MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Night_Thastus | 2025-08-15 16:58:57+00:00
Does that just profile cmake's time to configure and generate, or the underlying compile of each file as well? Configuration and generation are only seconds when done from scratch - the build is more like 20 minutes.

Just trying to add that argument with 3.26.5 on Rocky Linux 9, I get 'Unknown argument --profiling-format=google-trace'.

Not sure why, as cmake --help clearly states it should be there...

--profiling-format=<fmt> = Output data for profiling CMake scripts. Supported formats: google-trace --profiling-output=<file> = Select an output path for the profiling data enabled through --profiling-format.
by vunderba | 2025-08-15 16:58:57+00:00
I don't think anyone is "mysticizing" the language. It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.

IMHO spelling is an inapt analogy. Every single word I can communicate orally, I can write. Sure I might mess up "I before E" or some other minor issue, but I'm BUILDING the word from first principles, e.g., syllable phonemes. That's why kids are taught to "sound it out" at a young age.

The closest equivalent you have in logographs might be radicals.
by therealpygon | 2025-08-15 16:58:58+00:00
Often this is the only way.

The predatory nature of the industry isn’t much different than current laws on the service industry wages and tipping. For anyone not a big name movie star paid millions for their appearance, they are getting (comparably) below-minimum wage pay and hoping for tips (royalties, if any). The industry puts a lot of the real risk on the lowest levels who have no decisions, but they take the highest reward while blaming those people for bad decisions. That doesn’t sound fair to me.

It’s also a lot like our grocery supply chain…layers upon layers, each trying to take their cut of revenue as it passes from distributor, to distributor, to distributor, to… most people have no idea how many different companies are taking a cut while the farmers are squeezed. Not much different for content creators.

The problem isn’t that goods and services are expensive, it’s all the companies adding little or no value, or underpaying creators, just to maximize their own profits from the creations. YouTube sells ads, demonetizes the creators, but still run ads and keep all the revenue. Spotify just decides not to pay creators who don’t make enough while they sell ads that run before and after their music.

People are happy to pay toward the creation of content, otherwise Patreon, Twitch (I know…as bad as YT but at least a decent amount goes to the creator), and other “direct” (relatively) to creator sites wouldn’t exist.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-15 16:59:07+00:00
Again, ON PAPER your math works because you’ve narrowed down the problem to a conveniently limited set of variables that, in a controlled experiment, would produce ideal outcomes. And just like physicists keep learning time and time again of late, just because the math works on paper doesn’t mean the thing is real.

Yours (and every other detractor trying to eSplain Econ101 and market forces to me) ignores the complex realities of the marketplace. It ignores tax structures that benefit demographic groups over others in homebuying and wealth accumulation, incentives to hoard property for passive income through rent in lieu of releasing the property onto the market for sale, tax savings for owning secondary properties or rolling over capital gains, regulations that make teardowns harder until the structure is condemned and thus constrict supply, of homeowners who will go to extreme lengths to preserve paper valuations instead of building more housing.

Taken as a whole, with all the variables, and it’s readily apparent that it’s not “simply” a supply and demand issue.
by ticulatedspline | 2025-08-15 16:59:13+00:00
- LLMs don't need to be intelligent to take jobs, bash scripts have replaced people.

- Even if CEOs are completely out of touch and the tool can't do the job you can still get laid off in an ill informed attempt to replace you. Then when the company doesn't fall over because the leftover people, desperate to keep covering rent fill the gaps it just looks like efficiency to the top.

- I don't think our tendency anthropomorphize LLMs is really the problem here.
by OldfieldFund | 2025-08-15 16:59:17+00:00
Btw, you can buy a MacBook Pro Max M1 16" 64GB SoC RAM, 1TB SSD in excellent condition, with warranty, refurbished by Amazon with a brand new battery for $1,500 right now.

Corporations are switching laptops on a 3-year cycle.

Next year, there will be a flood of M2s, in 2 years, M3s, 3 years, M4s, nada, nada.
by mdp2021 | 2025-08-15 16:59:30+00:00
> "The rest of that list" is not relevant

Last time I checked it (here I barely have any Internet connection) it contained complaints from people unable to straightly conduct their usual web activities, of a sensitivity nature above Peppa Pig.

Hysterics? Possibly. But the first steps that could lead to the worse are taken. I have little trust in the profiles I see to have faith the future steerings.

> Is this you?

If you were suggesting that I could be behind childish acts, in the proper societies I lament are going missing you were supposed to apologize.

My age is private, not low.
by dkdcio | 2025-08-15 16:59:43+00:00
if it’s not actually living it’s not making intelligent decisions. if I make a grocery list, and go to my store, and the store isn’t there, what do I do? I make an intelligent decision about what to do next (probably investigating wtf happened, then going to the second nearest store)

my genuine question is how does a LLM handle that situation? and as you point out, it’s an absurd comparison
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-15 16:59:46+00:00
> there’s no obvious algorithm for discovering mathematical proofs or solving difficult problems that could be implemented in a classical, pre-Gen AI computer program.

Fundamentally opposite. Computer algorithms have been part of math research since they where invented, and mathematical proof algorithms are widespread and excellent.

The llms that are now "intelligent enough to do maths" are just trained to rephrase questions into prolog code.
by simonw | 2025-08-15 16:59:47+00:00
For anyone wondering, the article clarifies that "A NIF is a function that is implemented in C instead of Erlang".

I had a bunch of fun getting ChatGPT Code Interpreter to write (and compile and test) C extensions for SQLite last year: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/23/building-c-extensions-...
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-15 16:59:53+00:00
OK, that's an interesting point. There's not "the housing market". There are several markets, with some overlap. The market for starter homes is not filled by building 4+ bedrooms, still less the market for studio apartments.

And my impression is that, when we talk about the housing shortage, we're talking about apartments to starter homes, not about 4+ bedrooms. So what we seem to have is a disconnect between what the market needs and what builders are building.

But maybe that's only "seem". I'd bet that a 4+ bedroom house sits on the market a lot longer than a starter house. Maybe starter houses are being built, but not enough to satisfy the market, and so they're going almost immediately?
by igouy | 2025-08-15 17:00:00+00:00
Well afaik is an argument based on lack of evidence.

And why does from the get-go on parallel matter? Wouldn't it be OK if the initial focus was something else and then there was a change of focus?

And processes as first class depends what you mean: https://live.exept.de/doc/online/english/overview/basicClass...

And hot code swapping: Smalltalk.
by jp1016 | 2025-08-15 17:00:04+00:00
Really neat work! I’ve been experimenting with something similar running a local Whisper model for quick transcriptions, then organizing the notes in a tabbed interface so I can keep different topics separate without switching windows. Vertical tabs have been surprisingly nice for keeping ongoing transcription sessions alongside reference material (I use beavergrow.com for this, but anything with a good tab system would work).
by Supermancho | 2025-08-15 17:01:23+00:00
> Marx's theory is completely antithetical to economic freedom, which is a basic freedom recognized in most modern democratic nation

Writing that is interpreted as wrong or having ideas that aren't modern, does not constitute a harm to a society.

> So yeah, if anything we should wonder why Marx's teachings weren't declared unconstitutional earlier.

Constitutions outline powers. They do not dictate morality. How ideas can be unconstitutional by existence, is something to wonder about.
by stroz | 2025-08-15 17:01:31+00:00
Thank you so much for sharing this! What you’re doing is honestly amazing. You skip the negotiation about whether we’re allowed to be human with each other. You just assume connection is the default.

The truth is that people mirror the energy you bring. Show up tentative, they’ll be tentative. Show up like old friends, and suddenly you are.

Just refusing to install the system default software that makes us all strangers. And teaching us that the only thing between us and connection is believing we need permission to care.
by al_borland | 2025-08-15 17:02:00+00:00
It’s also important to realize that not every successful or worthwhile business has millions or billions of users that requires extreme optimization and scalability.

I work on internal tools at my company. We know how big our environment is, there isn’t much sensitivity to performance, and we don’t see random spikes that we don’t cause ourselves. Yet I had someone on my team who was obsessed with optimizing everything, to the point of changing his entire code base to a new language that only he knew, so he could save a few milliseconds on paper. Aside from him, no one noticed, no one cared. His optimizations just introduced risk, as he was the only one who could support what he built. When he left, we threw the whole thing away at management’s demand. Had it been a little more simple and slow, someone else probably could have taken it over without as much effort.
by 9rx | 2025-08-15 17:02:01+00:00
> It doesn't follow from there that increased supply wouldn't reduce prices.

Increasing the supply of labor, thus reducing the cost to build the home, was spoken to.

The average construction worker makes $30/hr. Get that down to minimum wage and the cost of a house will come down pretty quickly. You still might not be able to afford one on a minimum wage salary, perhaps, but the goal of reducing housing prices is met.
by cjs_ac | 2025-08-15 17:02:03+00:00
My theory is that there are three regimes: Not Scaling, Scaling, and Antiscaling.

Not Scaling is about crossing and shoring up your moat. Scaling is when your app has enough hype around it that your customers recruit new customers, and all you have to do is add new machines or shard the database or whatever to handle increased demand.

Antiscaling is when you turn into the thing that everyone hates about the modern web. Antiscaling is when intelligence agencies want to talk to you about how your chat app is used by terrorists, when cities want to licence access to your ridesharing or takeaway delivery app, when pieces of legislation are passed that are specifically designed to target your company, when you're sufficiently well-known as the founder of an app that people are making memes about you and tracking your personal movements.

You don't have to take over the world, you just have to make money. People who try to change the world often change it for the worse; just try to make something useful, and maybe the world will like it.
by gdubs | 2025-08-15 17:02:05+00:00
As a kid, I started to get really into computer graphics. But, the textbooks I got as a 15 year old from Borders Books were full of calculus that was literally greek to me. I was also not really enjoying my public school math education. One day I brought the book to my math teacher and he was dismissive and basically said, 'you're not going to understand any of this – it's college and beyond."

Such a giant missed opportunity that makes me more angry now as an adult with my own kids.

In the end, I'm self-taught in so many areas that it means throughout the years I've had to confront gaps and work to fill them in. And there's definitely a healthy amount of 'learn to unlearn' because, sometimes you're lucky enough to find a book or a person who explains things to you in a totally different way that makes it all click.

Anyway – it's never too late; big fan of life-long learning and continual self-improvement.
by bitpush | 2025-08-15 17:02:07+00:00
I find author's position to be very confusing.

From https://albanbrooke.com/

> But over the past ~30 years, the internet has become much more commercial. Every page is optimized for engagement, so your attention can be resold to ad companies. It just kinda sucks.

later in the same page

> I'm the Head of Marketing for Buzzsprout, a podcast SaaS built on RSS.

And https://www.buzzsprout.com/ads is exactly what you'd expect. The author has no trouble working and getting paid for the same thing they lament.
by spwa4 | 2025-08-15 17:02:12+00:00
Glad that you had to dig that deep to find something wrong. But: SpaceX was taken over from NASA/DoD (~ TRW). People generally don't say that because the people actually involved feel that it was NASA that abandoned them/their ambitions rather than the other way around.

But you know the same story emerges as elsewhere. Mr. Musk's was a financier, nothing else.
by barbazoo | 2025-08-15 17:02:14+00:00
Great writeup, lots of wisdom in there. Then I looked for other insightful articles and lo and behold

> Real connection beyond social media.

> Your social operating system. Get perfectly timed reminders to connect with the most important people in your life—never lose touch again.

Obviously it's another app, just another attention rent-seeker that wants to inject itself into human connections so they can make more and more and more money.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-15 17:02:25+00:00
In the sunbelt, they buy it, jack up rents, evict tenants, and basically turbocharge being a slumlord until they find new buyers for more than what they paid. Due to supply constraints, they often succeed in this process (which repeats under new landlords) multiple times before the market becomes too pricey and further increases aren’t tolerated (which is why organization is on the rise - the rent is too damn high for no valid reason). On paper, yes, the homes should devalue, but take a look at places like New England where absolute shitholes can fetch half a million dollars and it becomes clear that property depreciation is happening far slower than pricing inflation.
by tshaddox | 2025-08-15 17:02:28+00:00
Funny enough, an alleged Chesterton's fence is very likely to be one of these derelict electric fences. People who advocate the "Chesterton's fence" argument (which is similar to and equally misguided as the precautionary principle) are essentially saying "whoever built this fence either didn't understand why they built the fence, or didn't manage to explain their reasoning to other people affected by the fence, and therefore it's our responsibility to either respect the fence forever or invest an unbounded amount of resources trying to discover the reason the fence was built."
by marcellus23 | 2025-08-15 17:03:02+00:00
Sure, but if you're making a point about LLMs in general, you need to use examples from best-in-class models. Otherwise your examples of how these models fail are meaningless. It would be like complaining about how smartphone cameras are inherently terrible, but all your examples of bad photos aren't labeled with what phone was used to capture. How can anyone infer anything meaningful from that?
by exoverito | 2025-08-15 17:03:08+00:00
Over dependence on renewables and battery storage can be a strategic vulnerability, for example an extended stretch of cloudy and windless days. Freak weather events like hail can wipe out entire solar installations, cold snaps can disable wind turbines, batteries underperform significantly in extreme cold. And if we electrify everything, such as mandating electric stoves and heat pumps, then such an event would be a double whammy, since electricity demand spikes even more and most people won't have natural gas as a separate energy source. The Texas winter storm in 2021 is a cautionary example of what could happen.

Moreover, there's a distinct possibility of future weaponized weather modification, such as an enemy power releasing aerosols to reduce solar production, or saboteurs starting forest fires.
by fragmede | 2025-08-15 17:03:19+00:00
but also no stipulation otherwise is made by the contest runners. As the runners of a contest, I would presume they didn't give the answer to any of the test takers before they took the test because that would defeat the whole point of having the contest! If you think people/machines are cheating absent an explicit claim as such, I can't help you, but that seems unlikely to me.

It's entirely possible that both Google and OpenAI independently bribed a question writer for the answers and fed that into the LLM to be used as training data, and have not been discovered doing so, and that only then was the LLM able to generate the correct answer, but that seems a bit far fetched to me.
by Aunche | 2025-08-15 17:03:34+00:00
> The odds of the human species successful navigation of this extinction - at a civilization level - event is almost zero.

In that case, you should have no problem accepting this deal. I'll give you $10 right now. In exchange, you'll give me half of your net worth in 100 years (assume both of us will somehow be alive if civilization survives).

Humans are sub-Saharan tropical apes that somehow made it to every major landmass and climate zone in the world on stone age technology. As a species we'll be fine. Agriculture is only about 4% of the world's economic output, which gives us a lot of headroom. If it comes down it it, we triple that and probably feed the world off entirely off hydroponics in Canada and Russia.

> We had to reduce emissions 30 years ago, and simply chose not to

Greenhouse gas emissions have been rising to fuel growth that allows billions of people to achieve a quality of life that we would consider basic. Meanwhile, America's greenhouse gas emissions are below what they were 30 years ago. On a per-capita basis, they are over 25% lower.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states

> we'd have to create a coordinated global Manhattan Project around alternative energy

Solar energy has been exponentially growing for over a decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

> The US currently has the stupidest president it has ever had

Sure, but even Trump turns into TACO when the situation calls for it.
by throwup238 | 2025-08-15 17:03:44+00:00
> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.

I’ve actually done this all the time as a bilingual speaker with my language in Cyrillic. It doesn’t happen often but once in a while I’ll freeze and be unable to remember which glyph makes which sound when switching alphabets/languages.
by dang | 2025-08-15 17:04:17+00:00
Related. Others?

Ask HN: PG's 'Do Things That Don't Scale' manual examples? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38010992 - Oct 2023 (316 comments)

Do Things that Don't Scale (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26086196 - Feb 2021 (31 comments)

PG: “Do Things that Don't Scale” – What are some examples? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25898671 - Jan 2021 (2 comments)

Ask HN: How did you 'do things that don't scale' for your B2B startup? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15290433 - Sept 2017 (9 comments)

Do Things That Don’t Scale (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14957007 - Aug 2017 (37 comments)

Do Things that Don't Scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041765 - July 2013 (207 comments)
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-15 17:04:27+00:00
"Playing" misses the forest for the trees when the result is dystopian drain on society at best to enabling genocides in Myanmar at worst. Choices have consequences and culpability.

Those who worked for IBM voluntarily and serviced the Third Reich if they suspected what was happening and did nothing were collaborators in mass murder. Engineering and all professional disciplines must be restrained by honesty and ethics.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-15 17:04:38+00:00
> economic freedom, which is a basic freedom recognized in most modern democratic nations

The freedom to work your butt till the grave for little trinkets you don't need and renting a house you can no longer buy while your feudal lords fly around with private jets, buy out Venice for their wedding or send their wife to space. That's the life as Adam Smith intended it to be!
by intalentive | 2025-08-15 17:04:43+00:00
>Why is housing supply so severely restricted in US cities and suburbs? Urban economists offer two primary hypotheses: homeowner self-interest and political fragmentation. Homeowners, who outnumber and have organizational advantages over renters, are said to lobby against development to protect their property values. The fragmentation hypothesis emphasizes that development's negative externalities are borne locally while most of the benefits accrue regionally or nationally, leading localities to block housing.

These two hypotheses sound like the same thing to me. Homeowners organize to protect themselves from negative externalities that affect their property values (and quality of life).
by barbazoo | 2025-08-15 17:04:49+00:00
Chesterton’s fence isn’t “respect it forever” or “spend infinite resources”. It’s “don’t tear it down until you understand why it’s there”. The whole point is to avoid breaking something whose purpose you haven’t yet understood, because the original builders might have had a good reason that isn’t obvious to you. Once you’ve understood it, you’re free to remove it if that reason no longer applies.
by tjr | 2025-08-15 17:04:57+00:00
I might even think that a symbolic chess program is in some sense more intelligent than a modern LLM. It has a concrete model of the world it operates in along with representation what it can, cannot, and is trying to, do. When LLMs get the right answer, it seems more like... highly-optimized chance, rather than coming from any sort of factual knowledge.
by chubot | 2025-08-15 17:05:12+00:00
It is pretty profound. AI / deep learning failed to solve self-driving, but they’re good at moving text and code around, which humans still have to check

It’s arguable whether that’s “doing”

I’d say it’s more spreading knowledge around, which is super valuable, but not what is being advertised

The problem with self driving is that bad decisions can kill you, before anyone can check if it was a bad decision
by paulpauper | 2025-08-15 17:05:28+00:00
Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was Stripe. But in fact they're famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition.

This was 12 years ago. Even he couldn't have imagined how successful it would still become. I wish there were I way I could have invested in it.