MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by travem | 2025-08-08 23:31:13+00:00
The context in the related AP article shows that they were CEO of Cadence during the time when that company violated export control rules by selling certain technology to Chinese organizations linked to the Chinese military.

> According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Cadence, in July, agreed to plead guilty to resolve charges that it violated export controls rules to sell hardware and software to China’s National University of Defense Technology, which is linked to the Chinese military. Tan was the CEO of Cadence when the company violated the rules between 2015 and 2021.

https://apnews.com/article/intel-trump-cotton-yeary-tan-2061...
by SubiculumCode | 2025-08-08 23:31:42+00:00
Sorry, I did not mean to imply that the 30-50k ratio was active in 1932. It was about 93,020 in 1853, 280,000 in 1932, 761,000 in 2023 [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...
by OJFord | 2025-08-08 23:32:08+00:00
I would love it if Apple just fully embraced Asahi, dedicated resources to it. Imagine 'you can now run either macOS or Linux on your Mac, or both, your choice' - not an an Apple subsystem for Linux, actual Linux, and all peripherals working right across the line.

Seems like as impressive as the work & project is, it's always going to be struggling to play catch-up: you're not happy with the extent of M1 implementation, my understanding is M3/M4 just barely work headlessly.
by brailsafe | 2025-08-08 23:33:06+00:00
> Macos has no support for a second monitor

This is factually inaccurate. It's perhaps true on the Air and base model Pro, but not the others.

I hate on Apple's bs all the time, but it seems like the reality in your situation is that you got nearly the cheapest mac laptop 5 years ago, with a shitty screen, bumped the ram, and you're doing just fine still, except for some esoteric limitations that I just factored into my budget when buying one recently and aren't blocked by, namely external monitor support without MST.

I didn't get that computer at that time because of some of those limitations, sticking with my prior intel 13" until last year, until I finally convinced myself it was time. Doesn't mean they aren't worth complaining about though, I think 5 years on an Air is pretty good, they've always favored mobile utility over stationary excellence
by skeledrew | 2025-08-08 23:33:58+00:00
> That only works when the demand is actually paying

You should see the internet 20+ years ago. It was rich in forums, interest sites, etc where people just shared because they had this interesting thing they wanted to put out there. Reddit still has a bit of it, though it's mostly a mess now.

> why do we have so many licenses?

Because the way how the law works in some jurisdictions is that permission must be explicitly granted by the author via license, and some authors (who are aware of the legal requirement) just do up a thing without checking to see if there's something that fits their desires. And some want to tweak a license in some way to account for some other thing and end up creating a new license. See also CC0, 0BSD, WTFPL, Unlicense, and others [0].

BTW I'll clarify that it's not "expectations", but specifically "expectations of return". It's OK, and expected, for instance, that someone putting something out there for free wouldn't want to be held legally responsible if that thing is used in an illegal manner.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_equivalent_lic...
by littlexsparkee | 2025-08-08 23:34:04+00:00
Due to direct benefit to herders, this is easier to reinforce than methane reductions with supplement e.g. seaweed as has been posted here before, since those benefits are not captured (without a carbon market or climate-friendly consumer branding to command a premium). Even if beef was methane-free, it would still have a larger impact than chicken (without regenerative agriculture, silviculture etc) but projections show that consumption is going to grow steadily as the global middle class grows so adopting these efficiencies will be important.
by nbardy | 2025-08-08 23:35:04+00:00
The serving infrastructure becomes very efficient when serving requests in parallel.

Look at VLLM. It's the top open source version of this.

But the idea is you can service 5000 or so people in parallel.

You get about 1.5-2x slowdown on per token speed per user, but you get 2000x-3000x throughput on the server.

The main insight is that memory bandwidth is the main bottleneck so if you batch requests and use a clever KV cache along with the batching you can drastically increase parallel throughput.
by temp0826 | 2025-08-08 23:35:11+00:00
Cigars can be great sure. As the sibling comment mentioned you typically aren't supposed to inhale the smoke- however I think being that they're unfiltered and a lot bigger, you can still absorb a lot of nicotine/etc through your mouth. Probably just as much (or higher) risk of mouth/throat cancers.

I've worked at traditional ayahuasca retreats and a lot of "mapacho" (a South American style of tobacco, unprocessed but from a MUCH stronger species of tobacco, Nicotiana rustica, something like 10-20x as much nicotine as Virginia tobacco) is smoked in ceremonies, but not inhaled. You can still get a heck of a buzz from it.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-08-08 23:35:58+00:00
> just a cool thing

I think that says it all. It's gone beyond practicality for me, and I'm OK with that. I'm also satisfied with the current setup; I don't need to spend more.

I have a couple of Ecoflow's and Bluetti, and a Segway LFP battery. They all work fine so far.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-08-08 23:38:16+00:00
Not green, no.

But actually, you can see an intense enough source of (monochromatic) near-UV light, our lenses only filter out the majority of it.

And if you did, your brain would hallucinate it as purplish-blueish white. Because that's the closest color to those inputs based on your what your neural network (brain) was trained on. It's encountering something uncommon, so it guesses and present it as fact.

From this, we can determine either that you (and indeed all humans) are not actually intelligent, or alternatively, intelligence and cognition are complicated and you can't conclude its absence from the first time someone behaves in a way you're not trained to expect from your experience of intelligence.
by Eduard | 2025-08-08 23:38:38+00:00
> Paralleling 18650's is relatively easy. You need to match voltage to within a few mV and make sure the connection is really solid (welded) to ensure they stay paired perfectly.

These requirements are already not easy, and there are still plenty of things to consider for using LiPos in parallel (e.g. identical health, preferably batteries from same batch, to increase chance they age identically)
by kashunstva | 2025-08-08 23:40:51+00:00
> It's important that we don't let the cruelty of the current administration cause a backlash which leads us away from common sense.

Unfortunately, that reaction is practically axiomatic. It's tough to tell progressives to temper their responses to the abject cruelty and wantonness of this administration when the administration itself has shown no restraint whatsoever. If they would stop talking about alligators eating detainees, there's a chance of having a rational adult conversation around common ground on immigration.
by STELLANOVA | 2025-08-08 23:41:05+00:00
I got M1 Max with 64GB and 32 core GPU fro $1500 refurbished with zero cycle battery on 100%. As most companies doing refresh/write-off after 3 years 2025 is really a year where you can get a beast of machine for the money. I also have M4 Max for work and differences are only on really heavy tasks but for 3X less money I guess M1 Max is still good deal. This delay also means that M2/M3 ones will be good buy next year as well.
by hollerith | 2025-08-08 23:41:12+00:00
The average lifespan of the astronauts that did not walk on the moon might be even longer than the ones that did.

I mean, you don't have any data (or evidence) on that one way or the other; do you?

ADDED. Oops: the comment 3 levels above gives data. I regret wading into this thread.
by nullc | 2025-08-08 23:41:13+00:00
> incredibly plausible thus very difficult to spot and they believe their own lies completely and confidently.

Good liars believe themselves generally. I've long thought that this is why professional liars are so frequently victims of cons-- their ability to _believe_ is both what makes them effective liars but it also is what makes them vulnerable to other people's lies.

The LLM has an easier time being plausible than most liars in that it doesn't have any other coherent goal than plausibility. It doesn't want to make money, convince you to sleep with it, glorify its own worth. It just produces plausible output. When it's wrong it usually errors in the direction of being more plausible than the truth.

> What I missed was that so many people would use LLMs for things which aren't easily or immediately falsified.

Bingo.

Personally, I was also completely blindsided by the fact that many people like the glazing. I find it utterly repulsive even at the lower levels put out by OpenAI's commercial competitors -- so much so that I'm failing to use these tools even where they make sense. I'm not surprised that other people feel more neutral about it, but it seems inconceivable to me that anyone likes it. But clearly many do.
by sebastialonso | 2025-08-08 23:41:47+00:00
If this is correct, which I partially believe it is, it's even worse.

It's not measuring the "useful" kind of stress, like when you're on-call or in active incident handling.

It's just measuring how you approach problem solving and coding while being judged and looked at, on the spot, which is *hardly* a common scenario in real life!
Ask HN: Why do readmes still use $ in copy-pasteable commands?
by garyfirestorm | 2025-08-08 23:42:02+00:00
I often encounter this in docs/readmes `$ ls -lt` often renders with a copy button that you can easily click and when you paste it in terminal it shows up as `$ ls -lt` with an unnecessary $ causing an error $ command not found or something like that... wouldn't it make sense to just have `ls -lt` and not add the $ in front of it?
by LordDragonfang | 2025-08-08 23:43:34+00:00
> A child can make mistakes and (few shot) learn. A LLM can’t.

Considering that we literally call the process of giving an llm several attempts at a problem "few-shot reasoning", I do not understand your reasoning here.

And LLM absolutely can "gain acquire knowledge of or skill in (something)" of things within its context window (i.e. learning). And then you can bake those understandings in by making a LoRa, or further training.

If this is really your distinction that makes intelligence, the only difference between llms and human brains is that human brains have a built-in mechanism to convert short-term memory to long-term, and llms haven't fully evolved that.
by LiamPowell | 2025-08-08 23:43:47+00:00
> Is it just me or is that schematic hard to read due to bits of text being on top of each other?

This is extremely common in products that are open-source community adjacent. I assume it's some sort of stylistic choice as almost none of these labels are in their default positions and many of the default text sizes have been changed, the designer has put in additional work to make this less readable.

The purple text comes from additional fields added to the symbols (specifically these look like LCSC part numbers). When adding properties there's a checkbox to choose if they're visible on the schematic or not and normally you'd leave in unchecked. Again in this case I can only assume it's some kind of stylistic choice that I don't understand as it's a common thing to see.
by smsm42 | 2025-08-08 23:43:50+00:00
It's sad that people read the headlines and immediately start screaming "racism!". I don't know if Lip-Bu Tan has done anything wrong or not, but at least there's enough evidence to suggest a massive conflict of interest and particularly the Cadence affair stinks really bad. Maybe it turns out somehow Lip-Bu Tan is completely unconnected to any of this, but claiming this all just because he's "not of European ethnicity" is complete bullshit. It's not his ethnicity, it's his actions and connections.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-08 23:43:58+00:00
Also consider that Air Traffic Control and marine VHF radio[1] (and anything else based on old school radio) are a "standalone sound interface". It requires a formalized setting and training, sure. Rattling off grid coordinates isn't exactly relaxing, but it's a thing.

For usability, consider something more along the lines of "Hey roomba, go clean up the spill in the kitchen. [...] You missed a spot near the door."

[1]: As in maritime, not military.
by estearum | 2025-08-08 23:44:00+00:00
It’s probably something more like truth x prevalence

If you have a massive ecosystem dedicated to churning out un-truths and it can crowd out truth, then the truthiness hardly matters… in the near term at least.

In the long run, truth-seeking systems work better because it’s hard to operate effectively without it. Which I suspect we’ll re-learn in a few short months.
by serf | 2025-08-08 23:44:41+00:00
>Most of our ancestors didn't have to do anything to come here except just show up

my ancestors were war-refugees that were given asylum officially from the U.S. on my mothers side due to the atrocities committed by their former state, and my father's side had literally hundreds of members associated closely with the Western Expansion of the U.S.

To say they just showed up is so incredibly naive, and IMO it does a lot to paint the picture of current immigrants shallowly and without impact.

These people before us built this country.

These new people didn't 'just show up', either.
by lovich | 2025-08-08 23:44:44+00:00
I’ve found that a lot of my friends who are into pc gaming still haven’t grokked that ever since the crypto boom, much less the ai boom, that they are the old toys that no one wants to play with anymore.

I had a friend who legitimately could not understand why Nvidia didn’t care about their reputation in the gaming market souring even after I showed him the numbers on how much nvidia is selling to corporations now.

I don’t know if it was an inability to deal with the numbers or if it’s just culture shock at going from being a valued client to as you said “baggage”, but it was a surprising number of people in that camp
by rokob | 2025-08-08 23:45:25+00:00
Yeah but Jira is a good example of where the culture building the software shows they don’t give a shit about performance or usability. They tend to go together. I agree the talk about Linear being good because it is fast is weird but I think a lot of people who say that are actually saying the workflows are sensible and the ux is good. The feeling of speed is partially because you don’t have to click 17 times to do something simple.
by nullc | 2025-08-08 23:45:42+00:00
I noticed the obvious AI (4o in some cases, I'm guessing in comments made after it was restored)-- I skipped some of it because it was just so wordy, left some of it in because the prospect about using AI to plea for access to more AI was so weird.

I'm doubtful that the AI use itself is evidence of insincere activity: In my direct experience with GPT addicts some are absolutely Whispering Earring ( https://web.archive.org/web/20121008025245/http://squid314.l... ) victims. They use ChatGPT for everything, even to their obvious detriment, even to respond to people complaining that they're using ChatGPT or that it's harming them.
by simonw | 2025-08-08 23:45:55+00:00
You might find this updated section of the Claude system prompt interesting: https://gist.github.com/simonw/49dc0123209932fdda70e0425ab01...

> Claude critically evaluates any theories, claims, and ideas presented to it rather than automatically agreeing or praising them. When presented with dubious, incorrect, ambiguous, or unverifiable theories, claims, or ideas, Claude respectfully points out flaws, factual errors, lack of evidence, or lack of clarity rather than validating them. Claude prioritizes truthfulness and accuracy over agreeability, and does not tell people that incorrect theories are true just to be polite.

No idea how well that actually works though!
by throwup238 | 2025-08-08 23:47:23+00:00
Well that’s fun. The seastars are ravaged by Vibrio pectenicida in the same genus that includes human pathogens like the bacteria that causes cholera and various flesh eating bacteria that can infect through undercooked seafood. The latter have even begun to eat plastic and multiply in sargassum [1] so watch those cuts when swimming in Florida!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36129757
by YossarianFrPrez | 2025-08-08 23:47:27+00:00
Can you explain what you mean about 'not needing to be solved'? There are versions of that kind of critique that would seem, at least on the surface, to better apply to finance or flash trading.

I ask because scaling an system that a substantially chunk of the population finds incredibly useful, including for the more efficient production of public goods (scientific research, for example) does seem like a problem that a) needs to be solved from a business point of view, and b) should be solved from a civic-minded point of view.
by nelox | 2025-08-08 23:47:34+00:00
No widespread failures have been reported on M1s. SSDs often exceed their expected lifespan, especially when spec’d generously. But, monitoring tools can misreport, so be cautious drawing conclusions from early TBW readings.

So, when choosing a Mac, opt for higher RAM and SSD capacity to reduce swap pressure and spread wear.

If you are cautious, monitor TBW, but interpret the data with healthy skepticism.

Last, but not least, backup regularly!
by copularent | 2025-08-08 23:47:59+00:00
4o is a joke.

There must be a weird influence campaign going on.

"DEEP SEEK IS BETTER" lol.

GPT5 is incredible. Maybe it is at the level of Opus but I barely got to talk to Opus. I thought Opus was a huge jump from my limited interaction.

After about 4 hours with GPT5, I think it is completely insane. It is so smart.

For me, Opus and GPT5 are just other level. This is a jump from 3.5 to 4. I think more if anything.

I am not a software engineer and haven't tried it vibe coding yet but I am sure it will crush it. Sonnet already crushes it for vibe coding.

Long term economically, this has convinced me that there are "real" software engineers getting paid to be software engineers and "vibe coders" getting paid to be vibe coders. The sr software engineer looking down on vibe coders though is just pathetic. Real software engineers will be fine and be even more valuable. What ya'll need to be your hero Elon and make all the money?

Who cares about o3? Whatever I just talked to is beyond O3. I love the twilight zone but this is a bit much.

Maybe Opus is even better but I can't interact with Opus like this for $20.

I don't think that is true at all though. I really dislike Altman but they totally delivered.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-08-08 23:47:59+00:00
I read it as "the left should do what the right is very successfully doing." One can disagree about whether this is the right course of action, and I'm not really confident it is. Just to play devil's advocate: I would note that common "norms" of behavior often come into existence because a situation develops where both sides take arms against the other, and in these cases it becomes optimal for everyone to disarm -- hence the "norm" develops. If you view this kind of behavior as one version of "taking up arms" then maybe it's necessary for all sides to engage in the behavior before the norm reasserts itself.
by washadjeffmad | 2025-08-08 23:48:01+00:00
It's not that bad. If you're an adult making a living wage, and you're literate in some IT principles and AGI operations know-how, it's not a major onetime investment. And you can always learn. I'm sure your argument deterred a lot of your parents' generation from buying computers, too. Where would most of us be if not for that? This is a second transistor moment, right in our lifetime.

Life is about balance. If you Boglehead everything and then die before retirement, did you really live?
by simonw | 2025-08-08 23:48:38+00:00
I can't pinpoint exactly where I learned my definition of hallucination - it's been a couple of years I think - but it's been constantly reinforced by conversations I've had since then, to the point that I was genuinely surprise in the past 24 hours to learn that a sizable number of people categorize any mistake by a model as a hallucination.

See also my Twitter vibe-check poll: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1953565571934826787

Actually... here's everything I've written about hallucination on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/tags/hallucinations/

It looks like my first post that tried to define hallucination was this one from March 2023: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/10/chatgpt-internet-acces...

Where I outsourced the definition by linking to this Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_in...
by dataflow | 2025-08-08 23:48:43+00:00
> All of those issues can be solved

I've yet to see any build system solve these.

> by doing an import of the changed file into the build system's content addressed store, and creating a new version of the entire input tree.

That's going to be unusably slow and heavyweight for automatic rebuilds on a large repo. Maybe if you optimize it for a specific COW filesystem implementation that overlays things cleverly, it'd be able to scale. Or if your build tree avoids large directories and all your build tools handle symlinks fine, then you could symlink most things that don't change quickly. But I absolutely do not see this working on a large repo with the everyday filesystems people use. Not for a generic build system that allows arbitrary commands, anyway.

> You also don't need to choose between cancelling, waiting, or dropping. You can do 2 builds simultaneously

Do you have infinite CPU and RAM and money and time or something? Or are you just compiling Hello World programs? In my universe with limited resources this would not work... at all.

> These techniques are used in a build system that I work on[0].

And how exactly do you scale it the way you're describing with automatic rebuilds?

> Although it does not do automatic rebuilds like Poltergeist.

...ah.
by wisty | 2025-08-08 23:48:53+00:00
They can have a very even load if they use their nodes for training when the customer use is low, so that massively helps. If they have 3x as much hardware as they need to serve peak demand (even with throttling) this will cost a lot, unless they have a another use for lots of GPU.

Just illustrative guesses, not real numbers, I underestimate overheads here but anyway ...

Let's assume a $20k expert node can produce 500 tokens per second (15,000 per year). $5k a year for the machine per year. $5k overheads. 5 experts per token (so $50k to produce 15,000 megatokens with a 100% throughput). Say they charge up to $10 per million tokens ... yeah it's tight but I can see how it's doable.

Say they cost $100 per user per year. If it's $10 per million tokens (depends on the model) then they are budgeting 10 million tokens per user. That's like 100 books per year. The answer is that users probably don't use as much as the api would cost.

The real question is, how does it cost $10 per megatoken?

500 tokens per second per node is like 15,000 megatokens per year. So a 500 token node can bring in $150,000 per node.

Call it 5 live experts and a router. That's maybe $20k per expert per year. If it's a kilowatt power supply per expert, and $0.1 per kW power that's $1000 for power. The hardware is good for 4 years so $5k for that. Toss in overheads, and it's maybe $10k costs.

So at full capacity they can make $5 off $10 revenue. With uneven loads they make nothing, unless they have some optimisation and very good load balancing (if they can double the tokens per second then they make a decent profit).