they were optimised for those conditions. We see this more contemporarily with protected Russian and Chinese firms.

I am also curious if state-sponsored competitors will engineer a way around being labelled a gatekeeper. Such as by having a range of products with shared intellectual property spread across a number of legally discrete entities, effectively using a distributed form of anti-competitive practices.
by gtsop | 2025-07-11 14:44:34+00:00
I am waiting to see your 4 year human-equivalent project in a couple of months.

Words without actions are junk. You are asserting something you have no proof for. Proove it then. Amaze us all with your productivity, out in the open. Shred those pilled up open issues on open source projects and then give us a report of how fast-easy it.

If it is "easily true" you'll be done by next month
by speleding | 2025-07-11 14:44:52+00:00
Good question. The main problem I had was being too slow scaling up from 1 person. Building a good team is tricky, it's very hard to convince great devs to join you when you are by yourself at a time when they had a pick of jobs from FAANG. Even if you can match the salary of well funded startups, other companies can offer working with a larger team.

So you have three options: 1. hire sub-par people, 2. get VC funding to hire an entire team, or 3. continue doing most stuff by yourself.

I tried hiring sub-par people. That was a mistake, they took way more effort and negative energy than I got in return from the salary I paid them. I did not want to take on VC funding to be able create a large team at once, and in hindsight I think that was a good idea because several of my competitors did, and then had to fold 5 years later when they ran out of funding and their revenue was not high enough. (Also, the freedom of being a 100% owner and not having anyone tell you what to do was a major quality of life improvement for me that I never want to give up again once I tasted it. I hope you savor it as I do!)

So being smarter about hiring is what I would do differently, but that's easier said than done. I think the job market today probably does have more high quality devs available that don't mind being employee number two.

Edit: to add, once competitors appeared it became much more of a marketing game than a web dev game, because customers just tend to click the first three google hits. Getting good at marketing, and hiring the right people for that, is a whole other ballgame if you're a dev.
by yojo | 2025-07-11 14:45:06+00:00
FWIW, my kids never took to the screws, but are still ridiculously attached to their creations.

I strive to be open and honest in my parenting, but these battles just don’t seem worth everyone’s investment. A box spaceship that hasn’t been touched in a week is quietly “disappeared” to the basement, and if it’s not inquired after by the end of a month it goes to recycling.
by curious_cat_163 | 2025-07-11 14:45:18+00:00
100% agreed. It is all about removing friction for me. Case in point: I would not have touched React in my previous career without the assist that LLMs now provide. The barrier to entry just _felt_ to be too large and one always has the instinct to stick with what one knows.

However, it is _fun_ to go over the barrier if it is chatting with a model to get a quick tutorial and produce working code for a prototype (for your specific needs) where the understanding that you just developed is applied. The alternative (without LLMs) is to first do the ground work of learning via tutorials in text/video form and then do the cognitive mapping of applying the learning to one's prototype. I would make a lot of mistakes that expert/intermediate React developers don't make on this path.

One could argue that it shortcuts some learning and perhaps the old way results in better retention. But, our field changes so fast... and when it remains static for too long, projects die. I think of all this as accelerant for progress in adoption of new ways of thinking about software and diffusing that more quickly across the developer population globally. Code is always fungible, anyway. The job is about all the other things that one needs to do besides coding.
by jarjar2_ | 2025-07-11 14:46:11+00:00
This is very much my worry with AI in government. Those systems mass hallucinating fraud or some other punishable crime, and then the justice system doing what it does by threatening absurd sentences to compel plea deals and the evidence takes years to be properly challenged.

We are implementing AI in places it shouldn't be used and this whole thing is going to spin out of control at some point.
by s_dev | 2025-07-11 14:46:24+00:00
>2. Prosecutors didn't bother to verify if there is another explanation before accusing thousands of people of stealing? Isn't it common sense to pause for a second and think, "could we please double check the evidence? how can thousands of postal workers suddenly turn into thieves?"

They genuinely thought that the new software was uncovering a lot of theft that previously went undetected. This actually spurred them on even further thinking that the software was a godsend.

The sickening part is the people responsible won't ever see the inside of a prison cell despite sending many to prison for their failures.
by esperent | 2025-07-11 14:46:25+00:00
Ok, so the WHO recommendation is for curcumin. That makes sense.However, the supplement this woman was taking is quite unambiguously referred to as turmeric in both articles.

At this point I'd say we should just write it off as terrible reporting and make a mental note that the quality of Ars Technica is taking a significant drop, if they're allowing these kind of errors in their articles.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-11 14:46:26+00:00
> I seriously doubt everyone glued to their phone has a trauma.

The “trauma explains everything” meme has become more of a way to get people to accept therapy than a real explanation.

It transforms the problem from a personal failing (I can’t control my addiction) to a situation where the person is a victim of something external (Trauma inflicted on me has forced me to become addicted). People find it easier to accept treatment when they think they’re a victim of something external.

Gabor Mate (the trauma influencer mentioned in the comment above) uses trauma as the basis of his therapy, so he finds a “trauma” for everyone. If he can’t find something with the patient, he believes being born is their trauma, because the childbirth process is painful. Everyone was born, so he has a fallback trauma to assign to everyone.
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-11 14:46:39+00:00
I think the easiest trick here is to stop thinking about it as a parsing problem and consider it only as a lexing problem. A good lexer either doesn't throw out errors or minimizes error token states, and a good lexer gets back to a regular stream of tokens as quickly as it can. This is why we trust "simple" lexers as our syntax highlighters in most IDEs, they are fast, and they handle unfinished and malformed documents just fine (we write those all the time in our processes in our editors).

My experience many years back with using just a syntax highlighting tuned lexer to build character-level diffs showed a lot of great promise: https://github.com/WorldMaker/tokdiff
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-11 14:46:49+00:00
I’m pretty sure a nibbler will not wear out anywhere as quickly as scissors.

It can allow young children to work independently so you’d have to factor in cost of supervision with the scissors.

Main problem with it is that it is more expensive than many real nibblers designed to cut steel, I guess for now that it is niche and designed for classroom use. Mass market it and I think it could easily come down to $50.
by sgarland | 2025-07-11 14:46:54+00:00
> Of course, this is sometimes abused and taken to extremes in a microservices architecture where each service has their own database and you end up with nastiness like data duplication and distributed locking.

Not to mention the difficulty in maintaining referential integrity with all of that duplicated data. There are various workarounds, but at that point it feels very much like we’re recreating a shared DB, but shittily, and netting zero benefits.
by jeffhuys | 2025-07-11 14:47:06+00:00
If you see this as purely LLM-related, read again:

> AI addiction is the compulsive and harmful use of AI-powered applications. It can involve AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, video or image generation apps, algorithm-driven social media platforms, AI-powered gaming, AI companions, AI roleplaying, AI-generated pornography, or any other

The youth is not ready. Infinite pictures of whatever you want to see. Downloaded models have _no_ restrictions.

Make of that what you want.
by pm215 | 2025-07-11 14:47:28+00:00
It also felt to me to be weirdly concentrated in particular small areas. I spent a few weeks in various places in northern Japan which varied from "very quiet" to "tourists but not too many"; but in Tokyo, Akihabara was absolutely heaving with tourists (in a way it wasn't five years ago). And even in Tokyo just getting a little way away from the hotspots you could find beautiful but quiet places still. So I agree with the author's suggestion to go to parts of the country that aren't the tiny fraction of super-famous locations or social-media sensations.