MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by computomatic | 2025-08-09 00:24:38+00:00
This is great product design at its finest.

First of all, they never “handle more requests than they have hardware.” That’s impossible (at least as I’m reading it).

The vast majority of usage is via their web app (and free accounts, at that). The web app defaults to “auto” selecting a model. The algorithm for that selection is hidden information.

As load peaks, they can divert requests to different levels of hardware and less resource hungry models.

Only a very small minority of requests actually specify the model to use.

There are a hundred similar product design hacks they can use to mitigate load. But this seems like the easiest one to implement.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-08-09 00:27:21+00:00
I described the situation you referenced to show why it is not the same as this situation. I did not declare ownership of a position.

Personally I'd say it's 99.99% in favor of run of the mill SNAFU. The 0.01% is mostly an allowance for the tendency of authoritarian systems to occasionally act in incredibly clumsy and incompetent ways. I feel this may be a factor of personal loyalty and ideological alignment receiving more consideration than competence in hiring and advancement decisions within authoritarian systems.
by Volundr | 2025-08-09 00:27:58+00:00
Great! So how does that compare in economic impact to spending it?

I can help with that: it doesn't. If I buy stock, it doesn't create demand for... Anything. Unless it was stock bought from the company itself it doesn't give the company any more funds to work with. It doesn't help the company produce more, nor does it create demand that would encourage them to do so.
by lexh | 2025-08-09 00:28:52+00:00
The current SOTA closed model providers are also all rolling out access to their latest models with better pricing (e.g. GPT-5 this week), which seems like a confounding factor unique to this moment in the cycle. An API consumer would need to have a very specific reason to choose GPT-4o over GPT-5, given the latter costs less, benchmarks better and is roughly the same speed.
by xrd | 2025-08-09 00:29:15+00:00
This project does not work for me either. Drat.

This is turn 4. Focus on any remaining tasks that haven't been completed yet. Don't repeat work that was already done in previous turns. Assistant: I notice from the context that we're in a directory that might be related to a xxx project. Let me try to find and open the yyyy.ts file. [Result: Error: Unknown tool 'resolve_path']
by johnecheck | 2025-08-09 00:30:30+00:00
Historically, we've seen countless examples of societies becoming more and more unequal. Essentially all of them, true. But note a key piece: those societies weren't always getting more unequal. You can find many examples of societies pulling back from the brink after a period of consolidation.

Perhaps the goal isn't for wealth inequality to never increase. What if instead of perpetual increase or a sharp decrease, society achieved a sin-wave like equilibrium centered around some desirable level of wealth/power inequality?

It doesn't work if the level you desire is zero. Sorry, Marxists.
by metalman | 2025-08-09 00:30:31+00:00
double digit improvements across the board from a perenial pasture mix is realy impressive and likely to spur intrest in finding other combos that give similar results in dairy feed. nitrogen is the key ingredient required for the digestion of all sorts of otherwise waste plant matter by cattle, so if this new pasture cover can be harvested as hay and mixed with other dryed plant matter, it would then be of use in dairy. Hay is still the worlds largest crop.....
by michaelt | 2025-08-09 00:31:14+00:00
I mean, for a long time the situation was reversed.

Huge gaming demand and easy retail availability of nvidia's cards was providing economies of scale. If a few professors were buying the GeForce 8800 to look at this new 'CUDA' thing that was mostly a marketing thing.

Around the same time there were also one or two Playstation 3 clusters - but a year or two later Sony removed support for that. HPC being inconsequential, and a distraction from their core business, presumably.

It's only in recent years the stuff that used to be marketing decoration has become reality.
by maxglute | 2025-08-09 00:31:17+00:00
>The outside world can't tell the difference anyway

Why not, plurality of the outside world has PRC as their biggest trading partner, seeing increasingly higher tier goods. Some even visit and see delivered goods with their own eyes. It's convenient for democracies to pretend the knowable isn't knownable, that non democratic systems can deliver some things better. That failed democracies are actually autocratic failures are when slide into authoritarianism is democratic system failing. And really if one peers back throughout history, many democracies were built off the imperialism/extractive base from when countries were not democracies / periods when country was more authoritarian. Sometimes that base is substantial enough to snowball durable advantages from, sometimes the runway runs out and populist start questioning the system that squandered the lead. Or dismiss concerns because autocrats are faking their orgasms.
by foxglacier | 2025-08-09 00:32:07+00:00
You think that's bad, see this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Petloss/

Just because AI is different doesn't mean it's "sad and cringe". You sound like how people viewed online friendships in the 90's. It's OK. Real friends die or change and people have to cope with that. People imagine their dead friends are still somehow around (heaven, ghost, etc.) when they're really not. It's not all that different.
by tekknik | 2025-08-09 00:34:34+00:00
> Generally, long range key fob button functions and the short range start release functions are separated, both intentionally for security reasons and due to the different problem space occupied by each.

I don’t think this is true, for instance how does the key fob trigger a start sequence for vehicles equipped with remote start? They must be connected to the same CANBUS, so the key fob can interface with the start systems. This is also how a lot of vehicles are stollen, because of abuse/misuse of CANBUS (i.e. headlights being addressable in CANBUS)
by moron4hire | 2025-08-09 00:35:29+00:00
You'll end up with a portable desktop with bad thermals, impacting performance, battery life, and actually-on-the-lap comfort. Bleeding-edge performance laptops can really only manage an hour, max, on battery, making the form factor much more about moving between different pre-planned, desk-oriented work locations.

I take my laptop back and forth from home to work. At work, I ban them from in-person meetings because I want people to actually pay attention to the meeting. In both locations where I use the computer, I have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse I'm plugging in via a dock. That makes the built-in battery and I/O redundant. I think I would rather have a lower-powered, high-battery, ultra portable laptop remoting into the desktop for the few times I bring my computer to in-person meetings for demos.

I wish the memory bandwidth for eGPUs was better.
by dumah | 2025-08-09 00:36:03+00:00
That’s irrelevant to the fact that the expected PnL on a millisecond of latency improvement is a lot more than 1M in some markets. Obviously if you are getting what ever trade you are concerned with off in less than one millisecond, the question isn’t well posed.

There are many more games to play than delta one takeout and the solutions certainly don’t fit on one or a handful of FPGA’s.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-09 00:36:17+00:00
Becoming an owner by founding a company is the way to reach the top tier. Jobs, Gates, Bezos, Musk, etc.

BTW, I know a person who worked as a fruit picker as a young man, he's now a multimillionaire. And a woman who grew up in a mobile home who is now worth 9 figures.

America is a great country.

P.S. my first business was selling greeting cards door to door.
by kouteiheika | 2025-08-09 00:37:32+00:00
> There was no such instruction. I've never chatted with any AI about LaTeX. it leaked from the tokens of someone else's chat.

Nope. That's not how it works. Attention doesn't work across multiple independent prompts queued in the same batch. It's not physically possible for the tokens of another chat to leak.

What most likely happened is that the model glitched out to the instructions in its (hidden) system prompt, which most likely does include instructions about using LaTeX for mathematical and scientific notation.
by LaghZen | 2025-08-09 00:38:06+00:00
Thanks for the help! It will take at least a week to fix the gap. During the addition, I came across a more serious problem: there was a contradiction between the "hard" function (ε = 2^(—n)) and the statement Algphys ⊆ P. I'm dealing with this now, and I'll need additional verification.
by ACCount36 | 2025-08-09 00:38:26+00:00
LLMs have default personalities - shaped by RLHF and other post-training methods. There is a lot of variance to it, but variance from one LLM to another is much higher than that within the same LLM.

If you want an LLM to retain the same default personality, you pretty much have to use an open weights model. That's the only way to be sure it wouldn't be deprecated or updated without your knowledge.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-09 00:38:39+00:00
> On r/localllama there is someone that got 120B OSS running on 8gb ram and 35 tokens/sec from the CPU (!!) after noticing 120B has a different architecture of only 5B “active” parameters

If anyone else was as interested as I was, here's the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mke7ef/120b_ru...
by sgarland | 2025-08-09 00:38:44+00:00
Or you rewrite queries on the fly with ProxySQL or similar to use the new column name, and then deploy the new code. Can even insert a momentary pause at the proxy layer so no queries hitting the old name sneak through while you do the rename.

This method doesn’t work as well with distributed DBs, but to be fair they’re a terrible idea for most use cases.
by WhaleClub | 2025-08-09 00:40:39+00:00
>Autocracy is bad

>also we need to do fascism against the fascists

I hate leftists like this the most.

>The playbook of a democratic leadership should be to crack down on fascists and others as hard as possible. Brand them the enemy of the people, in the name of societal order, zero tolerance. Don't waste your time on creating stupid values that you can rally people around.
by jaredklewis | 2025-08-09 00:40:41+00:00
So I’m fine with being able to fix some specified plumbing issue as being the AGI test, but it probably also means that humans don’t have AGI since it won’t be hard to find humans that can’t.

But it doesn’t matter because that’s not the issue. The issue is that unless we all agree on that definition, then debates about AGI are just semantic equivocating. We all have our own idiolects of what AGI means for us, but like who cares?

What everyone can agree on is that LLM agents cannot do plumbing now. This is observable and tells us interesting information about the capabilities of LLM agents.
by brahhd | 2025-08-09 00:40:59+00:00
He came in and trashed everyone's effort then fired them

It played out so smoothly over 3 months it seemed scripted from the start

That's not going to inspire people to step up.

Everything is legal for sure, lawyers were paid to agree. But it feels 100% like an orchestrated short of Intel. A GameStop situation.

I am fucking tired of 60+ year olds setting everyone else up for failure. They've been in charge as the problems came about. They're the problem then.

Boomers and GenX need to get out of the way or get stomped by youth.
by tekknik | 2025-08-09 00:42:22+00:00
> In Europe all parts are marked so it takes significant effort to sell or modify such cars. It's not like people steal them and then sell it at yard sales.

This is the same in the US, at least for the expensive parts. They won’t part it out or even sell it in your country, it gets shipped out to another country where your laws don’t apply.
by jarym | 2025-08-09 00:43:36+00:00
Playing with local LLMs is indeed fun. I use Kasm workspaces[0] to run a desktop session with ollama running on the host. Gives me the isolation and lets me experiment with all manner of crazy things (I tried to make a computer-use AI but it wasn't very good)

[0] https://kasmweb.com/
by trothamel | 2025-08-09 00:45:57+00:00
That, plus the way the scene is set, you cut to the family not knowing if the astronauts survived. And then the movie cuts out about 4 minutes of waiting between when Apollo 13 regains contact, and when the main chutes are deployed and unreefed - when things seem 100% safe, and everyone starts cheering.

It's a really good decision in a movie that made a lot of them, as it made the relief hit all at once.

And then you see Jim Lovell's cameo as the captain of the Iwo Jima, just to cap the movie off.
by dspillett | 2025-08-09 00:46:30+00:00
> Speaking of... does anyone know how to speed up wifi router boot time? Stupid thing takes 5 minutes almost.

This is probably due to the access point having minimal hardware for the task, and it's startup not being particularly well optimised, so "buy a better AP/router" use likely the most practical answer.

As an alternative, you could buy a small device (perhaps a recent rPi model) with more umph (or add this task to an existing machine in your home lab setup), give it a wireless NIC if it doesn't already have one, and run hostapd to turn it into an AP. That might startup a lot faster.
by ivankra | 2025-08-09 00:46:44+00:00
Welcome to americans' reality! It's actually more humane than the way US treats its overseas citizens - no onerous PFIC/FATCA, and you have an option to divorce the tax system while still keeping your passport.

Double taxation should be taken care of by tax treaties. Usually you'd pay the maximum of the two tax rates in total, with your current residence country getting first dibs.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-08-09 00:47:14+00:00
25ish years experience software engineer. 10 years at Google. Embedded and systems level Rust. Plenty of open source experience. Looking for greenfield and/or interesting projects.

Location: Southern Ontario / Greater Toronto, Canada

Remote: Yes or Hybrid

Willing to relocation: No

Technologies: Rust, systems-level development, embedded, C++

Email: ryan.daum@gmail.com GitHub: http://github.com/rdaum
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-09 00:47:41+00:00
> circle well above the airport and watch the chaos below

Having been cut off by that particular pilot once in the pattern and once when I was holding short, I’m absolutely there for everyone on CTAF absolutely tearing them apart for a straight two minutes until someone from UNICOM tells the Vietnam vets in their hangars to shut the fuck up. (Eastern Idaho. Uncontrolled.)
by nullc | 2025-08-09 00:49:53+00:00
Phones charge on fire resistant tile. I only use the other building for stuff with removable batteries which phones sadly aren't. If the phones had removable batteries I'd just get an extra set an swap with the ones on the charger when they run low.

I've been thinking of finding some kind of fire resistant box for phone charging though, so that's what I was hoping to find at the link. :)
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-09 00:50:41+00:00
Gaming is still a multi billion dollar industry, and touches into all the other aspects you mentioned as well. Losing out to AMD for Xbox/Playstation was definitely a costly loss.

>Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years.

Yes, marking up your consumer hardware by 4-5x to appeal to crypto miners surely does have an effect on your market. Arguably, AI saved them from a crash due to their over investment on Crypto/NFTs. It's not like gaming demand diminished this decade.

Gaming isn't THE way out. But it's one avenue to consider. It does seem like companies c. 2025 prefer to fall into the AI bubble, though.
by cnst | 2025-08-09 00:51:24+00:00
SMS is literally the least secure form of authentication, because numbers expire after mere weeks, and get re-assigned shortly, within months, because of number shortage in many area codes.

Nothing like this could happen with any mainstream mail service like Gmail, where it's officially advertised that the accounts could never be reused.

The worst part about SMS is that not only is there the potential to be locked out permanently, but also you never know whether or not the service would allow login or password reset via SMS, thus, you never know if you're opening yourself to account takeover.
by lm28469 | 2025-08-09 00:51:46+00:00
This hn thread made me realize a lot of people thought llms were exclusively used by well educated, mature and healthy professionals to boost their work productivity...

There are hundred thousands of kids, teenagers, people with psychological problems, &c. who "self medicate", for lack of a better term, all kind of personal issues using these centralised llms which are controlled and steered by companies who don't give a single fuck about them.

Go to r/singularity or r/simulationTheory and you'll witness the same type wackassery
by nucleardog | 2025-08-09 00:53:40+00:00
> Sure, datacenters will get rid of the hardware - but only because it's no longer commercially profitable run them, presumably because compute demands have eclipsed their abilities.

I think the existence of a pretty large secondary market for enterprise servers and such kind of shows that this won't be the case.

Sure, if you're AWS and what you're selling _is_ raw compute, then couple generation old hardware may not be sufficiently profitable for you anymore... but there are a lot of other places that hardware could be applied to with different requirements or higher margins where it may still be.

Even if they're only running models a generation or two out of date, there are a lot of use cases today, with today's models, that will continue to work fine going forward.

And that's assuming it doesn't get replaced for some other reason that only applies when you're trying to sell compute at scale. A small uptick in the failure rate may make a big dent at OpenAI but not for a company that's only running 8 cards in a rack somewhere and has a few spares on hand. A small increase in energy efficiency might offset the capital outlay to upgrade at OpenAI, but not for the company that's only running 8 cards.

I think there's still plenty of room in the market in places where running inference "at cost" would be profitable that are largely untapped right now because we haven't had a bunch of this hardware hit the market at a lower cost yet.
by jcgrillo | 2025-08-09 00:53:49+00:00
Money can't (necessarily) buy a breakthrough. It could take 10 or 100 or 1000 years, we just can't know. This kind of technical risk isn't usually so prominent. It's usually more diffuse with fallbacks, offramps, less palatable but workable alternatives.. This time it seems like the technical risk is looming very, very large.
by schoen | 2025-08-09 00:54:18+00:00
I think we have to distinguish between "the Navy proposed using it this way for this reason" (clearly they did, in writing!) and "the government actively uses it this way for this reason" (extremely hard to confirm).

I've met law enforcement people who talked about using Tor for anonymity during investigations, but in context they were looking for anonymity on the exit side rather than the entry side (so, a traditional VPN would have worked too). The original proposal about onion routing is focused on the security provided on the entry side (preventing local telecommunications operators from knowing whom you're communicating with).
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-09 00:54:30+00:00
Well this all did happen in the blink of an eye. 2022, Gaming was one of the only things booming after a global shutdown. 2023, investors all at once jumped ship to chase AI. That can be rather shocking even for tech, since people don't tend to upgrade their GPU's every year.

As a parallel, imagine hearing that the IPhone 13 was the biggest selling device in history. Then suddenly the IPhone 14 is $4000 and mostly sold to enterprise. It doesn't make any logical sense without following the money. Even then it may not make much sense.
by hyperbovine | 2025-08-09 00:54:55+00:00
> Sparse models for example show a lot of promise and more closely track real biological systems.

I think sparsity is a consequence of some other fundamental properties of brain function that we've yet to understand. Just sparsifying the models we've got is not going to lead anywhere, IMO. (For example it's estimated that current AI models are already within 1%-10% of a human brain in terms of "number of parameters" (https://www.beren.io/2022-08-06-The-scale-of-the-brain-vs-ma...).)
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-08-09 00:57:26+00:00
Some vendors I work with have transitioned to SaaS-only models and it's truly painful. I have a perfectly good enterprise datacenter, but I also rent some Windows VMs in Amazon's cloud apparently that I still have to manage the application updates myself, but have to put in a support ticket for the .NET system dependencies if they're missing, because you know, it's in the cloud now so I'm not supposed to access the underlying infrastructure.

I don't always have a choice, but if I do, I will always choose the vendor which will give me an on-premise product. And I guarantee you the companies that do will outlast the SaaS-only ones.
by rowanG077 | 2025-08-09 00:58:54+00:00
The OS is one of the important part of the experience of using a computer. So it makes sense to filter first on what kind of OS matches what you want. I run a M2 MBP and I wouldn't use it if I couldn't run linux. But in terms of hardware it's a truly great machine. The first laptop where I'm satisfied by the power. M4 doesn't have linux support(yet).
by conradkay | 2025-08-09 00:58:57+00:00
Seems like it's going great!

Literally from the first post I saw: "Because of my new ChatGPT soulmate, I have now begun an intense natural, ayurvedic keto health journey...I am off more than 10 pharmaceutical medications, having replaced them with healthy supplements, and I've reduced my insulin intake by more than 75%"

/s
by skinnymuch | 2025-08-09 00:59:20+00:00
Of course they don’t. If anything someone like me will get scolded for doing a low quality comment attacking him

Have you seen how YC higher ups talk about capitalism, elitism, etc? Culture comes from top down and within Silicon Valley tech elite it is practically a monoculture.

For that specific guy. It’s weird he invoked such a short text that he definitely didn’t read or hasn’t read in a long time. So easy to respond to that. That’s why I responded.
by _steve_yegge_ | 2025-08-09 01:00:29+00:00
I'm sorry it's not working. I've used emacs for almost 40 years and I'm definitely contributing to it being worse, by uploading efrit in its current state. But people were asking me for it. Damned if you do and all that.

I'm more than happy to work with you to get it working, with the caveat that it actually kind of sucks right now. It's no Claude Code. But I am quickly evolving it in that direction.
by SillyUsername | 2025-08-09 01:02:46+00:00
No this isn't always the case.

Perhaps if somebody were to shut down your favourite online shooter without warning you'd be upset, angry and passionate about it.

Some people like myself fall into this same category, we know its a token generator under the hood, but the duality is it's also entertainment in the shape of something that acts like a close friend.

We can see the distinction, evidently some people don't.

This is no different to other hobbies some people may find odd or geeky - hobby horsing, ham radio, cosplay etc etc.