MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-08-28 13:14:29+00:00
What I did for myself was not exactly scientific.

I realized I overeat, mostly because I stay at the table longer with family and friends (hey, I am French! :)) and I eat too much before I realize that I am full. Or even realize I am full but what the heck, this nicely looking petit four is inviting.

So I decided to follow the JEFH approach (Just Eat Fucking Half). I did not change a lot in what I eat but mistly how much. I do not drink any sodas (we are trained in France since kindergarden to only drink water at meals) and getting rid of the sweet parts was not that of an effort. I removed most of the unhealthy stuff, though I was not eating much of that anyway (all kind of sausage and hams we have here, and heavily processed food).

I also do some sport, but not to lose weight.

I lost 16 kg effortlessly, and now need more effort to lose 15 more - this is going to be significantly more difficult. The main blockage is my lazyness and lack of self-control (and possibly some ilness I have but that would be too easy to put everything on that).

I have everything to succeed: a healthy eating country, money for any kind of food I need, a very high quality enterprise restaurant where I eat healthy food (and cheap), a place where I can easily practice sports.

So yes, I do not follow a strictly scientific method, but rather some common sense and reasonable self restrain. Ah, I also have a wife that I am afraid of and who watches with a stern eye what I am eating.
by jbstack | 2025-08-28 13:14:33+00:00
> I used to be a free speech absolutist in the past. Not anymore, though I still prefer more free speech to less. The UK and India are terrible at protecting free speech. And the laws dealing with defamation/libel are bonkers based on what Simon Singh had to go through.

I thought we were talking about the legal system, not the laws themselves. You can have a great legal system with terrible laws, or a terrible legal system with great laws. You can't blame the legal system for the fact that Parliament decides to pass a law which restricts free speech: it's not the role of the judiciary to decide what laws should be passed; rather, the role of a well functioning judiciary is to ensure that it applies and interprets the law (as it finds it) accurately and fairly regardless of the content of that law.
by iggldiggl | 2025-08-28 13:14:41+00:00
That's not actually true. True, with computerised technology it might be more convenient to implement it that way and it also allows some additional optimisations and bonus features, but it's not an absolute requirement.

At a minimum that's acceptable enough even by modern-ish safety standards, the signalling system only needs to know which sections of track are occupied and which are free, and it only needs to know that at the granularity of individual block sections between subsequent signals. It also doesn't necessarily need to know about the identity of the train, even though in practice you'll want to track that, too, for the convenience of the signallers.

The train in turn doesn't need to know where exactly it is – in terms of safety, it's enough knowing the local speed limit and the state of any upcoming signals, but for that, it doesn't need to know where it is in relation to the outside world. The classic implementation is simply fixed trackside infrastructure telling the onboard safety systems all they need to know.

Historically, any demands for knowing where the train is exactly in relation to the outside world were rather driven by automated passenger information systems and the like rather than the safety-critical parts of the signalling system.
by freakynit | 2025-08-28 13:14:45+00:00
It's not just the model name part. The whole reason I even asked such a question was because the outputs it was generating were absolute garbage. Like something that will be generated by a super super small 3B model. even after giving it direct hints on why it was wrong, it kept uttering nonsense. I repeated the same in chatgpt and with sonnet models... they both gave sensible, expected outputs.

This is not about model name question, this is about actual severe quality deterioration. Till yesterday, this was all fine.

I believe they are ding A/B testing. More models will start to show similar behaviours. And this will be specific to India. I might have guessed the reason too:

1. https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/techook/airtel-...

2. https://www.financialexpress.com/life/technology-free-perple...

3. https://www.news18.com/tech/airtels-free-ai-offer-with-perpl...

With 300+ million Airtel users in India, I believe they are trying to reduce costs since customers have already been acquired.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-28 13:14:45+00:00
Washington did not pass additional laws. It was the Supreme Court's South Dakota v Wayfair ruling:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-494_j4el.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.

Prior to this ruling, if you were a merchant in state A and you mailed something to someone in State B, you were not considered to have an economic nexus in state B, and hence state B had no jurisdiction over you to enforce sales tax collection.

Previous definitions of economic nexus involved having physical buildings or employees operating within a jurisdiction's boundaries.

South Dakota v Wayfair said that mailing something to a customer established economic nexus in the customer's jurisdiction, hence the merchant now has to register as a business in the customer's jurisdiction and collect applicable sales taxes and follow all the laws of that jurisdiction.

The whole ruling is weird though, because the justification came down to it's messing up the order of things, and since Congress can't be bothered to fix it with legislation, the Courts have to make up stuff to prolong the status quo.
by maweki | 2025-08-28 13:14:53+00:00
It's just a course about database design and in the first seminar we look at different news stories that have something to do with databases, like trump putting some random Italian chef on an international sanction list should make us think about primary keys and identifying people.

And the horizon post office scandal is the last and most poignant example that real people are affected by the systems we build and the design decisions we make. That sometimes easy to forget.
by imtringued | 2025-08-28 13:15:07+00:00
Using sparsity in advertising is incredibly misleading to the point of lying. The entire point of sparsity is that you avoid doing calculations. Sparsity support means you need fewer FLOPs for a matrix of the same size. It doesn't magically increase the number of FLOPs you have.

Even AMD got that memo and is mostly advertising their 8bit/block fp16 performance on their GPUs and NPUs, even though the NPUs support 4 bit INT with sparsity, which would 4x the quoted numbers if they used Nvidia's marketing FLOPs.
by kylemacomber | 2025-08-28 13:15:15+00:00
This isn't exhaustive, but quickly top of my head:

- How to Win Friends and Influence People — This was really eye opening to me and helped me more productively engage in a large organization like Apple.

- Sam Harris's podcast — I'm always interested to hear his takes on the controversial topics of the day as well as more philosophical and philanthropic ones.

- The Knowledge Project podcast — I don't listen to this as much anymore but a few years ago I was a regular listener.

- Simon Willison’s blog — The highest signal to noise way I've found to stay up to date with developments in AI.
by oneshtein | 2025-08-28 13:15:20+00:00
The FSB is looking for people they can recruit, even here, on HackerNews, too. Look at the HN news history. You will find stories about Russian history or culture. In comments, some people are expressing their fascination with Russia or its culture. This is how FSB identifies potential sympathizers, who are easy to recruit. Most likely, some of those, who expressed their sympathy under such news articles a year or two ago, are already recruited by FSB.
by asmor | 2025-08-28 13:15:53+00:00
The problem isn't paying for it, it's the extra workload of retrofitting authentication to all your things. I'd find this a lot more enticing if they just made you set a "i have a license or i am evaluating or i am not commercial" flag in Helm or fail the build. Plus the cost is extremely disproportionate, but some will pay it given the one month deadline.
by fprotthetarball | 2025-08-28 13:16:05+00:00
> Git won't catch new files the agent is adding.

Another problem I inadvertently dodged by using Jujutsu with Claude Code :)

I tend to send a lone "commit" message to Claude when I think I'm in a spot I may want to return to in the future, in case the current path doesn't work out. Then Claude commits it with a decent message. It knows how to use jj well enough for most things. Then it's really easy to jj new back to a previous change and try again.
by gruez | 2025-08-28 13:16:27+00:00
I think the point isn't to argue AI companies are money printers or even that they're fairly valued, it's that at least the unit economics work out. Contrast this to something like moviepass, where they were actually losing money on each subscriber. Sure, a company that requires huge capital investments that might never be paid back isn't great either, but at least it's better than moviepass.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-08-28 13:16:30+00:00
The unsubstantiated faith critique swings both ways: the amount of biofuel hate that came out of that one time agricultural land use adjustment is truly diabolical.

Like, "ok, you win, but if I drop this gigantic adjustment onto your math, then I win," and an honest conversation would then move to whether or not the adjustment was justified but that's not what happened, the conversation turned into yelling at anyone who didn't want to take the outcome-determinative adjustment on faith. Lol. Being a crusader doesn't make you wrong, but it does make the whole accusation of unsubstantiated faith / appeal to reason quite hypocritical.
by cgadski | 2025-08-28 13:16:49+00:00
> This blog post has explored the most critical equations in machine learning, from foundational probability and linear algebra to advanced concepts like diffusion and attention. With theoretical explanations, practical implementations, and visualizations, you now have a comprehensive resource to understand and apply ML math. Point anyone asking about core ML math here—they’ll learn 95% of what they need in one place!

It makes me sad to see LLM slop on the front page.
by jsnell | 2025-08-28 13:17:05+00:00
I don't believe the asymmetry between prefill and decode is that large. If it were, it would make no sense for most of the providers to have separate pricing for prefill with cache hits vs. without.

Given the analysis is based on R1, Deepseek's actual in-production numbers seem highly relevant: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20...

(But yes, they claim 80% margins on the compute in that article.)

> When established players emphasize massive costs and technical complexity, it discourages competition and investment in alternatives

But it's not the established players emphasizing the costs! They're typically saying that inference is profitable. Instead the false claims about high costs and unprofitability are part of the anti-AI crowd's standard talking points.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-28 13:18:07+00:00
While disaster is strong language, Claude Code isn't really a well engineered product, they're just kinda trying shit, they don't have a clear long term vision. The core prompts and agent loop are good though, it's too bad it's not open source so someone could implement them in a client with good UX/engineering (at least without disassembling claude code and being legally questionable).
by shenenee | 2025-08-28 13:18:12+00:00
These titles 'you are ... doing it wrong' always suprise me, partly because the problem is not really there.

These type of titles convey some kind of 'i don't understand it/ did it wrong, therefor everybody must be doing something wrong, because I cannot be the one making the mistake here.'

This is right up there with: - 10 things you didn't know about XYZ - etc

Choose a better title
by jerf | 2025-08-28 13:18:40+00:00
They can still miscalculate the intensity of the backlash or the willingness of people to do something about it. Many such stories. "The enemy has a plan so let's do nothing" is a great way to get consistently rolled in the world. As the saying goes, everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face; dishing out the occasional (and in this case fully metaphorical) punch in the face is not a hopeless endeavor.

(I agree with some other threads that merely signing a random petition is not a punch to the face. That's just whining. Systematic and organized, perhaps, but just whining.)
by rsynnott | 2025-08-28 13:18:54+00:00
> More recently I see a lot more people who see themselves as evangelists and try very hard to boost/advocate the technology (see all the "LLM coding changes my life" posts).

It feels very much like the crypto bubble a few years back (the second, larger one, when we were informed that soon everything would be an NFT). This is actually one thing that puts me off AI; on top of a certain amount of scepticism about whether it is actually useful, the whole space feels very, very, _very_ grifter-y. In some cases it is literally the same people who were pushing NFTs a while back.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-28 13:20:26+00:00
> Hell, I got it give me a list of recipes for the week based on my preferences and dietary needs then created a grocery list in 2 minutes.

I mean, er, yeah, but that's not a multi-trillion dollar industry, is the thing. "People find ChatGPT mildly useful" is not going to cut it, not at current levels of investment.
by JCM9 | 2025-08-28 13:20:36+00:00
Unit economics needs to include the cost of the thing being sold, not just the direct cost of selling it.

Unit economics is mostly a manufacturing concept and the only reason it looks OK here is because of not really factoring in the cost of building the thing into the cost of the thing.

Someone might say I don’t understand “unit economics” but I’d simply argue applying a unit economics argument saying it’s good without including the cost of model training is abusing the concept of unit economics in a way that’s not realistic from a business/economics sense.

The model is what’s being sold. You can’t just sell “inference” as a thing with no model. Thats just selling compute, which should be high margin. The article is simply affirming that by saying yes when you’re just selling compute in micro-chunks that’s a decent margin business which is a nice analysis but not surprising.
by tconfrey | 2025-08-28 13:20:37+00:00
Take a look at BrainTool. It's a bookmarks/tabs/todo-manager browser extension that writes to an org-mode syntax text file. Allows you to capture notes, containment hierarchy, to-do state etc and expose it all to your org PKMS. (Disclosure, I'm the developer.)

https://braintool.org

https://github.com/tconfrey/BrainTool
by MichaelZuo | 2025-08-28 13:20:38+00:00
Who would even hire an MBA to improve such difficult to measurre things?

Maybe it will make a significant enough cumulative impact 5 years later that it can actuallly be noticed and defended in a meeting against other priorities.

But I’ve never heard of anyone hiring someone on minimum wage and deferring a huge bonus to 5 years later.

Even if it does makes a big impact, would anyone even take a such a job?
by endymion-light | 2025-08-28 13:20:39+00:00
My experience with AI tooling is that while it's really useful and great - I don't think i've ever seen a LLM complete an epic long feature well full stop.

Don't get me wrong, it's definitely improved my workflow and efficiency, but you must be winning at roulette if the model is performing well on anything that can't be googled and implemented witihn a similar amount of time.

unless it's claude, where even simple styling changes seem to become epics just when it wants to spit out an extra few thousands lines of code
by general1726 | 2025-08-28 13:21:22+00:00
English is actually a weird language without genders in nouns. I.e. in Slavic languages you can say "male software engineer" with word "vyvojar" and "female software engineer" with a word "vyvojarka" and then lot of grammar is built atop of this fact.

Job listing are then trying to use something like "vyvojar/ka" to signify that both genders are sought for, but there is nothing like that in English, so you will get translation as "software engineer (all genders)" instead of using just "software engineer"
by indigodaddy | 2025-08-28 13:21:40+00:00
Maybe they're still counting back ports as CVEs? (Seems like scanning software still always false positives on a listening port that flags for a version and doesn't take into account backport and doesn't actually test for the CVE/vuln-- it's so exasperating weeding through reports thrown at you by "Security")

But yeah seems unlikely that official Debian images would be full of CVEs unless they are not being regularly updated.
by nashashmi | 2025-08-28 13:21:54+00:00
Apple sells the hardware. That is why they are responsible. If dell sold the hardware , dell would be responsible .

AMD does not sell the motherboard. The motherboard sells the CPU. So motherboard is responsible.

But the relevance here is CPU is burning out because it is being plugged in by the end user. And the manufacturer is blaming the motherboard for their cpu burning. Maybe the cpu should be protective?
by uticus | 2025-08-28 13:21:54+00:00
No doubt, it's a double-edged sword.

And to be clear, I wouldn't have a problem if only the facts were put down: current methods, advantages (probably compared to other methods) and drawbacks. But to say this is "potentially offering a more sustainable alternative to fossil fuels" is like saying: "I can use a 74GW data center and a prompt to get the answer to 2+2, it potentially offers a more sustainable alternative to calculators."
by weirdpickles | 2025-08-28 13:22:16+00:00
Yeah, it is pretty amazing but not surprising. The Register has taken to a certain kind of sensationalism as of late.

I found this interesting:

> "Every piece of code written by Russians isn't automatically suspect, but popular packages with no external oversight are ripe for the taking by state or state-backed actors looking to further their aims," Smith told us in an email. "As a whole, the open source community should be paying more attention to this risk and mitigating it."

Uh, I guess? The nature of open source is supposed to be that the dev provides the effort and the code, and that's where the guarantee stops. It is up to the people who uses it to implement and ensure security. People treat OSS like it is a business product that must have drop-in replacement ready at all times.

The modern nature of development is perhaps my biggest gripe as a professional. There is little care given. Projects begin with importing dozens of other packages and libraries that we never look at, let alone fully understand. And it is normalized.
by netsharc | 2025-08-28 13:22:46+00:00
The price was mostly symbolic (if they were free people would probably abuse it, e.g. for paper to line your birdcage with), and it was ads in the paper that paid for the business.

Heck, now we have multi-billion dollar companies selling us ads (Google, Meta) but no one wants to pay the people whose jobs include investigating government corruption (as well as reporting on Taylor Swift getting a ring...). Somewhat understandably, since ads on the Internet are much more obnoxious than ads on newspaper/magazines.
by codeulike | 2025-08-28 13:22:50+00:00
paywalled. tldr: A posh bit of LA called Calabasas, home to "Will Smith, John Travolta, Justin Bieber, Kevin Hart, Jessica Simpson, Jake Paul, Katie Holmes, Kanye West and a bunch of Kardashians" happens to have a Landfill site in it, which most of the posh people had not noticed was there. The LA fires of 2025 generated 2.6 million tons of waste - more than the entire city of Philadelphia produces in a year. That waste was _potentially_ classifiable as toxic but the official site for toxic waste was too far away for such a large amount so someone decided to send it to local landfills including Calabasas. There was legal basis for local landfills to accept fire waste. Then there's lots of details about how posh people tried to stop it from happening but it happened away. "That, for many residents, was the most haunting revelation of all. The 2025 fires had augured a future in which even a Calabasan could suffer sudden and catastrophic environmental injustice."
by Jsebast24 | 2025-08-28 13:23:08+00:00
I once helped my math-hating niece with math. I was eager to go through her homework and show her how wonderful math is. Her homework: How do you call the curve that intersects this figure in this way? How do you call the angle that is shown in the other figure? ...etc. I said, "Is this a math class or an English class? Who gives a s*t about how a curve is named?" It turned out her math class was all like this. This is what she is being taught that mathematics is. I would hate it with a passion too if I had been taught that way.
by grim_io | 2025-08-28 13:23:09+00:00
That's quite a bold statement to assume that the reader is probably using uv wrong.

I'll give some unsolicited advice while on topic:

On Linux, on your development machine, don't use your system python for your venvs.

Your system's python belongs to your system, not to you. It's a critical system dependency and you don't want to depend on it not changing its version after a system update.

Uv makes it easy to download its own python, there is the env var UV_PYTHON_PREFERENCE=only-managed to make the system python disappear from uv completely.

Thank me later.
by SkyBelow | 2025-08-28 13:24:17+00:00
Calling this economic rent, if anything, underplays the issue. The economics in play appear worse than what rent normally covers. The science is funded by other sources, often from the groups which want access, the scientists are not paid and many have to pay to publish. Reviewers are rarely if ever paid. Public ability to peruse science, something that is already limited by the difficulty of understanding the papers, is made far worse by the price tag. The value provided seems to mainly be some name recognition that has fed a publish or perish model that is arguably detrimental to science research at scale.

All considered, calling it economic rent appears too charitable an interpretation.
by jonathan-adly | 2025-08-28 13:24:26+00:00
Basically- the same math as modern automated manufacturing. Super expensive and complex build-out - then a money printer once running and optimized.

I know there is lots of bearish sentiments here. Lots of people correctly point out that this is not the same math as FAANG products - then they make the jump that it must be bad.

But - my guess is these companies end up with margins better than Tesla (modern manufacturer), but less than 80%-90% of "pure" software. Somewhere in the middle, which is still pretty good.

Also - once the Nvidia monopoly gets broken, the initial build out becomes a lot cheaper as well.
by TheCondor | 2025-08-28 13:24:40+00:00
Taking a bunch of projects and making containers and flexible helm charts for them is kind of an interesting model. It’s what Redhat and Canonical do with raw Linux packages; they charge for premium support and even patches or extended support.

I was going through one of my clusters, I have two bitnami uses and they are both ‘building blocks’ I use Trino, which uses a metastore which uses postgresql and then some other package uses redis. It seems like both postgresql and redis could/would have containers and charts to install their stuff, where it breaks is the postgresql guys probably want to support “current” and not 4 major releases back, which is kind of normal to see in the wild.

It is kind of an interesting model, I’d love it if rancher or openshift or someone started to seriously compete. Shipping a Kubernetes in a box is nice but if they started packaging up the building blocks, that’s huge too.