MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-29 02:30:06+00:00
I definitely agree with the author that there are opportunities out there for businesses which provide good service. I'm at a point in my life where I don't actually care that much about price any more. I will pay a premium for a) good quality products and b) good service. I love going to my local butcher shop, even though it's often 25-50% more than the supermarket near me. Why? Because they have great service. If I need some soup bones cut in half to roast, they're happy to take them back and run them through the saw. If I ask for 3" thick steaks, they will say "no problem, come back in a day or two and we will cut some that size for you". They'll break down whole chickens for me if I ask, etc etc. That's well worth the premium in price, and they have a very loyal customer base because of it. Service really does matter.
by 827a | 2025-08-29 02:31:46+00:00
I should have provided a direct quote:

> At first, he answered, no, we would be profitable, if not for training new models. Essentially, if you take away all the stuff, all the money we’re spending on building new models and just look at the cost of serving the existing models, we are profitable on that basis. And then he looked at Brad Lightcap, who is the COO. And he sort of said, right? And Brad kind of squirmed in his seat a little bit and was like, well — He’s like, we’re pretty close.

I don't think you can square that with what he stated in the Axios article:

> "We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company."

Except, if the NYT dinner happened after the Axios article interview, which is possible given when each was published, and he was actually literally unaware of the company's financials.

Personally: it feels like it should reflect very poorly on OpenAI that their CEO has been, charitably, entirely unaware how close they are to profitability (and uncharitably, that he actively lies about it). But I'm not sure if the broader news cycle caught it; the only place I've heard this mentioned is literally this NYT Hard Fork podcast which is hosted by the people who were at the dinner.
by fakedang | 2025-08-29 02:33:02+00:00
Honestly this was partly on Alex, but again, largely on Chase's banking practices. When a transaction of that size comes on the radar, you don't just ring up compliance to verify records internally. You also bring in the big guns from Main Office (aka the regional business banking HQ) and, along with Alex (as the point of contact), educate the business customer as to what can be done. This was what happened to me at Credit Suisse (RIP) after I had a similar, albeit smaller, transaction happen for my personal account. They were also extremely helpful when I wanted to get started with setting up my current trading business. Oh, and I'm still in touch with most of the people who helped me through that journey, even though they've left for other shores.

But again, Alex would not have been able to do this because Chase might not have had any policy about how to redirect customers to the appropriate type of banker. Which is kind of stupid for a megabank of its size.
by dazamarquez | 2025-08-29 02:34:25+00:00
The piece isn't an independent analysis as the author has an obvious interest in Zitron being wrong. In fact, the piece closes off with a nice marketing self-plug. But that aside, the author doesn't actually refute Zitron's points. One of the main argument is "the comparison with Netflix is wrong", which doesn't prove anything in itself; and then tries to show that inference is profitable. Though just as in their baker analogy, you must factor in all other costs, including training new models. Worthless marketing plug.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-29 02:34:35+00:00
> So the user generates the ID for each site he visits? What prevents them from generating arbitrary IDs?

The construction would go basically like this:

pseudonym = VRF(secret_key + site_id)

The expectation is that you would have only one valid secret_key at any time, and it would be unknown to the government. This kind of scheme is called anonymous credential generation in literature I believe. It can be established the secret_key got govt backed, but that's it.

The site_id would be e.g. domain cert public key or similar (domain ownership is a moving target, so just the domain name imo is not sound).

VRF is a verifiable random function. This is the magic ZK part.

Pseudonym is what you present to the site, i.e. the identity you go by.

This way the site can verify that this pseudonym was specifically issued for it (making it site unique), and that it belongs to a govt certified identity (of which there should be only one issued at a time per person). The VRF is deterministic, guaranteeing that it's the same person every time.

Revocation is annoying so I didn't bother thinking that through but should be fairly okay I think?

I believe this is robust to people forging arbitrary IDs, to sites colluding with each other in deanonymization, and colluding with the govt in the same. The only kickers I can think of are secret_key misuse (e.g. via duress) / theft / loss / sharing, and the trust anchor (the govt) being untrustworthy (forging invalid or duplicate identities). Would also need to handle people dying, but that would be pretty much just revocation.

I consider trust anchor issues out of scope. The remainder doesn't sound too bad to try defending for, and I think is also basically out of scope.

Potentially important edit: I'm not accounting for timing side channels here, which might be relevant during revocation or else.

Another: didn't mention but in my humble opinion cryptographically attesting people is unsound. People can't calculate crypto in their head, and can't recall long arbitrary strings of hex. What is appropriate to attest (if anything) is their devices instead. But that's a layer of complication I didn't want to deal with here.
by Aardappel | 2025-08-29 02:35:57+00:00
the "gl" namespace is really a bit of misnomer since it is much higher level API than OpenGL, and does not really depend on OpenGL. It could pretty easily run on another API underneath.

The repo comes with a LOT of graphical samples (in the "samples" dir).

The lights are more of standard way of passing them to the shader (see the phong shader implementation).

Matrices are a bit of a weak spot since its all implicit (which is convenient, but not powerful). There are also classes for direct use of matrices though.
by rayiner | 2025-08-29 02:36:14+00:00
What makes you say Trump v. Casa is “flimsy?” The Supreme Court addressed injunctions against the executive in Marbury in 1803. Wikipedia’s write up cites scholars that say federal courts issued between 0 and a dozen nationwide injunctions in the first 175 years of the republic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_injunction. The wikipedia write up is actually quite good on this.

McMahon v. New York is obviously correct. A preliminary injunction is an “extraordinary and drastic” remedy requiring a showing that the plaintiff is likely to succeed in the merits: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/civil-resource-manual-21.... The argument that federal courts can supervise a reduction in force where the individual firings aren’t themselves illegal (e.g. race based) is a tenuous argument. Besides, what’s the irreparable harm? Being fired is one of the classic examples of something that can be remedied by after a trial with reinstatement and backpay.
by Refreeze5224 | 2025-08-29 02:36:31+00:00
As someone with a close relative who is deep into the Q-Anon stuff, and was totally normal beforehand, I can't help but see how similar it seems to psychosis, or at least severe delusions that you find in people who are psychotic/schizophrenic.

It's truly shocking to witness someone you've known your whole life just go off the deep end into something that has so many demonstrably false aspects, and watch them start saying believing so much batshit crazy stuff. I don't know of anything comparable, short of a previously typical person developing a severe meth addiction, which is known to cause psychosis.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-29 02:37:28+00:00
> LLMs will just find the snippets of code that matches somehow

This suggests a huge gap in your understanding of LLMs if we are to take this literally.

> LLM programming, when first started, was more about a direct english to finished code translation

There is no direct english to finished code translation. A prompt like "write me a todo app" has infinitely many codes it maps to with different tradeoffs and which appeal to different people. Even if LLMs never made any coding mistakes, there is no function that maps a statement like that to specific pieces of code unless you're making completely arbitrary choices like the axiom of choice.

So we're left with the fact that we have to specify what we want. And at that LLMs do exceptionally well.
by skydhash | 2025-08-29 02:37:32+00:00
Valid programs are almost infinite. Context free grammars (which describe valid programs) are generative. When you're programming, you are mostly restricting the set of valid program to include only the few that satisfy the specs. Adding an extra 0 to a number is valid, but put that in the context of money transactions, it's a "hell breaks loose" situation.

SO that's why "it compiles" is worthless in a business settings. Of course it should compile. That's the bare minimum of expectations. And even "it passes the tests" is not that great. That just means you have not mess things up. So review and quality (accountability for both) is paramount, so that the proper stuff get shipped (and fixed swiftly if there was a mistake).
by heywoods | 2025-08-29 02:37:49+00:00
I’m building my first iOS app ever so I know it has much more to do with me not understanding Xcode but getting builds to succeed after making changes with Claude code has been a nightmare. If you or anyone have any tips, guides, prayers, incantations for how to get changes in one to not clobber the other and leave me in xproj symlink hell I would be so grateful.
by geor9e | 2025-08-29 02:37:58+00:00
To run a model locally, they would need to release the weights to the public and their competitors. Those are flagship models.

They would also need to shrink them way down to even fit. And even then, generating tokens on an apple neural chip would be waaaaaay slower than an HTTP request to a monster GPU in the sky. Local llms in my experience are either painfully dumb or painfully slow.
by djtango | 2025-08-29 02:38:42+00:00
I enjoy the opt-in experience for interactivity when using noscript. There's a few cases where it can be janky in particular payment flows but I've been noscript for almost 10 years so I am used to it and the workarounds don't bother me as much as CPU hogs and random sites bombarding me with all kinds of video ads
by typewithrhythm | 2025-08-29 02:40:40+00:00
It's interesting, ai seems to be enabling the middle in a positive way.

On the other side, we have started to find that the value of outsourcing to very low cost regions has completely disappeared.

I expect that the wages in eastern Europe will quickly rise in a way they never did in former outsourcing hotspots (India for example), because they are able to do similarly complex and quality work to westerners, and are now enabled by awesome translation tools.

The low quality for cheaper is now better served by the Artificial Indian.
by edgineer | 2025-08-29 02:41:12+00:00
"boost up to max temp and stay there"

At stock settings CPUs will boost depending on many factors. Once one of several different limits is hit the CPU will not boost as high, trying to find a steady state where it stays below Tjmax.

Note the following: the 9950x does not come with a stock cooler. AMD recommends water cooling for the 9950x. Transistor lifetime decreases exponentially with temperature.

I'd expect that a 9950x under sustained load paired with a "165W" cooler would not only not boost, but would throttle to below base clocks.

In the case of CPU cooling, I don't agree that relying on the CPU's thermal safety nets to continuously regulate the system to avoid damage is good practice. With additional cooling to ensure it never reaches Tjmax, this also will result in better CPU performance, a tangible benefit.

Had the author monitored his systems, he would have observed high temperature and throttling. Yes, in 2025 it's arguable that a CPU's safety net should be reliable wrt temperature, even if you run with no heatsink at all. I also agree that TDP specifications are unclear.

But the bottom line is that you should pay the extra $100 or so to cool your CPU properly. It will be faster and more reliable.

Please take care of your equipment; do not take it for granted.
by Refreeze5224 | 2025-08-29 02:41:18+00:00
Of course it has. That's the entire point of AI.

Ostensibly it's to help programmers, or writers, or lawyers, or whomever. But those are just the users of AI.

The owners and buyers of AI at a company level are developing and using it to push down payroll expenses. That's it. It's to avoid paying people, and providing them benefits. Even if you fire 50% of your employees, realize it was a terrible mistake, and hire most of them back, it's a net reduction in payroll costs.
by tptacek | 2025-08-29 02:41:20+00:00
It feels like you stopped reading before "and then a further subset of those".

Again: my claim is simply that whatever else is going on, the halting problem doesn't enter into it, because the user in this scenario isn't obligated to prove arbitrary programs. Here, I can solve the halting problem right now: "only accept branchless programs with finite numbers of instructions". Where's my Field Medal? :)

It always feels like the "LLMs are nondeterministic" people are relying on the claim that it's impossible to tell whether an arbitrary program is branchless and finite. Obviously, no, that's not true.
by zahlman | 2025-08-29 02:41:29+00:00
> absurdities like having the default queue be thread safe (sacrificing performance).

Why is this absurd? What are you writing where you need to scrape this sort of performance, but are perfectly fine with the overhead of interpreting bytecode at runtime, heap-allocating objects to represent floating-point numbers, not having homogeneous-type arrays that can store their elements contiguously in memory but which must indirect them, etc. etc. etc.?

Alternately, what world are you living in where everything a program does is CPU-bound and must be done efficiently? In this world, what led you to examine or try Python in the first place?
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-29 02:41:49+00:00
You're getting downvoted, but IMO what you're saying is exactly true, and I've seen it happen.

In my experience, pre-2015 or so, offshoring was limited in its utility. Communication was a bitch because videoconferencing from everyday laptops wasn't quite there yet, and a lot of the favored offshoring centers like India had horrible time zone overlap with the US. And perhaps most importantly, companies as a whole weren't used to fully supporting remote colleagues.

Now, though, if I interact with the majority of my colleagues over Zoom/Teams/Meet anyway, what difference does it matter where they're sitting? I've worked with absolutely phenomenal developers from Argentina, Poland and Ukraine, and there was basically no difference logistically between working with them and American colleagues. Even the folks in Eastern Europe shifted their day slightly later so that we would get about 4 hours of overlap time, which was plenty of time for communication and collaboration, and IMO made folks even more productive because it naturally enforced "collaboration hours" vs. "heads down hours".

I understand why people like remote, but I agree, US devs pushing for remote should understand they're going to be competing against folks making less than half their salaries.
by epiccoleman | 2025-08-29 02:41:54+00:00
> 'biological' mental illness is tightly coupled to qualitative mental state, and bidirectionally at that. Not only do your chemicals influence your thoughts, your thoughts influence your chemicals, and it's possible for a vulnerable person to be pushed over the edge by either kind of input. We like to think that 'as long as nothing is chemically wrong' we're a-ok, but the truth is that it's possible for simple normal trains of thought to latch your brain into a very undesirable state.

It's interesting to see you mention this. After reading this post yesterday I wound up with some curious questions along these lines. I guess my question goes something like this:

This article seems to assert that 'mental illness' must always have some underlying representation in the brain - that is, mental illness is caused by chemical imbalances or malformation in brain structure. But is it possible for a brain to become 'disordered' in a purely mental way? i.e. that to any way we know of "inspecting" the brain, it would look like a the hardware was healthy - but the "mind inside the brain" could somehow be stuck in a "thought trap"? Your post above seems to assert this could be the case.

I think I've pretty much internalized a notion of consciousness that was purely bottom-up and materialistic. Thoughts are the product of brain state, brain state is the product of physics, which at "brain component scale" is deterministic. So it seems very spooky on its face that somehow thoughts themselves could have a bidirectional relationship with chemistry.

I spent a bunch of time reading articles and (what else) chatting with Claude back and forth about this topic, and it's really interesting - it seems there are at least some arguments out there that information (or maybe even consciousness) can have causal effects on "stuff" (matter). There's the "Integrated Information Theory" of consciousness (which seems to be, if not exactly "fringe", at least widely disputed) and there's also this interesting notion of "downward causation" (basically the idea that higher-level systems can have causal effects on lower levels - I'm not clear on whether "thought having causal effects on chemistry" fits into this model).

I've got 5 or 6 books coming my way from the local library system - it's a pretty fascinating topic, though I haven't dug deep enough to decide where I stand.

Sorry for the ramble, but this article has at least inspired some interesting rabbit-hole diving for me.

I'm curious - when you assert "Not only do your chemicals influence your thoughts, your thoughts influence your chemicals" - do you have evidence that backs that notion up? I'm not asking to cast doubt, but rather, I guess, because it sounds like maybe you've got some sources I might find interesting as I keep reading.
by lossolo | 2025-08-29 02:42:19+00:00
China was the world’s largest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries (with exceptions being parts of the 19th and 20th centuries, when Western Europe and then the U.S. surged ahead after the industrial revolution).

And China is no longer just catching up in many industries, it is leading innovation[1]. Many in China believe they are simply returning to their natural state being the world’s number one economy.

Your analysis is through the lens of Western culture. The definition and understanding of freedom and harmony are entirely different in China. I was in China and experienced this myself, so this is firsthand experience, not something I picked up from blogs or news. And China is not like Russia at all, Russia fills its government with oligarchs, while China fills it with science and technology experts[2]

> And when it does, a generation of people (who grew up wealthy) will start to think about corruption, human rights, and having a say in what goes on.

In the Chinese context, freedom is defined collectively (freedom from chaos, poverty, or foreign domination etc), whereas here in the West it's individual liberty. Harmony and social stability are seen as more valuable than political pluralism, so authoritarian governance is culturally framed as legitimate. Chinese leaders and citizens remember periods of fragmentation and civil war (warlord era, Japanese invasion, cultural revolution). There is a widespread belief that adopting a Western adversarial political model could reintroduce instability and weaken national unity so something China cannot risk given its size and diversity.

That is the main reason this will not happen, you will not see a liberal style democracy in China. This claim is repeated all the time, but it is a total misunderstanding of their culture, ethnicity, and history. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (over 2k years since the Qin Dynasty), where stability and order are prioritized.

1. https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-be...

2. https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/chinas-xi-stacks-government...
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-29 02:42:38+00:00
> I've come to the conclusion that the only proper response to norm violations is a 10x counter-response.

That may be true --- or even a 100x response. But the thing is that a 100x (and probably even a 10x) response to many of these norm violations would take us well beyond the entire realm of lawfare. A 10x response would be at least "ignore everything the entire federal court system says because it's irredeemably corrupted", if not actual armed resistance.

Even going back well before Trump, norm violations like McConnell holding Scalia's seat open already made it clear that the Supreme Court was no longer a meaningful institution (if it ever had been). I don't mean I didn't like some of their decisions. I mean the entire thing is a meaningless charade, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and 366 in leap years. And that is just one example. The level of "counter-response" required to recover from the norm violations we've had over the last 10-20 years requires an overhaul to the very foundations of our system of government.
by jolmg | 2025-08-29 02:42:38+00:00
> Note that TOTP can be handled by any app of the user's choosing

The banks are probably using the same standard behind the scenes, but they don't allow alternate TOTP apps. There's no point where they give you a key to set it up in an alternate app.

I suppose part of the point is a lack of trust in users' ability to handle their own security, and the possibility that they may provide such a key to a compromised TOTP app.

> hardware tokens

It'd be excellent if banks moved back to purpose-specific hardware like that. Even better if it were some standard with multiple providers, like FIDO2.
by kazinator | 2025-08-29 02:42:45+00:00
Yes, the manager knows what tasks you're assigned and what priority they are.

So how does that work then, if you can't be interrupted?

Boss has a new task for you which is higher priority than your current highest one.

How do you learn about this?

OK, you are not interrupt-driven, so you must poll. The boss puts the task into some task tracking system, which you check every hour.

1. Isn't the hourly check an interruption? (You actually are interrupt-driven: you have a timer which interrupts you every hour so that you poll the task list.)

Polling still requires multitasking: multitasking between the polling loop and its timer, and your higher priority task.

2. What if something comes up which can't wait up to an hour? Maybe you should poll the task list every five minutes. Then when you see it change, just do not call that a notification.

How about the scenario in which we remove management; they don't bring value. Well, you are doing a job which means doing things other people want done. Instead of your boss feeding your tasks, those customers that were behind your boss are now doing it.

Those people don't have access to the internal task system, so polling is out of the question. They use strictly messaging systems with notifications.

Nope; they only way you can escape being interrupted by notifications is if you have a manager who lets you do leisurly polling.