MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-08-24 02:12:44+00:00
This mirrors a weird thought I’ve had recently. It’s not a thing I necessarily agree with, but just an idea.

I hear people say things like, “AI isn’t coming for my job because LLMs suck at [language or tech stack]!”

And I wonder, does that just mean that other stacks have an advantage? If a senior engineer with Claude Code can solve the problem in Python/TypeScript in significantly less time than you can solve it in [tech stack] then are you really safe? Maybe you still stack up well against your coworkers, but how well does your company stack up against the competition?

And then the even more distressing thought accompanies it: I don’t like the code that LLMs produce because it looks nothing like the code I write by hand. But how relevant is my handwritten code becoming in a world where I can move 5x faster with coding agents? Is this… shitty style of LLM generated code actually easier for code agents to understand?

Like I said, I don’t endorse either of these ideas. They’re just questions that make me uncomfortable because I can’t definitively answer them right now.
by vips7L | 2025-08-24 02:13:08+00:00
> GC tuning, Netflix

I believe Netflix has moved to ZGC with no tuning. Their default setup is to set the min/max heap to the same size, enable always pretouch, and to use transparent huge pages [0]. GC tuning is something of the past. Once automatic heap sizing for ZGC and G1 land you won’t even need to set the heap size [1][2]. They’ll still use more ram because the vm and jit, but the days of it holding on to ram when it doesn’t need it should be over.

[0] https://netflixtechblog.com/bending-pause-times-to-your-will...

[1] https://openjdk.org/jeps/8329758

[2] https://openjdk.org/jeps/8359211
by nradov | 2025-08-24 02:13:15+00:00
Perhaps, but it's entirely possible that China will collapse in another violent revolution within our lifetimes. It has happened several times before and will probably happen again. China has serious structural problems with food and energy security, and in a crisis the central government may find it difficult to maintain the loyalty of internal security forces.

As the old Chinese saying goes, "The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away."
by Uw7yTcf36gTc | 2025-08-24 02:13:39+00:00
Health insurance companies know that the health insurance arm is capped at 80% so they have added vertical companies to capture the profits. Check the full breath of CVS for example. Their Health Insurance may be capped at 80% profits but their doctor’s offices, their pharmacy and so on don’t have a cap. It’s just moving the money around to comply with the 80% rule while moving the profits to sister companies along the stack. Basically Hollywood accounting in health insurance.
by soulofmischief | 2025-08-24 02:14:39+00:00
That's a pretty bad mischaracterization, I haven't shown any aggression at all. Let's focus on what I am saying and not rely on ad hominem by suggesting I'm not okay simply for sharing my opinion.

We're starting with "suggestions", but it's a slippery slope, especially when you look at the slew of laws being passed in US states around the freedom for children to use devices and communicate according to their parents' own guidelines.

> The city will work with schools and parents to promote the healthy use of electronic devices, according to the draft ordinance.

And where will this begin and end? It's moral policing by the government, even if it's only the first soft step in that direction.
by krick | 2025-08-24 02:15:55+00:00
But wouldn't you run whatever you are writing in Docker container on dev anyway? I always did just that, as long as I use Docker as a deployment tool for a project at all. And, in fact, even sometimes when I didn't, since it's much easier and cleaner to keep, say, multiple php or redis versions in containers, than on your PC. And it's only maybe a year since it became actually effortless to maintain all this version-zoo locally for Python, thanks to uv. In fact, even when it's something like Go, so the deployable is a compiled binary, I'd usually wrap the build process into a Docker container for dev anyway.
by OvermindDL1 | 2025-08-24 02:16:18+00:00
As someone with extremely similar experience to thomashabets2 over my life, but less go and more rust, please allow me to compare go's Interfaces to rusts dyn Traits, both of which are implemented pretty much identically under the hood. Rust just doesn't let you construct the data nor vtable part of the interface/trait as nil/null, in any form. Either the interface/traits instances entirely whole or it can't be instanced at all. This is the way to do it, not partially filled in one part (the vtable) and not the other (the data pointer).
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-24 02:16:45+00:00
Although the article discusses EXIF, which is primarily hardware-created metadata, there is the other metadata like Description and Keywords that I find very important (typically encode as IPTC or XMP metadata, if I recall correctly).

Especially older family photos that I scan: in the Description I can add what was written on the back (and/or front) of the photo. I use Keywords to identify who is in the photo as well as who I got the photo from (like a "Photo From Peggy" keyword).

In time when you get quite a collection, it becomes handy to be able to search your Photos library using this metadata. Also, when exported, the metadata remains if you allow it to. So when I send off digital copies to relatives, they also have that additional information.
by positron26 | 2025-08-24 02:17:26+00:00
This is a common idea, and it is a super-hard problem. Sites like Reddit are increasingly sampling by throwing more new posts into hot. That is a solution that may improve yet not really change HN. Ultimately, we don't all want the same feeds and user majorities tend to stifle key minorities such as early adopters.

I'm building such a system for prizeforge and am several more steps ahead on this solution. You need a decent background in probability and a more robust understanding of what a "good" outcome is to work on this kind of thing. https://positron.solutions/careers if you do Rust and care a whole lot about this problem and can deal with the challenges we're going to have with PrizeForge.
by jzackpete | 2025-08-24 02:17:30+00:00
I'm talking about the regulatory capture of everything related to health care: medications, credentialing, insurance, etc. Any regulation imposed on the production of a good or provision of a service is a constraint on the supply. Reducing supply increases costs. I fail to see how the imposition of one insurance company (a monopoly) would improve that.

When Medicare was created, medical care accounted for less than 7% of GDP. It's around 20% now[1]. If you extrapolate life expectancy from before Medicare to now, has that massive increase in spending changed the trajectory at all?

You see the same phenomenon in higher education: we subsidize demand through government-backed loans, and costs and administrative overhead skyrockets.

[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...
by john-tells-all | 2025-08-24 02:19:53+00:00
(Hi, Nik!)

So what you're saying is that "Static sites with Python, uv, Caddy, and Docker" wasn't the overall goal. You want to stay in Coolify world, where most things are a container image.

It just so happens that a container can be just a statically-served site, and this is a pattern to do it.

By treating everything as a container, you get a lot of simplicity and flexibility.

Docker etc is overkill for the static case, but useful for the general case.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-24 02:20:16+00:00
The working programmer might be interested in the series on ropes on the Xi Editor website[1] as a practical application, as it motivates the concept as it goes. (Alternatively, if you’ve taken an algorithms class you have probably encountered the idea of computing things over an interval of an array by storing them in for each node of a tree that flattens to that array, such as a search tree or interval tree.)

[1] https://xi-editor.io/docs/rope_science_00.html
by ahmedhawas123 | 2025-08-24 02:20:25+00:00
Function / tool calling is actually super simple. I'd honestly recommend either doing it through a single LLM provider (e.g., OpenAI or Gemini) without a hard framework first, and then moving to one of the simpler frameworks if you feel the need to (e.g., LangChain). Frameworks like LangGraph and others can get really complicated really quickly.
by fragmede | 2025-08-24 02:21:18+00:00
LLMs write python and typescript well, because of all the examples in their training data. But what if we made a new programming language whos goal was to be optimal for an LLM to generate it? Would it be closer to assembly? If we project that the future is vibe coded, and we scarcely look at the outputted code, testing, instead, that the output matches the input correctly, not looking at the code, what would that language look like?
by soulofmischief | 2025-08-24 02:22:24+00:00
It's not always as useful as you think from the perspective of a business trying to sell an automated service to users who expect reliability. Now you have to worry about waking up in the middle of the night to rewind your model to a last known good state, leading to real data loss as far as users are concerned.

Data and functionality become entwined and basically you have to keep these systems on tight rails so that you can reason about their efficacy and performance, because any surgery on functionality might affect learned data, or worse, even damage a memory.

It's going to take a long time to solve these problems.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-24 02:22:29+00:00
It's a pity lpddr hasn't gained the higher capacity DDR recently gained.

That there are 48 and 64gb DDR dimms now has been such a sweet boost. It'd be awesome if 6x64GB were possible for Medusa Halo (384GB) but seems right now like only half that will be possible (192GB).
by nativeit | 2025-08-24 02:22:42+00:00
I suppose if growth is all that matters, that's probably good news. It's probably worth mentioning a good chunk of those will have been the ongoing projects with current stock.

On the other hand, if long-term maintenance and optimizations for this absolutely critical new infrastructure are even a little bit of a priority? Then it's still unlikely the "smart" move to eliminate the entire department.

Also carrying around suitcases full of designer drugs is maybe a bad sign for CEO, staying up all night playing video games, and working--charitably speaking--"part time" are all rather uninspiring choices...
by gwern | 2025-08-24 02:23:03+00:00
They can, but they are known to have a self-favoring bias, and in this case, the error is so easily identified that it raises the question of why GPT-5 would both come up with it & preserve it when it can so easily identify it; while if that was part of OP's original inputs (whatever those were) it is much less surprising (because it is a common human error and mindlessly parroted in a lot of the 'scaling has hit a wall' human journalism).
by russellbeattie | 2025-08-24 02:23:25+00:00
> "About $7.8 billion had been been pledged to Intel under the incentives program, but only $2.2 billion had been funded so far. Another $3.2 billion of the government investment is coming through the funds from another program called “Secure Enclave.”"

The funds were already going to Intel. Trump just decided to demand 10% of the company for the already earmarked incentive programs. It was pure extortion.
by mac-monet | 2025-08-24 02:23:45+00:00
Started using this recently, extremely impressed with this tool's capabilities. The only issue is the TUI is absolutely miserable to use.

One of the biggest pain points for debugging failures that Echidna finds is the path of getting the failure into a forge test that I can replay, and then slowly diagnosing where the bug is stemming from. An alternative path that could be useful is to stream the function call sequence (with the option to disable traces as well) to a file. This would allow easily creating a forge test from it. This file could even be used to generate a test and be diagnosed by a coding agent. Resolving the "last mile" of finding these failures would make the DX absolutely top tier.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-08-24 02:23:58+00:00
> I feel the implication in the article is that Clegg believes it's impossible to be a wealthy man and also a victim? ... But simply saying they're wealthy is insufficient to prove that.

You "feel" something and you demand Clegg to prove what you feel instead of you proving that Clegg is really implying what you feel. But he isn't trying to prove anything, in fact he accepts whiny wealthy men as fact, he just feels this to be an ugly combination:

>> Clegg: “In Silicon Valley, far from thinking they’re lucky, they think... they’re victims. I... can’t, understand this deeply unattractive combination of machismo and self-pity."
by michaelmrose | 2025-08-24 02:24:46+00:00
The Amish way is ultimately impractical to practice without being embedded in a society which is much larger and inimical to their own way of thinking as otherwise those willing to both bear the cost of accepting modern ways of and willing to do violence burn your shit and settle on your land. In more peaceful times people may chose only to impoverish your people and buy your lands but the net effect is the same.

The inherent built-in futility limits the virtue of this approach.
by tambourine_man | 2025-08-24 02:25:41+00:00
What I meant is that I’m not sure it will even boot. Bookworm minimum requirements are 256MB of RAM.

https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/armel/ch03s04.en.ht...

128MB should be plenty. I used systems for years with much less. But in reality, Linux is much heavier these days.
by nwallin | 2025-08-24 02:26:45+00:00
1/sqrt(x) is complicated. Imagine instead of computing 1/sqrt(x), imagine instead that you wanted to compute exp_2(-.5 log_2(x)). Also imagine you have an ultra fast way to compute exp_2 and log_2. If you have an ultra fast way to compute exp_2 and log_2, then exp_2(-.5 log_2(x)) is gonna be fast to compute.

It turns out you do have an ultra fast way to compute log_2: you bitcast a float to an integer, and then twiddle some bits. The first 8 bits (after the sign bit, which is obviously zero because we're assuming our input is positive) or whatever are the exponent, and the trailing 23 bits are a linear interpolation between 2^n and 2^(n+1) or whatever. exp_2 is the same but in reverse.

You can simply convert the integer to floating point, multiply by -.5, then convert back to integer. But multiplying -.5 by x can be applied to a floating point operating directly on its bits, but it's more complicated. You'll need to do some arithmetic, and some magic numbers.

So you're bitcasting to an integer, twiddling some bits, twiddling some bits, twiddling some bits, twiddling some bits, and bitcasting to a float. It turns out that all the bit twiddling simplifies if you do all the legwork, but that's beyond the scope of this post.

So there you go. You've computed exp_2(-.5 log_2 x). You're done. Now you need to figure out how to apply that knowledge to the inverse square root.

It just so happens that 1/sqrt(x) and exp(-.5 log x) are the same function. exp(-.5 log x) = exp(log(x^-.5)) = x^-.5 = 1/sqrt(x).

Any function where the hard parts are computing log_2 or exp_2 can be accelerated this way. For instance, x^y is just exp_2(y log_2 x).

Note that in fast inverse square root, you're not doing Newton's method on the integer part, you're doing it on the floating point part. Newton's method doesn't need to be done at all, it just makes the final result more accurate.

Here's a blog here that gets into the nitty gritty of how and why it works, and a formula to compute the magic numbers: https://h14s.p5r.org/2012/09/0x5f3759df.html
by pluto_modadic | 2025-08-24 02:26:54+00:00
lots of people not considering UNPHAT - https://gist.github.com/rponte/67c78e6b3ee349a6e14cb8fb155b7... / https://stevenschwenke.de/pragmaticSoftwareEngineeringUNPHAT - some solutions didn't exist in the past. you evaluate your landscape and your problem, and try to find a good fit.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-08-24 02:27:14+00:00
They are used in OCT (optical coherence tomography) as well

OCT is a technique which uses IR to get "through" tissue using beam in the near infrared (roughly 950 nm, with a spread of roughly 100 nm). The return is passed through interferometer and what amounts to a diffraction grating to produce the "spread" that the line camera sees. After some signal processing (FFT is a big one), you can get the intensity at depth. If you sweep in X,Y somehow, usually deflecting the beam with a mirror, you can obtain a volumetric image like an MRI or sonogram. Very useful for imaging the eye, particularly the back of the retina where the blood vessels are.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-24 02:27:47+00:00
“Inquiry” is not this “gosh just asking questions” bullshit you’re doing. If you want to go out and actually add to the body of human knowledge by doing yet another study or vaccine safety, then by all means, go for it. But dropping into online conversations to say “I can’t believe you idiots trust Big Pharma” isn’t inquiry.
by fragmede | 2025-08-24 02:28:05+00:00
Of course we'd think that, we're on the Internet, discussing it. The people who aren't, aren't here to rebut that. I met this woman who lives part-time in Romania, and was saying that they don't have smartphones still, which is why she has to spend her time in Romania, because she can't just have this particular subset of elderly people in Romania get information from her off of Instagram.
by zahlman | 2025-08-24 02:28:21+00:00
When I posted that, I was honestly projecting from my own use. I think I may have independently thought of the term on Stack Overflow prior to koalie's tweet, but it's not the easiest thing (by design) to search for comments there (and that's assuming they don't get deleted, which they usually should).

(On review, it appears that the thread mentions much earlier uses...)
by mrDmrTmrJ | 2025-08-24 02:28:49+00:00
What an insane article. It's almost like he hasn't read Eric Hoffer.

Mass movements arise when populations, that had had large increases in living standards, find their living standards are no longer rising. Hoffer cites something like 30% of the country is now 'middle class' and then depressions etc. set in.

Take the quote, "A society so thoroughly steeped in the work ethic and committed to the pursuit of individual achievement cannot but fail to prepare its members for any other kinds of lives."

The reality is the opposite. When work doesn't pay (i.e. when hard work can't lead to buying a condo/house and starting a family) the original premise of "work hard to get ahead" breaks. And here we are.

Any civilization where two 30 year old elementry school teachers can't buy a 1,200 sq-ft 3bdr/2bath condo for less than 30% of their income - is morally bankrupt. Aka 99% of the bay area, or DC, NYC. So people tern to idleness without the ability for work to result in personal progress.

The solutions are simple: make it easy to build housing. If you're bored, deadlift. Spend time outside. And, most of all, change our national household economics to allow ownership and family formation.
by erelong | 2025-08-24 02:29:13+00:00
> The main takeaway, again, is to keep things simple.

if true this seems like a bloated approach but tbh I wouldn't claim to know totally how to use Claude like the author here...

I find you can get a lot of mileage out of "regular" prompts, I'd call them?

Just asking for what you need one prompt at a time?

I still can't visualize how any of the complexity on top of that like discussed in the article adds anything to carefully crafted prompts one at a time

I also still can't really visualize how claude works compared to simple prompts one at a time.

Like, wouldn't it be more efficient to generate a prompt and then check it by looping through the appendix sections ("Main Claude Code System Prompt" and "All Claude Code Tools"), or is that basically what the LLM does somewhat mysteriously (it just works)? So like "give me while loop equivalent in [new language I'm learning]" is the entirety of the prompt... then if you need to you can loop through the appendix section? Otherwise isn't that a massive over-use of tokens, and the requests might even be ignored because they're too complex?

The control flow eludes me a bit here. I otherwise get the impression that the LLM does not use the appendix sections correctly by adding them to prompts (like, couldn't it just ignore them at times)? It would seem like you'd get more accurate responses by separating that from whatever you're prompting and then checking the prompt through looping over the appendix sections.

Does that make any sense?

I'm visualizing coding an entire program as prompting discrete pieces of it. I have not needed elaborate .md files to do that, you just ask for "how to do a while loop equivalent in [new language I'm learning]" for example. It's possible my prompts are much simpler for my uses, but I still haven't seen any write-ups on how people are constructing elaborate programs in some other way.

Like how are people stringing prompts together to create whole programs? (I guess is one question I have that comes to mind)

I guess maybe I need to find a prompt-by-prompt breakdown of some people building things to get a clearer picture of how LLMs are being used
by amrocha | 2025-08-24 02:29:17+00:00
How can you be so sure that you’re evaluating ideas fairly? How can you be so sure you’re not biased? What if you have an intrinsic bias that you’re unaware of shaping every single decision you make? What if that bias was instilled into you purposefully by people who wanted their ideology to seem like the “rational” way of being?

You should be more skeptic of yourself.
by nativeit | 2025-08-24 02:29:38+00:00
Well, sadly, Space Cersei owns another good chunk, and Space Jaime has a bunch, then Space Reek is surprisingly well-endowed, and Space Baelish is probably somewhere in the mix. All of whom sit on the Space Iron Council, and advise Space Joffrey about what dank memes they should focus on during the upcoming Space Tourney, where they will be testing new Space Fire Water to use on the Walkers approaching the Space Mexican Border. At least, until the Master of Tired Analogies signals the end of festivities by beating a dead Space Horse.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-08-24 02:30:10+00:00
Pretty sure could do it but it would be very expensive, because you'd need alot more very fast ADCs.

Like if the camera is $5k, in order to get that exposure time in full-field you would need to duplciate the hardware 800 times or whatever you wanted horizontal resolution to be. Thats alot of zeros for a single camera
by devmor | 2025-08-24 02:30:13+00:00
> I wonder if perhaps a part of LLM hallucinations can be explained by them being provided such reporting and having it (mistakenly) tagged as high-quality training data.

Probably (haha) far more of a function of temperature than training data. If the corpus is large enough for your prompt and you turn the temperature all the way down, you will get almost no hallucinations. You then have what is essentially a search engine.