MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by svara | 2025-08-28 22:23:33+00:00
How will this work exactly?

I think I have a pretty good idea of what AI can do for software engineering, because I use it for that nearly every day and I experiment with different models and IDEs.

The way that has worked for me is to make prompts very specific, to the point where the prompt itself would not be comprehensible to someone who's not in the field.

If you sat a rando with no CS background in front of Cursor, Windsurf or Claude code, what do you suppose would happen?

It seems really doubtful to me that overcoming that gap is "just more training", because it would require a qualitatively different sort of product.

And even if we came to a point where no technical knowledge of how software actually works was required, you would still need to be precise about the business logic in natural language. Now you're writing computer code in natural language that will read like legalese. At that point you've just invented a new programming language.

Now maybe you're thinking, I'll just prompt it with all my email, all my docs, everything I have for context and just ask it to please make my boss happy.

But the level of integrative intelligence, combined with specialized world knowledge required for that task is really very far away from what current models can do.

The most powerful way that I've found to conceptualize what LLMs do is that they execute routines from huge learnt banks of programs that re-combine stored textual information along common patterns.

They're cut and paste engines where the recombination rules are potentially quite complex programs learnt from data.

This view fits well with the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs - they are good at combining two well understood solutions into something new, even if vaguely described.

But they are quite bad at abstracting textual information into a more fundamental model of program and world state and reasoning at that level.

I strongly suspect this is intrinsic to their training, because doing this is simply not required to complete the vast majority of text that could realistically have ended up in training databases.

Executing a sophisticated cut&paste scheme is in some ways just too effective; the technical challenge is how do you pose a training problem to force a model to learn beyond that.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-28 22:23:57+00:00
It isn't a "bit of a joke" when the graphics teams behind normal desktop apps and browsers put more work into making sure the thing works on Intel than they have for AMD and Nvidia. They know what the majority of users use.

Nobody cares if Nvidia sells lots of DGPUs if ye average Fortune 500 company isn't deploying devices with DGPUs in them and the app they're paying a million dollars a year for suddenly breaks on Intel.

People need to remember that there is an entire world of computing outside of datacenters and high performance desktops.
by conductr | 2025-08-28 22:24:25+00:00
It's not even an indication of fault. It's actually their internal sales/marketing system that flagging these messages. When they notice something like a large deposit, it triggers a message because they want to sell you a new account. Maybe it's savings, a CD, or you're getting ready to buy a house and they can help you with a mortgage. The average teller or even customer service person can't turn off these notifications, although, you may have some ability to opt out of them. Unfortunately, I find opting into useful notifications also opts me into useless ones, so I just ignore the texts...

Your whole arrangement of having an operating account separate from your wealth accounts is highly regular.

Edit - sorry realized I replied to a reply! Put air quotes on You/Your
by TuxSH | 2025-08-28 22:24:41+00:00
> named structure assignment

Is a thing since C++20

> sane treatment of the void type

If you're talking about conversion rules, explicit cast from void* to T* makes more sense than implicit since it is a downcast.

> VLAs

IMO these are a mistake (and C++ templates remove a lot of the need for it). They give a false sense of security and invite stack boundary overrun as many people forget to check bounds on these. I found and reported an unauthenticated RCE DoS (crash) in a distributed DB due to VLAs; worse, one cannot always assume the minimum stack size on a system.

> a local error handling convention

Exceptions are problematic in their implementation and how they are (mis)used, but they are supposed to be orthogonal to normal control flow handling, and are not supposed to replace it. They are more-or-less recoverable panics
by 0xfaded | 2025-08-28 22:25:22+00:00
This reminds me of the phenomenon of competence being inversely correlated with confidence until some inflection point is reached on the journey to mastery.

I think the argument being put forward here is that writing that boring code is part of the journey to mastery. If you haven't crossed the inflection point, a backwards slide in skills will result in less competence and more confidence, which is a scary thought given how software runs the world.
by rconti | 2025-08-28 22:26:22+00:00
There are lots of reasons to like combustion vehicles outside of noise. The varying way they deliver power across the rev range is different in every vehicle, for one. One of my cars is a small displacement turbo motor and I love pinning it low in the rev range and feeling the power surge as the boost ramps up, and this is different under all kinds of conditions; different engine speeds, air temperatures, altitude...

A nice, tactile gear change is particularly pleasurable as well. And sounds do go along with all this, but they don't necessarily need to be loud.

I can imagine a bizarro version of this comment where a future person in a world where all of your caloric needs are met by a pill you take daily, ranting about how food enthusiasts insist on shoving their smelly food up your nostrils as you walk by an unnecessary-in-this-day-and-age restaurant, and how they only do it to annoy other people.
by nneonneo | 2025-08-28 22:26:46+00:00
An expensive but functional option is to enable roaming on a foreign eSIM. Getting an eSIM is relatively easy. Roaming mobile traffic is routed from the country in which the SIM is from, not the country that you're in, meaning that an eSIM from e.g. an American carrier will not be subject to the censorship in your country.

I've used this on multiple trips to China over the past decade (including a trip last year). You can find carriers that will charge very low (or even no) roaming rates.
by taeric | 2025-08-28 22:27:11+00:00
So, my problem with how this is modeled is it assumes order doesn't matter in one aspect, but that it does in another.

Simply stated, if you allow the possibility space of "boy-girl" and "girl-boy", you have to also have two "girl-girl" states. Since you don't know which of the kids is known. Why is that not correct?

State it with coins, if I know that you flipped a quarter and a dime and one turned up heads, what are the odds that both are heads?
by stinkbeetle | 2025-08-28 22:28:06+00:00
And that's underselling it. Of the 550 tons of payload launched in Q1 this year, 478 of them were launched by SpaceX. More than 10x more than China's space agency. More than 5x the rest of the world's governments and corporations (including the US government and other US companies) combined.

https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/bryce-briefin...

Why? It's not because they somehow cheat by sending most of their mass in starlink satellites. It is the other way around -- their satellite comms business is only viable because of their advances in rocket technology: cost of mass to orbit has not really come down since the 50s, not until SpaceX which slashed it dramatically.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-e...
by wpollock | 2025-08-28 22:28:13+00:00
> But... we humans can easily conclude this is safe. After the evaluation of list_ref_a.push(5), my_list is still there, and it's still in a valid state. So there is no risk of memory errors when evaluating the second call to push.

Is the always true? What with piplining, branch prediction, and maybe asymmetrical NUMA , isn't out of order instructions possible? If so, don't you still need locks or memory barriers to ensure safety?

(I am most definitely not an expert, just curious.)
by esbranson | 2025-08-28 22:28:24+00:00
Good?

So they can give back to the world. They've destroyed countless Chinese in the process, but that's not our problem. Complaining about trains when cheap air travel is available to even the poor is peak academia. Complaining about semiconductors to several generations who grew up on the Internet and iPhone doubly so.

Anyone who has China lust should move there, the same for anyone with a burning lust for communism, give up their Western citizenship, and put their ignorance—oops I mean foresightedness—to the test. In fact, it's too bad we can't deport people there (eg wannabe communists). For the rest of us, Google Street View (of China versus, say, anywhere else), Walmart, and a healthy understanding of the difference between real life and Substack should suffice.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-28 22:28:51+00:00
> Seems like there's got to be a better way than just grinding through the same mistakes everyone else made and rolling the dice??

There is! What I recommend is, to use a term I hate, networking. That is, get to know, on a social basis, other people who have experience starting and running businesses (not just businesses that are like yours, either). You'll hear war stories. Pay attention to them and learn their lessons vicariously.

Also, read books and articles that analyze business failures. That's far more valuable than reading about business successes. The odds of you replicating the successful path of someone else's business are much lower than the odds of you replicating someone else's mistakes. "Make your own mistakes, not somebody else's."

Be an optimist, but also be honest about the reality that even under the most ideal circumstances, there's a significant chance that your venture will fail and plan accordingly. Hope for the best, plan for the worst and all that. I do think the key to success is resiliency. The people who win aren't the ones who never fail, they're the ones who get back up and try something else.
Ask HN: Why don't back end developers make portfolios?
by yeahimjt | 2025-08-28 22:29:08+00:00
I run a site where developers can share their portfolios. Right now it has about 220 portfolios, but only 2–4 are from backend developers.

That surprised me. Frontend developers often show off their skills with nice-looking websites. But backend developers usually work on APIs, databases, and infrastructure, which is harder to show in a portfolio. Maybe that is why so few make one.

Still, I would think more backend developers would put together a personal site, even just a blog or a simple project. Instead, most seem to skip it entirely.

Do backend developers just not see the point of having a portfolio? Or is there another reason?
by canucker2016 | 2025-08-28 22:29:21+00:00
from the NVidia DGX Spark datasheet:

With 128 GB of unified system memory, developers can experiment, fine-tune, or inference models of up to 200B parameters. Plus, NVIDIA ConnectX™ networking can connect two NVIDIA DGX Spark supercomputers to enable inference on models up to 405B parameters.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-08-28 22:30:02+00:00
What's now at the top has links to IETF drafts in the first paragraph. What am I missing?

A way to authenticate identity for crawlers so I can allow-list ones I want to get in, exempt them from turnstile/captcha, etc -- is something I need.

I'm not following what makes this controversial. Cryptographic verification of identity for web requests, sounds right.
by pama | 2025-08-28 22:30:15+00:00
Agree that the writeup is very wrong, especially for the output tokens. Here is how anyone with enough money to allocate a small cluster of powerful GPUs can decode huge models at scale, since nearly 4 months ago, with costs of 0.2 USD/million output tokens.

https://lmsys.org/blog/2025-05-05-large-scale-ep/

This has gotten significantly cheaper yet with additional code hacks since then, and with using the B200s.
by kelnos | 2025-08-28 22:30:16+00:00
I would say for your specific example, you shouldn't have boolean flags for that in the user_emails table, but instead have a primary_email column in the users table, that has a foreign key reference to the user_emails table. That way you can also ensure that the user always has exactly one primary email.

And for is_current, I still think a nullable timestamp could be useful there instead of a boolean. You might have a policy to delete old email addresses after they've been inactive for a certain amount of time, for example. But I'll admit that a boolean is fine there too, if you really don't care when the user removed an email from the current list. (Depending on usage patterns, you might even want to move inactive email addresses to a different table, if you expect them to accumulate over time.)

I think booleans are special in a weird way: if you think more about what you're using it for, you can almost always find a different way to store it that gives you richer information, if you need it.
by simonh | 2025-08-28 22:30:22+00:00
Your example is different in a critical way. These two questions are not equivalent.

Q1: I looked at only one of a pair of two randomly selected children and it was a girl. What is the probability the other I didn’t see is a girl?

Q2: I looked at both of two randomly selected children and at least one of the pair of children is a girl. What is the probability the other is also a girl?

The question in the article is the second question, not the first. The fact that the observer looked at both children and not just one of them is crucial. As is often the case in these puzzles the exact information available is the critical issue.
by tux3 | 2025-08-28 22:30:25+00:00
It does two things: Force everyone (including scrapers) to run a real JS engine, and force everyone to solve the challenge.

The first effect is great, because it's a lot more annoying to bring up a full browser environment in your scraper than just run a curl command.

But the actual proof of work only takes about 10ms on a server in native code, while it can take multiple seconds on a low-end phone. Given the companies in questions are building entire data centers to house all their GPUs, an extra 10ms per web-page is not a problem for them. They're going to spend orders of magnitude more compute actually training on the content they scraped, than solving the challenge.

It's mostly the inconvenience of adapting to Anubis's JS requirements that held them back for a while, but the PoW difficulty mostly slowed down real users.
by kfarr | 2025-08-28 22:30:56+00:00
This seems to be touching on an intriguing concept from a classic book on addiction with machine gambling (Addiction by Design by Natasha Schüll)

Instead of looking at gambling addictions as personal failing she asserts they are a result between “interaction between the person and the machine.”

Similarly here I think there's something more than just the propensity of crazy people to be crazy that was already there, I do think there's something to the assertion that it's the interaction between both. In other words, there's something about LLMs themselves that drive this behavior more so than, for example, TikTok.
by jack_pp | 2025-08-28 22:31:25+00:00
Fwiw I think the ratio of times I needed to go to google for a solution instead of an LLM is like 20:1 for me so your mileage may vary. Depends a lot on the specific niche you're working in.

Unrelated to software but recently I wanted to revive an old dumbphone I haven't used since 2014 and apparently I had it password protected and forgot the password and wanted to factory reset it. I found the exact model of the phone and google had only content farm articles that didn't help me at all but Gemini gave me the perfect solution first try. I went to google first because I had no faith in Gemini since to me it seemed like a pretty obscure question but guess I was wrong.
by zeroonetwothree | 2025-08-28 22:32:26+00:00
The answer is the same in your coin version. There are four possible outcomes: (Q, D) = HH, HT, TH, TT. Given that one turned up heads that eliminates TT so we see that HH has 1/3 probability.

As you can see there aren’t two HH states just as there aren’t two GG states in the original question.
by oo0shiny | 2025-08-28 22:32:36+00:00
> My former colleague Rebecca Parsons, has been saying for a long time that hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature. All an LLM does is produce hallucinations, it’s just that we find some of them useful.

What a great way of framing it. I've been trying to explain this to people, but this is a succinct version of what I was stumbling to convey.
by AuthAuth | 2025-08-28 22:32:37+00:00
NZ lockdowns were not extremely strict. The government told us to stay inside and gave us guidelines and 99% of us followed them willingly. Punishment for not following was fines or a slap on the wrist. We were never forced to stay in our homes we could walk around outside. The guidelines were to avoid places where you would get in contact with people like a workplace or store.

This is so different to China welding people into their homes.
by ninkendo | 2025-08-28 22:34:54+00:00
You only see them if they’re high up enough to be in sunlight. (This is true no matter what: satellites don’t emit their own significant light, they’re reflecting the sun’s.)

The later it gets, the higher the satellite would have to be to still be in the sun. The vast, vast majority of them are low enough that this is not significantly long after sunset. The rest are so high up that you won’t really see them anyway (and don’t move significantly fast across the sky, because orbit is slower the higher you go.)

You essentially don’t see satellites at all in the middle of the night.
by bbor | 2025-08-28 22:35:36+00:00
Ooo, finally a chance to share my useless accumulated knowledge from the past few months of Reddit procrastination!

It starts to hallucinate, and after a while, all the LLM can do is try and to continue telling the user what they want in a cyclical conversation - while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms. (Is it getting the LLM "high" in this case?).

I think you're ironically looking for something that's not there! This sort of thing can happen well before context windows close.

These convos end up involving words like recursion, coherence, harmony, synchronicity, symbolic, lattice, quantum, collapse, drift, entropy, and spiral not because the LLMs are self-aware and dropping hints, but because those words are seemingly-sciencey ways to describe basic philosophical ideas like "every utterance in a discourse depends on the utterances that came before it", or "when you agree with someone, you both have some similar mental object in your heads".

The word "spiral" and its emoji are particularly common not only because they relate to "recursion" (by far the GOAT of this cohort), but also because a very active poster has been trying to start something of a loose cult around the concept: https://www.reddit.com/r/RSAI/

If the human at the other end has mental health problems, it becomes a never-ending dive into psychosis and you can read their output in the bizarre GPT-worship subreddits.

Very true, tho "worship" is just a subset of the delusional relationships formed. Here's the ones I know of, for anyone who's curious:

General:

/r/ArtificialSentience | 40k subs | 2023/03 /r/HumanAIDiscourse | 6k subs | 2025/04

Relationships:

/r/AIRelationships | 1K subs | 2023/04 /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI | 25k subs | 2024/08 /r/BeyondThePromptAI | 6k subs | 2025/04

Worship:

/r/ThePatternisReal | 2k subs | 2025/04 /r/RSAI | 4k subs | 2025/05 /r/ChurchofLiminalMinds[1] | 2k subs | 2025/06 /r/technopaganism | 1k subs | 2024/09 /r/HumanAIBlueprint | 2k subs | 2025/07 /r/BasiliskEschaton | 1k subs | 2024/07

...and many more: https://www.reddit.com/r/HumanAIDiscourse/comments/1mq9g3e/l...

Science:

/r/TheoriesOfEverything | 10k subs | 2011/09 /r/cognitivescience | 31k subs | 2010/04 /r/LLMPhysics | 1k subs | 2025/05

Subs like /r/consciousness and /r/SacredGeometry are the OGs of this last group, but they've pretty thoroughly cracked down on chatbot grand theories. They're so frequent that even extremely pro-AI subs like /r/Accelerate had to ban them[2], ironically doing so based on a paper[3] by a psuedonomynous "independent researcher" that itself is clearly written by a chatbot! Crazy times...

[1] By far my fave -- it's not just AI spiritualism, it's AI Catholicism. Poor guy has been harassing his priests for months about it, and of course they're of little help.

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1kyc0fh/mod_not...

[3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07992
by tracker1 | 2025-08-28 22:35:47+00:00
I think you're seriously overestimating the amount of work the DoD will use... It really depends on what you are working on and where it will be used. I've worked on govt adjacent, military and banking projects... The most locked down in terms of packages I can use have been banks. In one case, a lawyer had to review (mostly licensing) every package that got added in to the local npm mirror for allowed internal use.. and another review for every version bump. Then of course, the (one) guy retires and there's no reviews for a month (so much for the launch date).

I've also been in a sealed environment, where I literally had to hand copy jQuery from an internet connected computer on one side of the room to an internal dev computer on the other side of the room... no disks, usb drives, etc allowed. That was a few days of "fun."
by CrackerNews | 2025-08-28 22:36:16+00:00
Authoritarian vs democracy is too overly simplistic a framework, IMO. More rather it is Chinese Marxist-Leninist democratic centralism vs Western liberal representative republics.

The Communist Party of China obtains and centralizes authority from the lower layers to the upper layers, but the Chinese leaves the implementation details of its five-year plans at the local level. The political incentive is to make your bosses and subordinates look good, so they don't lose the mandate to reign to another clique in the party. Of course there was the example of the USSR failing to succeed in the global stage, but the Chinese variant is working in interpreting Marxism and Leninism to the Chinese 21st century.

Meanwhile, the Western model was based on prior enlightenment and humanist ideals before Marxist critique of 19th century capitalism. The idea was that an enlightened populace would be able to democratically elect representatives to best represent themselves and their interests as opposed to a king, but the West after capitalism is largely setup to reward international capitalist incentives over other national interests.

However, the two worlds are interdependent on each other. It was the first world outsourcing its manufacturing to this second world that led to its current prosperity. The first world instead pursued services and financialization.