MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nine_k | 2025-08-28 21:14:53+00:00
I'd rather say that LLMs live in a world that consists entirely of stories, nothing but words and their combinations. Thy have no other reality. So they are good at generating more stories that would sit well with the stories they already know. But the stories are often imprecise, and sometimes contradictory, so they have to guess. Also, LLMs don't know how to count, but they know that two usually follows one, and three is usually said to be larger than two, so they can speak in a way that mostly does not contradict this knowledge. They can use tools to count, like a human who knows digits would use a calculator.

But much more than an arithmetic engine, the current crop of AI needs an epistemic engine, something that would help follow logic and avoid contradictions, to determine what is a well-established fact, and what is a shaky conjecture. Then we might start trusting the AI.
by skhameneh | 2025-08-28 21:14:59+00:00
> Figuring out what code to write is a bigger deal. LLMs can help with part of this. Figuring out what's wrong with written code, and figuring out how to change and fix the code, is also a big deal. LLMs can help with a smaller part of this.

I found exactly this is what LLMs are great at assisting with.

But, it also requires context to have guiding points for documentation. The starting context has to contain just enough overview with points to expand context as needed. Many projects lack such documentation refinement, which causes major gaps in LLM tooling (thus reducing efficacy and increasing unwanted hallucinations).

> Juniors are screwed.

Mixed, it's like saying "if you start with Python, you're going to miss lower level fundamentals" which is true in some regards. Juniors don't inherently have to know the inner workings, they get to skip a lot of the steps. It won't inherently make them worse off, but it does change the learning process a lot. I'd refute this by saying I somewhat naively wrote a tokenizer, because the >3MB ONNX tokenizer for Gemma written in JS seemed absurd. I went in not knowing what I didn't know and was able to learn what I didn't know through the process of building with an LLM. In other words, I learned hands on, at a faster pace, with less struggle. This is pretty valuable and will create more paths for juniors to learn.

Sure, we may see many lacking fundamentals, but I suppose that isn't so different from the criticism I heard when I wrote most of my first web software in PHP. I do believe we'll see a lot more Python and linguistic influenced development in the future.

> I'm guessing LLMs will ratchet forward part of the software world, will remove support for other parts that will fall back, and it'll take us way too long to recognize which part is which and how to build a new system atop the shifted foundation.

I entirely agree, in fact I think we're seeing it already. There is so much that's hyped and built around rough ideas that's glaringly inefficient. But FWIW inefficiency has less of an impact than adoption and interest. I could complain all day about the horrible design issues of languages and software that I actually like and use. I'd wager this will be no different. Thankfully, such progress in practice creates more opportunities for improvement and involvement.
by legitster | 2025-08-28 21:15:13+00:00
It will be interesting to see how this permeates through the medical system. So it's painfully obvious now to any professional that whatever new leadership is going to sit at the CDC is going to be cooking their own recipes.

I strongly doubt hospitals are going to start prescribing beef tallow or apple cider vinegar to treat diseases (although, who knows at this point). So I wonder how the vacuum will get filled on authoritative information on diseases and outbreaks. Just a bunch of informal data from a variety of sources? Or a set of expensive privatized networks that will get passed on as healthcare costs?
by babblingfish | 2025-08-28 21:15:31+00:00
Neat! It's great to see this segment of phones increasing. Cal Newport in his book Digital Minimalism talks about why he prefers the term "digital declutter" to "digital detox." A detox makes it sound like a break and you'll eventually go back. Like the case of getting a dumb phone, a digital declutter is sorting out your relationship with technology and keeping only what's useful. He uses the analogy of decluttering a house. You don't just randomly throw stuff away. You take inventory of what's useful and what isn't.
by immibis | 2025-08-28 21:15:31+00:00
This speaks to the gap between what economists measure and what the public sees.

Here's a more on-the-ground perspective: The price of food went up 50% during COVID, and you caused it since you were in power. You will make it go back down to how it was before, or I will vote for someone else.

(The average voter runs on simpler emotions like this and does not take into account that Trump will most likely cause much more inflation, which is what he has done)
by WJW | 2025-08-28 21:15:48+00:00
Not always, or rather not exclusively. For example, some types of distillation benefit from sparse-ifying the dense-ish matrices the original was made of [1]. There's also a lot of benefit to be had from sparsity in finetuning [2]. LLMs were merely one of the examples though, don't focus too much on them. The point was that sparse matmul makes up the bulk of scientific computations and a huge amount of industrial computations too. It's probably second only to the FFT in importance, so it would be wild if radix sort managed to eclipse it somehow.

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/mastering-llm-techniques-i...

[2] https://arxiv.org/html/2405.15525v1
by SlowTao | 2025-08-28 21:16:33+00:00
I think both sides of this are fair. Power is interested in stability of itself, to keeps its back to the wall so that nobody can sneak up on it. But also political power has teamed up with corporate power/determination to create a far more nasty beast.

Seeing companies like Palantir (and many lesser known ones) buddy up to everyone that wants it, its a clear statement on how they want to monitor and control the populace.

Long term I don't think it can be done, but the pain mid term can be vast.
by primitivesuave | 2025-08-28 21:16:39+00:00
I suppose that for this case, an underground black market of VPN providers might emerge - average individuals setting up VPN software on a cloud service provider, and then selling monthly access to people. Aside from the obvious danger of getting ripped off (someone might put you on a slow shared VPN with many other people, or shut down the server at any time), there is also the possibility of someone monitoring all your Internet activity.
by amelius | 2025-08-28 21:16:43+00:00
> A lot of boolean data is representing a temporal event having happened. For example, websites often have you confirm your email. This may be stored as a boolean column, is_confirmed, in the database. It makes a lot of sense.

> But, you're throwing away data: when the confirmation happened. You can instead store when the user confirmed their email in a nullable column. You can still get the same information by checking whether the column is null. But you also get richer data for other purposes.

So the Boolean should be something else + NULL?

Now we have another problem ...
by gf000 | 2025-08-28 21:16:49+00:00
I was thinking that the type system can in certain cases determine that no circular reference is possible for an instance of this type - in that case it could e.g. use an RC (for a region only having that type of objects), and fallback to either an arena-like pattern of freeing everything at once (if only internal circular references exist), or a tracing GC.
by multjoy | 2025-08-28 21:16:57+00:00
In matters of public health, you cannot trust the public to do the right thing.

The problem with covid is that we weren't totalitarian enough. Regulations you could drive a coach & horses through and no way to enforce is a sop.

The first lock down needed to be a proper 'papers, please' affair. When we get a properly lethal pandemic, we're fucked. Hopefully Laurence Fox and Piers Corbyn will catch it quickly and expire in a painful and televised way, it's the only hope of people complying with actual quarantine measures.
by runlaszlorun | 2025-08-28 21:17:02+00:00
I agree whole heartedly with your main point but I'd say militaries are more likely to overreact to the last war. "Generals are always fighting the last war" is a quote I heard from long ago and it seems to match up. In Desert Storm it was clear that the lessons of not getting entangled a la Vietnam were clearly in mind. When I went in to Bosnia it was clear Somalia was in mind as our RoE basically said if we were being being fired up on by someone using civilians as a shield to "aim carefully", and I keep hearing mention that the US is still trying to shift away from GWOT even though it's been 10 years since that started slowing down.
by ikkun | 2025-08-28 21:17:27+00:00
they discontinued it because of quality control reasons, which tracks with my experience. the key mechanism is weird, a circular membrane around plastic posts, and it makes some of the keys (especially the top row) constantly miss inputs. there's a 3D printed shim 'fix' but that barely helped me. off-center keypresses also bind really badly. the pogo pins that connect to the phone are flaky, which can make it lose connection and require a reboot. like the keys, there's a shim you can use (putting some paper behind the contacts) which only sort of helps.

a benefit of the keyboard case is the battery it has that extends the phone's battery, which is nice, but it's an odd setup too. the charge controller on it was originally designed for a power bank and seems like a bit of a crude solution that's lead to multiple issues, like how you could damage the phone having it plugged into USB while the keyboard case is connected. it's slow to charge too, often it can't even keep up with the phone during use.
by nicwolff | 2025-08-28 21:18:12+00:00
> I’ve often heard, with decent reason, an LLM compared to a junior colleague.

No, they're like an extremely experienced and knowledgeable senior colleague – who drinks heavily on the job. Overconfident, forgetful, sloppy, easily distracted. But you can hire so many of them, so cheaply, and they don't get mad when you fire them!
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-28 21:18:30+00:00
That's literally the moral justification for the Thiel/Musk/Yarvin Dark Enlightenment, and the basis of cult dynamics in general.

The idea actually works if, and only if, the ruling group has empathy for the population as a whole. Which - in spite of anti-government propaganda in the US - is at least partially possible.

It's catastrophic when the ruling ethic is narcissism and supremacism.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-28 21:19:04+00:00
> Medieval Europeans were fanatical about a strange fruit that could only be eaten rotten.

To be clear, you do not let the medlar "rot" before eating.

Rotting involves decay by microorganisms -- fungi, bacteria, yeasts.

What the medlar does is totally different. It has an enzyme within it that continues to break down the fruit, so it goes from rock hard to soft and edible.

Because this is a different chemical process from traditional ripening, someone gave this the name "bletting". But it's definitely not "rotting".

There's an evolutionary theory that by delaying when the fruit could be eaten, it could attract animals in the winter that would be more likely to eat it (since other fruits were no longer available) and potentially transport its seeds longer distances.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-28 21:19:12+00:00
TFA didn't really explain the mistake.

What I think it was:

1: Chase's business account wasn't appropriate for a tech startup; nor was it appropriate for the amount of money Mitchell was handling.

2: When your bank calls you after a very, very large money transfer, you should take the call.

That being said: In today's world where every other phone call is some telemarketer trying to scam you or otherwise sell you something you don't want or need, I can sympathize with why Mitchell blew off the first call.
by mierz00 | 2025-08-28 21:20:13+00:00
This reminds me of the Louis C.K skit where he talks about people complaining on a plane, completely forgetting how incredible it is to be flying.

Not so long ago, the example I gave about recipes was something you would only see in sci-fi.

Maybe you’re right there is too much investment, but that’s the same whenever there is a new technology that has completely unlocked new possibilities.
by michaelt | 2025-08-28 21:20:26+00:00
Ah, in the UK the NIMBYs don't just have property rights on their side, to stop things getting built.

There are also 'green belt' laws (which ban construction on land in a ring around many cities) and there are 'environmental impact' laws (which require you to check for things like rare species) and there are 'areas of outstanding natural beauty' and national parks (where it's a lot harder to build things) and local government 'planning permission' rules (which have pretty broad powers to block development and dictate what type of development is allowed) and rules for 'nationally significant infrastructure projects' (giving national government a big say on things like airports) and also 'judicial review' for decisions that don't go your way.

And almost all of these still apply, even if the government themselves are performing the construction.

In the UK, just because you own some land, doesn't mean you're allowed to build on it.
by int_19h | 2025-08-28 21:20:29+00:00
The real concern isn't the nationality per se, it's the vulnerability to blackmail by the state that has jurisdiction over you. It's not a matter of personal responsibility, but nevertheless it has to be accounted for.

For example, I am an American citizen, but I have extended family in Russia, and I would fully expect a place like DoD to be wary of that solely on the basis that it makes me susceptible to blackmail by Russian govt agencies by threatening my family.
by salawat | 2025-08-28 21:20:52+00:00
>With this ruling, we may be seeing the final blows dealt to the NLRB, and a signal that companies need not even fear later reprisal.

This is great news, actually. If Trump is going to debase the National Labor Relations Act by nullifying it's practicability, then that also undoes the social contract created in Taft-Hartley. So, fuck it. Ladies and gentlemen, secondary strikes and wildcat strikes are back on the menu.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_action

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_strike

Full on, unbridled, class war now seems to be the desired outcome of this administration. A time for throwing away the kid gloves and brandishing the brass knuckles again. Capital needs a reminder that greenbacks do not, in fact, make you any better than anyone else. You are still human, with all that entails, and if you piss off the rest of the population enough, there is nowhere left to hide.

Oh, but dearest me, shouldn't get so riled up in polite company. Pip pip cheerio.
by dudefeliciano | 2025-08-28 21:21:05+00:00
> That is specifically limited to contract law

That is false, and the wiki paragraph does not say that

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_11

> quite distinct from criminal law.

Trumps frivolous lawsuits have been civil matters, which is obviouos because private persons do not file criminal lawsuits, prosecutors do that.
by legitster | 2025-08-28 21:21:53+00:00
> Pharma makes more from diseases occurring, agriculture makes more from diseases undetected.

This is actually not true. Pharma is incredibly dependent on accurate CDC data. Same with agriculture, unless you think farmers are looking forward to the screwworm epidemic.

This benefits nobody except for the president, direct lackeys that will do his bidding, and maintaining his cult of personality. Even the powerful elites who helped put him here were themselves conned.
by dhjhdskj | 2025-08-28 21:21:59+00:00
The author’s case leans on survivorship bias and correlation/causation fallacies. China is portrayed as proof that authoritarianism “works,” while the long list of failed or stagnant dictatorships (Soviet Union, fascist states, much of the post-colonial world) is ignored.

Success is attributed to repressive and uninclusive government sytems rather than to the far more decisive factors: market reforms, foreign capital, and global trade integration. By collapsing this complexity into a single flattering story about centralized control, the piece functions more as an ideology and propaganda piece than a real good faith analysis of China's root causes of success.

The narrative also erases China’s structural advantages: the world’s largest labor force and vast natural resources that made global dominance in manufacturing and supply chains possible. These advantages would likely have delivered major growth under democracy, and possibly with less fragility, failure, and human rights abuse. By crediting authoritarianism instead, the article smuggles in a propagandistic message: authoritarian control isn’t incidental but necessary for technological and societal success. Bullshit!
by msabalau | 2025-08-28 21:22:34+00:00
The point of wargames and the work of the committee is to find issues and address them, not so that one can panic about nonsense like China building ships faster than we can build missiles.

As noted, the result of the wargames was that China lost. That's not really the sort of result that the CCP would be looking for. They want stability. Losing a war, and a whole a bunch of young men, in a patrilineal society demographically warped by the CCPs one child policies ain't a recipe for stability.

China hasn't fought a war since '79. They probably shouldn't start learning how to fight again by trying an amphibious assault on an island that is mostly mountains, jungles, and cities. The US in '45 had more material advantages than the PRC ever will, and a lot of experience with amphibious assault, and they turned away from invading Taiwan to go to the incredibly costly invasions of the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, because as bad as that was, it was so much less difficult.

Note further that the wargames assumes that the fight is only between the US forces in theater vs a massed Chinese attack, because all the rest of the US military is dealing with "some other crisis".

America doesn't have great supply chains for building artillery shells, because they aren't important for our strategic focus China, and they weren't needed in quantity for our last military conflict, which was evidently about spending trillions of dollars ensuring that Afghanistan could have a woman's soccer team for a few years.

Just because the US can be more thoughtfully prepared doesn't that China is some unstoppable giant.
by anthem2025 | 2025-08-28 21:22:39+00:00
It’s funny how people acknowledge the railroads and the similarity to AI, but then jump back to comparing it to the internet when it comes to drawing conclusions.

The internet build out left massive amounts of useful infrastructure.

The railroads left us with lots of railroads that fell into disuse and eventually left us with a complete joke of a railway system. Made a few people so rich we started calling them robber barons and talking the gilded age.

Are we going to continue to use the 60 billion dollar data centers in Louisiana when the bubble bursts? Is it valuable infrastructure or just a waste of money that gets written off?
by XorNot | 2025-08-28 21:23:29+00:00
Also that Commercial off the shelf availability for things is a key way to drive down prices. If consumers buy it and a slightly modified version is suitable for the military then the thing will be a lot cheaper to acquire and operate.

Same goes for RtR: it's worthless without a robust spare parts market, and having that exist in the civilian sector is what you need to realize savings.

This is related to one of the key reasons F-16 was worth getting to Ukraine: compared to any other system, there's just a lot of F-16s in the world and a lot of spare parts for them.
by throwaway31131 | 2025-08-28 21:24:11+00:00
> I'm not sure it's that our job is the most automatable

I don't know. It seems pretty friendly to automation to me.

When was the last time you wrote assembly? When was the last time you had map memory? Think about blitting memory to a screen buffer to draw a square on a screen? Schedule processes and threads?

These are things that I routinely did as a junior engineer writing software a long time ago. Most people at that time did. For the most part, the computer does them all now. People still do them, but only when it really counts and applications are niche.

Think about how large code bases are now and how complicated software systems are. How many layers they have. Complexity on this scale was unthinkable not so long ago.

It's all possible because the computer manages much of the complexity through various forms of automation.

Expect more automation. Maybe LLMs are the vehicle that delivers it, maybe not. But more automation in software is the rule, not the exception.
by kgwgk | 2025-08-28 21:24:29+00:00
> It means "you can assume the family does not have two boys".

But it does not mean that you can assume that p(you're told at least one is a girl | both are girls) = p(you're told at least one is a girl | they aren't both girls) as explained by 6gvONxR4sf7o.

If you allow assuming whatever you want, then many answer are allowed!

That’s what it means that the problem is not “well-posed” as mentioned by in_cahoots. You need additional assumptions to get a definite answer - and the answer will depend on the assumptions.

As JeffJor noted it seems much more natural to have assumptions that keep the symmetry of the problem (because why not?) and the answer 1/2 is not just possible but arguably “better”.
by greyb | 2025-08-28 21:25:03+00:00
>Let's say that a friend of mine has a startup funded account at Chase, and where should they go?

Silicon Valley Bank... oh wait. In all seriousness, the approachability and flexibility of SVB bankers was really unparalleled at the time. Not like Alex in this story, that made really half-baked attempts to engage with a client model he was entirely unfamiliar with (but got all the credit for). This being said, Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank continues to exist.

I see a lot of Fintech players on the scene now. Brex, Mercury and Rho are common ones, through Brex has taken steps to distance itself from true, seed-stage startups as of late. Given what happened with Synapse's failure [1], I have doubts that they have the same protections and regulations of a brick and mortar FDIC bank.

Diversification is key too - so having multiple accounts. Some non-fintech banks I've seen floating around, ironically, JP Morgan Startup Banking, Wells Fargo Technology Banking Group, Citigroup Commercial Bank, PNC Technology Finance. All big banks, just not their retail banking divisions (as the author was experienced using).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapse_Financial_Technologies
by supportengineer | 2025-08-28 21:25:25+00:00
I think a Mustang would be a great car to own, especially with a V-8 and manual transmission, but social media has ruined it for me. There are non stop videos of Mustangs crashing when leaving meets such as Cars With Coffee. Now, the Mustang brand is synonymous with this type of driving. If you bought one you would immediately be looked down upon.