MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rsynnott | 2025-08-28 13:25:06+00:00
I saw _quite a few_ people trying to claim that it included training, even though it clearly didn't, so maybe that?

Also, note that it is the _median_ usage for Gemini. One would assume that the median Gemini usage is that pointlessly terrible Google Search results widgets, the one that tells people to eat rocks. Which you've got to assume is on the small side, model-wise.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-28 13:25:13+00:00
> Can you elaborate how the other fallacies were mis-applied

Sure. OP didn’t ever reject the developers’ arguments. He’s criticising their methods for activism. But, even if OP were attacking their arguments:

OP doesn’t reject the developers’ methods (remember, their arguments are never contested) because of who is speaking, but how. To the extent it could be mistaken for ad hominem, it would be in tone policing, but that’s not what you said and it is not true because OP was citing Apple’s language, as evidenced by the quotes.

Appeal to corporate omniscience is not a fallacy. (And OP doesn’t cite Google as evidence for their arguments, so no appeal to authority.)

Circular reasoning doesn’t apply, even to your example, because complaints not mattering doesn’t cause Google to expect them.

False dichotomy does not apply because OP never argued any dichotomy. The closest they came was hyperbolic language (“perfectly” and “completely and fully”). But that’s closer to modal scope than any dichotomy, possibly fallacy of necessity since it implies future limits.

Arguments rarely require citing the formal or informal fallacy invoked. Instead, just respond to the argument. This is a great case of AI corrupting a discussion through derailment and false confidence.
by CRConrad | 2025-08-28 13:25:52+00:00
> No mention of C#, which of all the languages I've seen makes the best distinction...

It's the "I've seen" that does the heavy lifting here. I'd guess it's C# for you only because you haven't seen Hejlsberg's predecessor to it, Borland Object Pascal / "Delphi".

Sigh... Tempus fugit.
Ask HN: What perfectly written monospace block text am I looking for?
by meta-level | 2025-08-28 13:26:44+00:00
I don't know where else to ask, ChatGPT didn't even understand my question, but on HN had been some ASCII art related posts recently, so I give it a try..

Some time ago I stumbled upon a text - I don't even know the topic, maybe related to a computer game - which was written in perfectly aligned blocks in monospace font, without any space characters used to enforce the alignment. So every word was carefully chosen to end up with equally sized lines (no HTML trickery, worked in text editors, too).

Someone has a hint where I can find this text? Or is there even a word for this kind of art?
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-28 13:26:47+00:00
At least in the US, code reviews are essentially mandated by legal compliance in publicly-traded companies. The law (SOX) says something like "no one person can destroy the company by making an engineering change", so viola, code review was invented. Private companies can probably get away with not doing code reviews, but often private companies want to pass security reviews like SOC 2.

> I am pretty sure that adding a review step would have slowed me down tremendously

This is very true. Everyone should work on a personal side-project at some point and realize just how much code review slows things down.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-28 13:28:03+00:00
I'm not sure to what extent this is an actual youth thing, versus that older people have been exposed to more "it's the real thing this time, promise!" hype bubbles, and, in particular for programmers, have probably been exposed to one or more of the prior "this will make programmers 10x as efficient" and/or "this will get rid of icky programmers altogether" crazes.

Fool me once, and all that.
AI audio generation/cleanup trained on my voice
by jgrauman | 2025-08-28 13:28:05+00:00
I would like to have an AI audio model that I can train on hours of clean audio of my voice, and then feed it a very noisy audio file of a lecture I did, that it can effectively clean up to get rid of all the noise. Noise filters don't work because the audio quality is so bad. Ideally, the AI could match the same timing of the audio of the noisy feed because it is audio that came from video, so that the resulting clean audio could be put back with the video without looking like it's dubbed. I have no experience in AI, does something like this exist or could it be setup with minimal effort for someone who is otherwise technically literate (has used Linux for 20+ years)?
by nottorp | 2025-08-28 13:28:38+00:00
> a few quarters per issue

Not X dollars per month with a yearly commitment that auto renews and for which you need to stay on hold for 6-12 hours to cancel...

Cry me a river.

If "newspapers" really wanted my money they'd band up and set up a micropayments agency so I could pay them for the issue i'm interested in again.

But they're only chasing whales instead so I have zero compassion.
by crote | 2025-08-28 13:28:54+00:00
Their assumption is that training is a fixed cost: you'll spend the same amount on training for 5 users as you will with 500 million users.

Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on training when you are two guys in a garage is quite significant, but the same amount is absolutely trivial if you are planet-scale.

The big question is: how will training cost develop? Best-case scenario is a one-and-done run. But we're now seeing an arms race between the various AI providers: worst-case scenario, can the market survive an exponential increase in training costs for sublinear improvements?
by georgejg | 2025-08-28 13:28:54+00:00
I can really relate to the challenges of managing both code architecture and project assets. Over time, I realized that having a reliable assistant for game development makes a huge difference. Tools like https://www.code-maestro.com/ have been especially useful—they help maintain clean code structure, automate handling of scenes and prefabs, and even provide insights for optimizing mechanics or fixing lingering bugs. Beyond just coding, it turns complex projects into an interactive knowledge base, making it easier to understand how different systems connect. For anyone working on long-term or legacy projects, integrating something that offers both code generation and structured documentation can save months of trial and error, while also supporting more consistent and maintainable growth over time.
by reissbaker | 2025-08-28 13:29:08+00:00
You can't. The Spark has 128GB VRAM; the highest you can go in FP16 is 64B — and that's with no space for context.

200B is probably a rough estimate of Q4 + some space for context.

The Spark has 4x the VRAM of a 5090. That's all you need to know from a "how big can it go" perspective.
by martinald | 2025-08-28 13:29:22+00:00
Yes. I was really surprised at this myself (author here). If you have some better numbers I'm all ears. Even on my lowly 9070XT I get 20x the tok/s input vs output, and I'm not doing batching or anything locally.

I think the cache hit vs miss stuff makes sense at >100k tokens where you start getting compute bound.
by lmm | 2025-08-28 13:30:26+00:00
> Programming-language researchers didn't start investigating linear (or affine) types till 1989.

Sure, but as ModernMech said, the vast majority of Rust's benefits come from having sum types and pattern matching.

> In pre-Rust ML-family languages, it is harder to reason about CPU usage, memory usage and memory locality than it is in languages like C and Rust.

Marginally harder for the first two and significantly harder for the last, sure. None of which is enough to matter in the overwhelming majority of cases where Rust is seeing use.
by alphazard | 2025-08-28 13:30:45+00:00
A certificate is just a fancy way of saying one key pair signed a message containing another public key. It is a link in a cryptographic chain of trust. Given that you already trust a public key, you should also trust some other public key with certain caveats because the first public key signed a message containing the second key and whatever else. A list of allowed domain names is a possible caveat.

An onion address is more like an IP address, except it is stable for hosts across time, and it contains enough information to cryptographically prove identity. It may be true that the browser interprets it as a domain name, but it is really operating at the network level where Tor is the network.

A certificate for a Tor address means you can go from DNS to a Tor address because the certificate will contain a list of allowed domains and the tor address contains a public key, same as usual.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-08-28 13:31:10+00:00
That assumes the characterization is perceived as flattering, or that enough data on me would allow it to "think" it would be to me. Generally, given the anti-intellectual bias in American popular culture, I'm on the fence about that. But then, what are the biases of the corpus ChatGPT was trained on?

For context, I was asking GPT to rewrite some passage in the style of various authors, like Hemingway or Waugh. I didn't even ask it for an assessment of my writing; I was given that for free.

In retrospect (this was while ago), I think the passage may have been expository in character, so perhaps it is not much a mystery why it was characterized as "academic". (When I give it samples similar to mine now, I get "formal, academic, and analytical tone". Compare this to how it characterizes an article from The Register as written in an "informal and conversational tone", in part because of the "colloquial jargon" and "pop culture references"). So my RP comparison is sensible. And there's the question of social class as well. I don't exactly speak like a construction workers, as it were.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-28 13:31:21+00:00
The cost of “manufacturing” an AI response is the inference cost, which this article covers.

> That would be like saying the unit economics of selling software is good because the only cost is some bandwidth and credit card processing fees. You need to include the cost of making the software

Unit economics is about the incremental value and costs of each additional customer.

You do not amortize the cost of software into the unit economics calculations. You only include the incremental costs of additional customers.

> just like you need to include the cost of making the models.

The cost of making the models is important overall, but it’s not included in the unit economics or when calculating the cost of inference.
by chasd00 | 2025-08-28 13:32:13+00:00
Self hosting LLMs isn’t completely out of the realm of feasibility. Hardware cost may be 2-3x a hardcore gaming rig but it would be neat to see open source, self hosted, coding helpers. When Linux hit the scenes it put UNIX(ish) power in the hands of anyone with no license fee required. Surely somewhere someone is doing the same with LLM assisted coding.
by Fraterkes | 2025-08-28 13:32:58+00:00
I’m not a very experienced programmer, but the first example immediately strikes me as weird. The consideration for choosing types is often to communicate intend to others (and your future self). I think that’s also why code is often broken up into functions, even if the logic does not need to be modular / repeatable: the function signature kind of “summarizes” that bit of code.

Making a boolean a datetime, just in case you ever want to use the data, is not the kind of pattern that makes your code clearer in my opinion. The fact that you only save a binary true/false value tells the person looking at the code a ton about what the program currently is meant to do.
by taylodl | 2025-08-28 13:33:03+00:00
What I'm getting out of this is boolean shouldn't be a state that's durably stored, it's ephemeral, an artifact of runtime processing. You wouldn't likely durably store a boolean in an OLTP store, but your ETL into the OLAP store may capture a boolean to simplify logic for all the systems using the OLAP store to drive decision support. That is, it's an optimization. That feels right, but I've never really thought through this before. Interesting!
by gregorygoc | 2025-08-28 13:33:26+00:00
I come from a country which had a strong Soviet influence, and in school basically we were taught that behind every hard formula lies an intuitive explanation. As otherwise, there’s no way to come up with the formula in the first place.

This statement is not true, there are counter examples I encountered in my university studies but I would say that intuition will get you very far. Einstein was able to come up with special theory of relativity by just manipulating mental models after all. Only when he tried to generalize it, that’s when he hit the limit of the claim I learned in school.

That being said after abandoning intuition, relying on pure mathematical reasoning drives you to a desired place and from there you usually can reason about the theorem in an intuitive way again.

Math in this paper is not that hard to learn, you just need someone to present you the key idea.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-28 13:33:37+00:00
(This is a dupe so I'll copy my comment on the old, unloved post from 5 days ago...)

Linux is a fish, stop trying to make it a bird. The fact that a significant portion of the Linux-user population thinks/believes/hopes/expects that it will someday be a bird won't make it so, or do anything to unblock the technical, legal, and organizational roadblocks. If you want a FOSS desktop OS that can win the "right battles", here's what you do:

1. Come up with a name and a logo. Trademark them. Make a basic set of rules that people have to adhere to if they want to use your logo. Obviously, get a lawyer to look it over to ensure it's ironclad.

2. Fork FreeBSD (or any other open-source-but-not-copyleft-licensed kernel)

3. Pick a GUI layer. GTK, Qt, WxWidgets, doesn't really matter as long as you keep the API stable so programs written in 2028 will run in 2038 (good luck doing that on Linux).

4. Create a driver API interface so someone can write a Realtek Wifi driver once and it'll never need recompiled or updated for a newer kernel. The driver file will work in 2028 and 2038 (of course, excepting the case where there's a new CPU architecture, or a security vulnerability).

5. Stabilize the application-level API as well. That means, probably pick a version of glibc and stick with it forever. Patch vulnerabilities, but maintain backward compatibility as much as possible. Application binaries should work forever.

If your instinctive reaction to these bullet points is to think "who's gonna do all that" then yeah, I agree with you. It's not going to happen.
Ask HN: Which LinkedIn roles should I target for web scraping products/services?
by vikramaruchamy | 2025-08-28 13:33:39+00:00
I’m working on building an audience for web scraping tools and services. My goal is to share useful content on LinkedIn, but I’m unsure which roles/professionals would be most relevant to target.

Who do you think benefits most from web scraping — data analysts, growth marketers, researchers, e-commerce teams, or others?

Would appreciate any insights from those who’ve tried building similar audiences.
by cratermoon | 2025-08-28 13:33:47+00:00
Multiple bitter lessons

1. Somehow people moving into houses that went for $4 to $25 million didn't notice or bother to check that there's a landfill a mile from their houses.

2. Ash waste from last year's huge wildfires needs a place to go, but it's de facto toxic.

3. A waiver granted to allow the toxic waste to be dumped into landfills not rated for handling it.

4. Rich people find they have no more power than residents of Flint, MI

Addendum: at least the cops are deferential to the crowd of protestors that include rich white moms with a babies. They didn't declare a "riot" and didn't fire teargas or rubber bullets at anyone.
by voxic11 | 2025-08-28 13:33:52+00:00
That isn't what unit economics is. The purpose of unit economics is to answer: "How much money do I make (or lose) if I add one more customer or transaction?". Since adding an additional user/transaction doesn't increase the cost of training the models you would not include the cost of training the models in a unit economics analysis. The entire point of unit economics is that it excludes such "fixed costs".
by gdwatson | 2025-08-28 13:33:56+00:00
It sounds like their lawyers have done the appropriate counter-challenge with YouTube, so the video will go back up unless Bloomberg sues them in the next so many days. And this is Gamers Nexus, so I presume they will fight to keep it as is on principle.

Personally, I found the length of the quotes from politicians kind of tedious, but I sure wouldn’t want them to capitulate to Bloomberg after this.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-28 13:34:13+00:00
> likely a sleeper agent account that has been woken up from a pattern of posting non-content to disguise inactivity to start astroturfing for Google

“Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by hu3 | 2025-08-28 13:34:38+00:00
Maybe this will open your eyes.

Dell support has flown a repair guy to my place with spare hardware pieces and fixed my pc in front of me. In my office. And I was partially to blame for the problem (I over clocked the CPU). I told them I did oc the CPU, they changed motherboard and processor anyways. For free.

So not only there are other verticals, but they are better.
by jonpizza | 2025-08-28 13:35:20+00:00
I chunked my conversations by day so that each conversation in the dataset would be about the same topic throughout without random switching, which isn't perfect, ideally I would let an LLM chunk the conversations into logical start/stop points, but I didn't want to spend all that money on tokens. I also got rid of any conversations with images and group chat conversations to simplify.
by martinald | 2025-08-28 13:35:34+00:00
Mmm let's see. I think in LLM ads are probably have the most intent (and therefore most value) of any ads. They are like search PPC ads on steroids as you have even more context of what the user is actually looking for.

Hell they could even just add affiliate tracking to links (and not change any of the ranking based on it) and probably make enough money to cover a lot of the inference for free users.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-28 13:35:46+00:00
Buying parts for that particular desktop was quite fun:

- Me: Can I get a Q6600? - Seller: But, that's... Quad core? - Me: Yes, I'll have it. - Seller: OK. RAM? - Me: I'll get OCZ Flex-XLC Hybrids. 1GB. - Seller: *Gives one* - Me: I'll get four. - Seller: ? - Me: Yes, four please.

Motherboard was an MSI P35 Platinum. Fun times.
by Hilift | 2025-08-28 13:36:00+00:00
This is about where to put the toxic waste created by the Palisades (7,000 homes) and Altadena (9,400 structures) fires.

The process removes the top 12" and replaces with with clean fill. The governor granted an exemption from California Environment Quality Act (CEQA), and recent legislation passed will streamline or waive the process for all future development. The material will go somewhere, the question is which NIMBY is the recipient.

Probably worth noting that before the CEQA revamp legislation this year, 50% of all California construction development was challenged/thwarted with lawsuits by the same people for multiple or no reasons. That usually resulted in one or two years of delays, with the cost added to the construction. The price to build "affordable" housing in California is $700,000 to $1,000,000.

https://www.pacificresearch.org/newsom-right-to-waive-ceqa-f...
by winter_blue | 2025-08-28 13:36:18+00:00
Yup, that's what I do. Even for personal projects, with the flurry of changes Claude/other AI assistants make, a branch makes it easier for me to compare changes.

Often I have a branch with multiple commits on it, with each commit corresponding to a message in a conversation with AI on Cursor trying to get a new feature built.

In the end, I can diff the branch against the main branch, and see the sum total of changes the AI agent has made.

Maybe edit/improve manually on my own afterwards. And then, merge.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-28 13:36:40+00:00
If you go back and forth with chatgpt/gemini on architectural details first, then get chatgpt to produce a hyper detailed spec (like, almost a program claude can execute), you can get claude to run for 2-3 hours at a shot (particularly with a hook to prevent early stopping). Require >85% test coverage, and bake very clear e2e test paths into the spec, and Claude can come surprisingly close to one shotting big things.
by ForHackernews | 2025-08-28 13:36:54+00:00
> if you have healthy positive cash flow you have much better mechanisms available to fund capital investment other than selling shares. Eg issue a bond against that healthy cash flow.

Is that actually true in 2025? Presumably you have to make coupon payments on a bond(?), but shares are free. Companies like Meta have shown you can issue shares that don't come with voting rights and people will buy them, and meme stocks like GME have demonstrated the effectiveness of churning out as many shares as the market will bear.
by chikinpotpi | 2025-08-28 13:37:06+00:00
I generally prefer to let one value mean one thing.

Allowing the presence of a dateTime (UserVerificationDate for example) to have a meaning in addition to its raw value seems safe and clean. But over time in any system these double meanings pile up and lose their context.

Having two fields (i.e. UserHasVerified, UserVerificationDate) doesn't waste THAT much more space, and leaves no room for interpretation.
by jfengel | 2025-08-28 13:37:10+00:00
Because weight matters a lot in an airplane, and hydrocarbons are the densest form of fuel. Adding 20% to the weight of a car isn't really a big deal; adding that to a plane makes the entire enterprise fail.

If they can find a way to transform carbon-neutral electricity into a hydrocarbon, then they can keep airplanes going without having to burn fossil fuels. But it's hard to make that efficient enough to be economically viable.
by zemvpferreira | 2025-08-28 13:37:18+00:00
"Schizoaffective disorder is a mental health condition that is marked by a mix of schizophrenia symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, and mood disorder symptoms, such as depression, mania and a milder form of mania called hypomania. Hallucinations involve seeing things or hearing voices that others don't observe. Delusions involve believing things that are not real or not true."

I'm not sure this is an employable condition unfortunately. As progressive as anyone wants to be, I can see the disruption an illness like this causes not being tenable. Businesses are competitive entities, not machines for inclusion. My heart goes out to OP but I don't think I'd want him on my team either.
by CurtMonash | 2025-08-28 13:37:20+00:00
I type em dashes as double hyphens. Sometimes the software resolves them to a true em dash, but sometimes not.

I never use hyphens where em dashes would be correct.

I do have issues determining when a two-word phrase should or shouldn't be hyphenated. It surely doesn't help that I grew up in a bilingual English/German household, so that my first instinct is often to reject either option, and fully concatenate the two words instead.

(Whether that last comma is appropriate opens a whole other set of punctuation issues ... and yes, I do tend to deliberately misuse ellipses for effect.)
by sneak | 2025-08-28 13:37:38+00:00
I agree that that is ridiculous, but for many definitions of “for work”, $20k/year is well within the low end of “cost of doing business”.

I spend that much on computer hardware, and again that much on cloud services, and again that much on airfare each year, and I’m a one-person shop with very high margins.

Services are also a supply chain.