MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-08-09 15:01:04+00:00
To share my experience, 25 years ago I looked into AI and had inclinations to see what scaling compute would do. It took no time to find advisors who told me the whole program I had in mind could not gain ethics approval and was mathematically limited. The former road block is now lifted due to the fact that nobody cares about ethics any more, the latter seems to be the remaining hurdle.
by _fat_santa | 2025-08-09 15:01:43+00:00
I remember one day I took my car to the mechanic and saw they were doing a head job on a Toyota Sienna (the minivan) that was used as a Taxi. Took a peek inside and realized the car had something like 450k miles.

Now a proud 4Runner owner, I see on forums all the time guys bragging about hitting 300k, 400k and as high as 600k in their 4Runners.
by messe | 2025-08-09 15:02:10+00:00
Bounds safety by default, nullability is opt-in and checks are enforced by the type-system, far less "undefined behaviour", less implicit integer casting (the ergonomics could still use some work here), etc.

This is on top of the cultural part, which has led to idiomatic Zig being less likely to heap allocate in the first place, and more likely to consider ownership in advance. This part shouldn't be underestimated.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-09 15:02:27+00:00
If we only ever “saw” the universe through naked eye observation, we’d “know” a lot less about our universe. Creating waveforms or spectrographs of sound would be similar since humans can’t see sound, should we never be allowed to use those. We can’t see x-rays, so should doctors just have to guess at where your bones are broken?

The fact that humans can over come their limited abilities from their natural senses to be able to experience real world in wider gamuts is a very cool thing. These types of astro images are real world data. It’s not some genAI made up from thin air. People are not rendering things in some 3d software and passing it off as real, or making obviously impossible comps. These are just presenting data that exists that we can’t “see” without help.

Again, I’m all for managing expectations. Every time I let someone look through my telescope, I remind them it is not going to be what they’ve seen from Hubble or anything else online.
by amoshebb | 2025-08-09 15:03:20+00:00
Some folks are posting about the regular flights over Panama, and I’ve seen talk about ending screwworm with a “gene drive”, but I also feel that it doesn’t feel necessary.

But a third option I don’t see talked about a lot: finish the job. We could drop sterile flies all over the USA and Mexico all the way into panama with 1950s tech. We have drones now, surely some inexpensive paper planes shoved out of the back of hercs could cover roughly all of south america for fairly cheap.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-09 15:04:18+00:00
> There is simply no justification to make that equivalence.

I explained in some detail exactly why this equivalence exists. I actually have a small hope that this time there are enough people who think it's a bad idea that we don't have to watch this play out for decades before the realisation as we did with C and C++.

Yes it's exactly Rice's Theorem, it's that simple and that drastic. You can choose what to do when you're not sure, but you can't choose (no matter how much effort you imagine applying) to always be sure†, that Undecidability is what Henry Rice proved. The languages you mention choose to treat "not sure" the same as "nope", like Rust does, you apparently prefer languages like Zig or C++ which instead treat "not sure" as "it's fine". I have explained why that's a terrible idea already.

The underlying fault, which is why I'm confident this reproduces, is in humans. To err is human. We are going to make mistakes and under the Rust model we will curse, perhaps blame the compiler, or the machine, and fix our mistake. In C++ or Zig our mistake compiles just fine and now the software is worse.

† For general purpose languages. One clever trick here is that you can just not be a general purpose language. Trivial semantic properties are easily decided, so if your language can make the desired properties trivial then there's no checking and Rice's Theorem doesn't apply. The easy example is, if my language has no looping type features, no recursive calls, nothing like that, all its programs trivially halt - a property we obviously can't decidably check in a general purpose language.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-08-09 15:04:22+00:00
It does have an interpreter for the full language, that's what Miri uses [0]. In fact, Miri doesn't even have its own evaluator, it just adds additional features to the rustc const-evaluation. The big limitations are that it doesn't have much support for syscalls or other calls into non-Rust code, and it emulates all multithreaded code on a single thread.

[0] https://github.com/rust-lang/miri
by oblio | 2025-08-09 15:04:26+00:00
Weirdly, the fact that the Windows and MacOS versions will be paid makes me more optimistic.

Customizing at least the Windows window manager isn't for the faint of heart and its architecture doesn't have a lot in common with Linux so such an effort is very far from a straightforward port, and as a result most Linux desktop software and especially stuff that deeply integrates with the desktop environment is basically never ported or the port is incomplete, buggy, short lived, etc.

KDE4 was supposed to fully support Windows and 15+ years later I'm fairly sure that dream is dead.
by self_awareness | 2025-08-09 15:04:45+00:00
So I guess it's also a common knowledge that a compressed stream needs to be uncompressed in order to use it. So argumenting that compressed stream takes smaller space on a floppy disk doesn't mean that it will also take the same amount of bytes in memory.

Also I'd argue if HTTP1 can be treated as a pure text format, since it requires \r and \n as EOL markers, even on systems that only use \n. Strict binary requirements like this shouldn't be needed if it was a text protocol.
by andrewl | 2025-08-09 15:05:44+00:00
Some would say Harvard and Yale are the Oxford and Cambridge of the US. But we’re a big country, and we have a lot of schools. Many lists of top schools include these, alphabetically ordered:

Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Rice University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University

But this discussion of rankings reminds me of a quote from John Allen Paulos:

In fact, trying to convert a partial ordering into a total one is, I think, at the root of many problems. Reducing intelligence to a linear ordering—a number on an IQ scale—does violence to the complexity and incomparabilities of people’s gifts.
by rtkwe | 2025-08-09 15:06:20+00:00
It heavily depends on the workload, if one node needs to interact commonly with the memory on another node, like calculating the output of the weights stored on node the other node for the LLM, it's going to be dog slow because it has to wait 100x as long as it does for local. If you can batch the work into chunks that mostly get processed on one node then get passed to another then it can be parallelized easily.

eg if the individual layers of your model can fit on one node and the output can be pipelined so work can continue cascading through the various nodes it'd do well. But because the current word changes the next word a lot on LLMs you can't pipeline it. But you can see it in this [0] image from the attached blog post when he was testing llama.cpp, each node processes a batch of work and passes it off to the next node then goes idle.

[0] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/fram...
by hedgehog | 2025-08-09 15:06:57+00:00
This doesn't seem like a bad idea but let's follow it a few steps. If a key tactic is to take share by shipping LLM-friendly consumer GPUs, one question is would this work. Setting aside the technical issues, they'd certainly sell some. They'd be limited by software, that's still much better on Nvidia, so it would be people with a near-term need for inference at lower cost than Nvidia's going rate. Two things to think about:

1) How might Nvidia etc respond? They've made one-off SKUs for crypto, they could certainly respond quickly with a part that matched on memory but had much better software (meaning, more compatible with tools and better performance. AMD doesn't have the software, but their hardware is find and they could similarly up on-board memory. So Intel would really have to compete on price.

2) Ok, now we've found some 2nd or 3rd place success in a business built on logic fabbed at TSMC and DRAM from Samsung or Micron. If this is the future, why have fabs or any of the associated R&D?

I don't know what the right answers are but maintaining Intel at anything resembling its current size seems like a pretty tough puzzle.
by whynotmaybe | 2025-08-09 15:07:31+00:00
> This is maintained with stringent animal movement controls, surveillance, trapping, and following the proven science to push the NWS barrier south in phases as quickly as possible.

Why add "proven" before science?

Nobody expects the USDA to handle such problems with "unproven science", for whatever it could be.

For decades they've made the sterilized flies by exposing them to gamma radiation that damages their reproductive system and it's been effective.

Am I getting doubtful of every announcement from this administration or are they trying to tackle conspiracy theories from the start?
by jmkni | 2025-08-09 15:07:45+00:00
what's funny is that newer models will now be trained on the exact question, "Without adding third-party dependencies, how can I compress a Data stream with zstd in Swift on an iPhone?" and similar questions to it, because of this post

maybe the key to training future llm's is to write angry blog posts about the things they aren't good at and get them to the front page of hn?
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-08-09 15:07:45+00:00
As far as I'm aware, it's always been the other way around: Miri adds some features on top of rustc's const-evaluation code. The limitations of the latter are mainly self-imposed, due to the issues of exposing the different runtime models to programs. (E.g., you don't want to create allocations in const code that get deallocated at runtime.) Indeed, since 2019, the full functionality can be exposed with the unstable -Zunleash-the-miri-inside-of-you flag [0].

[0] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/56123
by rowanG077 | 2025-08-09 15:08:20+00:00
> That depends what you mean by "safer", but it is an empirical fact that unsound methods (like tests and code reviews) are extremely effective at preventing bugs, so the claim that formal methods are the only way is just wrong (and I say this as a formal methods person)

I agree that tests and reviews are somewhat effective. That's not the point. The point is that if you look at the history of programming languages simplicity in general goes against safety. Simplicity also goes against human understanding of code. C and assembly are extremely simple compared to java, python, C#, typescript etc. yet programs written in C and assembly are much harder to understand for humans. This isn't just a PL thing either. Simplicity is not the same as easy, it often is the opposite.

> I don't understand the logical implication. From the fact that there exists a complicating extension of a language that's safer in some practical way than the original you conclude that complexity always offers correctness benefits? This just doesn't follow logically, and you can immediately see it's false because Zig is both simpler and safer than C++ (and it's safer than C++ even if its simplicity had no correctness benefits at al

It's the greatest example of you take a simple language, you add a ton of complexity and it becomes more safe. You are right that zig is simpler and safer, but it's a green field language. Else I might as well say rust is more safe than zig and also more complex. The point is as to isolate simplicity as the factor as much as possible.

I would even say that zig willingly sacrifices safety on the alter of simplicity.
by wenc | 2025-08-09 15:08:31+00:00
I've been doing intermittent fasting (16:8) since 2016 (9 years).

I have a belly and am what you would call "a little chubby". I don't exercise that much (once a week). I drink one black coffee in the morning.

After all these years of IF, net-net I haven't lost any weight, but I find if I stop IF (i.e. I start eating 3 meals a day), I feel sluggish. So in the absence of doing anything else, at least IF keeps my mind sharp.

p.s. the only times I've lost weight is when I've fasted once a week, cut out 50% of all carbs from diet, and starting lifting weights. I lost water weight at first, then plateaued because I gained muscle, then after that muscles did the work of burning excess calories.

I was that way for at least 3 years. Then I decided I loved food too much and added certain carbs back into my diet. These days I just do IF and nothing else, and my weight is stable.
by righthand | 2025-08-09 15:08:36+00:00
Yeah I agree. I accidentally walked out my front door without my keys in my pocket for the first time in my life. I called my property management company who sent over a technician to unlock the door. The management company intentionally does such a poor job that there is no spare key to my apartment. So the technician has to drill the lock. Surprise! The technician only claims they have a lock-drilling skill.

My phone dies and the technician says I have to call a locksmith and pay for it myself. Now I’m in small claims court for $1275 no good reason other than my property management company enabling extortion by a locksmith. All they had to do was hire or train someone into being competent lock driller.

Real estate industry in this city is a toxic grift game. People are very nice here, but these real estate people are the “assholes” in which everyone refers. The whole thing is rotten except for maybe 5% of landlords.
by treetalker | 2025-08-09 15:08:40+00:00
My understanding is that, yes, the weight loss results end up being similar — but that the story is not so simple (or linear) because "true" fasting activates certain metabolic pathways (e.g., mTOR) that mere calorie reduction does not, and that those pathways have different effects, such as autophagy and others that increase lifespan in different ways.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-09 15:08:44+00:00
Well, first off, I never called it a backdoor. I just laid out the pitiful security situation Apple created for their Chinese users. You're the one putting words in my mouth.

Secondly, yes, especially if it's OneDrive. Both iCloud and OneDrive are first-party software products, they are built-into their respective operating systems as native features. If BitLocker was compromised, it would be a "Windows backdoor" too.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-09 15:08:51+00:00
Capturing motion with timelapse and/or long exposure again is just a way of showing us things that we cannot “capture” on our own. We know the sky moves, we know the auroras change shape, intensity, colors, but on a timescale slower than our perception can handle. Capturing that through a camera just proves that, and is not making things up.

Your premise is just too out there. Someone only ever having seen long exposure of a waterfall is just so preposterous, and is more guilty of making shit up than the GP’s concern over faking imagery by pushing contrast/saturation in images. Yours is just totally made up nonsense trying to make a point while the other is just enhancing real data.
by wslh | 2025-08-09 15:10:34+00:00
Retiring across more than one location can be part of a holistic plan that blends health, finances, lifestyle, and legal considerations. Beyond buying two properties, you could rent one, or both depending on your capital and flexibility. Health and mobility may change with age, and by 80 or 90 you might prefer a more sedentary life in one place. For those with multiple nationalities or long-term residency rights, extended stays abroad can open even more possibilities.
by darknavi | 2025-08-09 15:10:35+00:00
A past coworker who worked on Cobalt[1] told me that they spent entirely too much time implementing stars in the sky of the game with some amount of real(ish) star system physics behind them.

I can understand people removing polish things like that if there are usability concerns, but those small things add up to a lot in an end product and are a joy to find and explore.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_(video_game)
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-08-09 15:10:39+00:00
These old economy boxes were designed to be as simple as possible. We simply don't have anything like it today. While the durability of year 2000+ vehicles has very consistently improved, their repairability is trending exactly opposite. A "lifetime" part failure can be 5x the time and effort to remove and replace compared to the pre-2000 models.
by BSDobelix | 2025-08-09 15:11:12+00:00
>Maybe I'm old-fashioned.

No your not, even in the Sun-Solaris time they asked themself why rm should be able to delete /.

>The complaints are about the effect of wilful force.

Don't make a function no one uses (because it has no function) but is able destroy the system.

Compare it to a aircraft, shutdown your fuel has probably a emergency function, make a button to instantly destroy your aircraft has no real function nor will it ever be used (aka pkg remove -af).

>Unfortunately, we now have a few people complaining about predictable, consistent behaviour with packaging that is coherent.

That's not predictable but stupidity, try to remove all pkg/Application/Apps from MacOS, Windows, OpenBSD, NetBSD or Android...will the system boot or not? All those operating-systems make a clear distinction from the base-system to "apps" and the system should ALWAYS boot to a state where you can interact with it and so should FreeBSD.

There is not a single system (no OS and no living being) in this world wheres there is a function to destroy itself would not be called a error (the worst possible one)

But hey lets tell Linus (from Linus tech-tips, a Linux beginner) it's your fault because you forgot to read 100 lines, what a wannabe elitist think, there are ZERO point's, that a system should be able to make itself not booting anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4L8Oci_2Bs
by nikolayasdf123 | 2025-08-09 15:11:21+00:00
> “Not having an answer” is not a possibility in this system - there’s always “a most likely response”, even if that makes no sense.

simple fix - probability cutoff. but in all seriousness this is something that will be fixed. don't see fundamental reason why not.

and I myself seen such hallucinations (about compression too actually) as well.
by hylaride | 2025-08-09 15:11:40+00:00
Car reliability can vary so much. Some vendors have a deserved reputation for overall quality (Toyota) where issues are usually the exception (accepting the fact that issues can always happen). Others used to have terrible reputations, but are much better now (most of the Korean brands). Some have varying QA issues, depending on model, shifting suppliers, factory, etc (GM, Stellantis). Some can mostly be reliable, but when they do break it’s expensive (VW). Sometimes the car vendor is good, but the dealer you’re at can make all the difference.

That being said, you’ll always meet somebody burned by a particular vendor (or their dealer), then swear off them forever. We’re also going through a huge shift in the market with the rise of electrification and China. In some ways electric cars can me even more reliable with fewer moving parts. In other ways the software matters more and batteries replacements can be even more expensive than a new engine in a traditional car.
by nouveaux | 2025-08-09 15:11:43+00:00
It sounds like what you're arguing for is that companies ought to have employees that are irreplaceable. Wouldn't that impose a huge risk to the company? If said employee gets hit by the proverbial bus or leaves, the company should just fold?

Companies need to build systems where everyone is replaceable to de-risk the business and not because they don't get programmers.
by bfioca | 2025-08-09 15:12:36+00:00
>...it’s a useless tool. I don’t like collaborating with chronic liars who aren’t able to openly point out knowledge gaps...

I think a more correct take here might be "it's a tool that I don't trust enough to use without checking," or at the very least, "it's a useless tool for my purposes." I understand your point, but I got a little caught up on the above line because it's very far out of alignment with my own experience using it to save enormous amounts of time.
by bigtunacan | 2025-08-09 15:12:38+00:00
In both cases it depends on the area of the state and how populous. Far southern Iowa near Whatcheer for example is mostly gravel with paved roads only in the cities and major highways, but by contrast nearly the entire corridor area is well paved. Same for most of the Boone area.

Wisconsin is no different in that. Most of Jackson, Levis, BRF, and that whole area is gravel except for major highways and in town. Pretty poorly maintained gravel at that.

The roads do seem disorganized and wandering, but much of that is because the roads are built wherever they won’t flood since we’re nothing but marshes, wetland, lakes, rivers and ponds
by throwup238 | 2025-08-09 15:13:31+00:00
There is no finishing the job. Screwworm flies have tons of reservoirs in the jungles of Central America that aren’t practical to eliminate for logistical and ecological reasons. We can only control the population in agriculturally important areas by constantly releasing the sterile male flies every year. Whenever we stop the releases, the flies bounce back in a few years.
by xg15 | 2025-08-09 15:13:40+00:00
I found Factorio being a good paradigm for that. The core game loop is essentially: "Do a task manually, then automate it; then do a higher-level task manually that only became feasible through the automation; then automate that as well, etc etc".

But throughout the game, you often drop back down into the lower level tasks, e.g. to understand problems or change the workflow. So in the end an understanding of the entire "stack" of tasks on different abstraction levels is necessary to make progress.

This always felt like a good analogy to programming, or really scientific knowledge in general.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-09 15:14:11+00:00
I am sympathetic to the reasoning as to why LLMs should not be used to help some programmers right now. But I get a little frustrated seeing many of these kinds of posts that talk about fundamental limitations of LLMs vs humans on the grounds that it cannot "logically reason" like a human does. These are limitations in the current approach to training and objectives; internally, we have no clue what is going on.

> it’s “just a statistical model” that generates “language” based on a chain of “what is most likely to follow the previous phrase”

Humans are statistical models too in an appropriate sense. The question is whether we try to execute phrase by phrase or not, or whether it even matters what humans do in the long term.

> The only way ChatGPT will stop spreading that nonsense is if there is a significant mass of humans talking online about the lack of ZSTD support.

Or you can change the implicit bias in the model by being more clever with your training procedure. This is basic stats here, not everything is about data.

> They don’t know anything, they don’t think, they don’t learn, they don’t deduct. They generate real-looking text based on what is most likely based on the information it has been trained on.

This may be comforting to think, but it's just wrong. It would make my job so much easier if it were true. If you take the time to define "know", "think", and "deduct", you will find it difficult to argue current LLMs do not do these things. "Learn" is the exception here, and is a bit more complex, not only because of memory and bandwidth issues, but also because "understand" is difficult to define.