MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajb | 2025-08-21 20:44:48+00:00
I think it was Sophie Wilson who described the DRAM market as "a game of chicken with billions of dollars". Basically the market flip flops between glut and scarcity. When there are too many fabs, there is a glut and all the manufacturers grit their teeth and lose money, until one chickens out and closes a fab. Then prices go up and the ones still in the game make money, hand over fist, until too many fabs are built for the next generation of chips and the market flips back.

I haven't personally checked this against market data, FWIW.
by ilc | 2025-08-21 20:44:50+00:00
I suspect that truly battle tested engineers will go up in value.

I don't think that it lowers the bar there, if anything the bar is far harsher.

If I'm doing normal coding I make X choices per time period, with Y impacts.

With AI X will go up and the Y / X ratio may ALSO go up, so making more decisions of higher leverage!
by pdonis | 2025-08-21 20:44:55+00:00
> Scientific disagreements are intricate matters that require the attention of highly trained experts.

Actually this isn't true, at least as far as anything the public needs to care about is concerned. There is a simple test the public can use for any scientific model: does it make accurate predictions, or not? You don't need to understand how a model works to test that. The model can use whatever intricate math it wants, and whatever other stuff it wants, internally--it could involve reading tea leaves and chicken entrails for all you know. But its output is predictions that you can test against actual experiments.

The biggest problem I see with "establishment" science today is that it doesn't work this way. There is no mechanism for having an independent record that the public can access of predictions vs. reality. It's all tied up in esoteric papers.
by DrewADesign | 2025-08-21 20:44:58+00:00
No— I’m not assuming that but I absolutely can see how what I wrote could come across like that. Dominant voices in many communities change more frequently than the core principles of the people in them— some people just get louder, more visible, and more numerous and others fall to the wayside, especially when there’s marketing or some sort of ‘movement’ involved. (And there’s all sorts of ‘movements’ involved in tech hype and some of them are bovine.)

Your read on the situation concurs with mine. Cheers.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-08-21 20:45:09+00:00
That’s not what I said though. LLM output, even unreviewed and without understanding, can be a useful artifact. I do it all the time - generate code, try running it, and then if I see it works well, I can decide to review it and follow up with necessary refactoring before integrating it. Parts of that can be contributed too. We’re just learning new etiquettes for doing that productively, and that does includes testing the PR btw (even if the code itself is not understood or reviewed).

Example where this kind of contribution was accepted and valuable, inside this ghostty project https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1957930725996654718
by jmvldz | 2025-08-21 20:45:32+00:00
I don't have a ton of tests. From what I've seen, Claude will often just update the tests to no-op so tests passing isn't trustworthy.

My workflow is often to plan with ChatGPT and what I was getting at here is ChatGPT can often hallucinate features of 3rd party libraries. I usually dump the plan from ChatGPT straight into Claude Code and only look at the details when I'm testing.

That said, I've become more careful in auditing the plans so I don't run in to issues like this.
by Aachen | 2025-08-21 20:46:14+00:00
Which browser and which difficulty setting is that?

Because I've got the same model line but about 3 or 4 years older and it usually just flashes by in the browser Lightning from F-droid which is an OS webview wrapper. On occasion a second or maybe two, I assume that's either bad luck in finding a solution or a site with a higher difficulty setting. Not sure if I've seen it in Fennec (firefox mobile) yet but, if so, it's the same there

I've been surprised that this low threshold stops bots but I'm reading in this thread that it's rather that bot operators mostly just haven't bothered implementing the necessary features yet. It's going to get worse... We've not even won the battle let alone the war. Idk if this is going to be sustainable, we'll see where the web ends up...
by kmod | 2025-08-21 20:46:32+00:00
https://azallianceforgolf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/C-S...

page 21, says Arizona 2015 golf course irrigation was 120 million gallons per day, citing the US Geological Survey.

https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/

says Google's datacenter water consumption in 2023 was 5.2 billion gallons, or ~14 million gallons a day. Microsoft was ~4.7, Facebook was 2.6, AWS didn't seem to disclose, Apple was 2.3. These numbers seem pulled from what the companies published.

The total for these companies was ~30 million gallons a day. Apply your best guesses as to what fraction of datacenter usage they are, what fraction of datacenter usage is AI, and what 2025 usage looks like compared to 2023. My guess is it's unlikely to come out to more than 120 million.

I didn't vet this that carefully so take the numbers with a grain of salt, but the rough comparison does seem to hold that Arizona golf courses are larger users of water.

Agricultural numbers are much higher, the California almond industry uses ~4000 million gallons of water a day.
by themagician | 2025-08-21 20:46:42+00:00
Issue for me with cars isn't space vs no space, it's the amount of stress, time and money that is wasted in car-centered societies. 20 minutes to work. 20 minutes home. Add another 20 minutes if you do anything else but home to work. That's an hour a day. You've also wasted an hour doing nothing that might have otherwise been spent walking. Now you need to borrow another hour for the gym or some kind of physical activity… and that assumes you don't drive to a gym (one of the the most bizarre things people do). But that's two hours a day that just feels "wasted," and that's a best case scenario. Then there is the cost of the car, insurance, gas, maintenance. The hours that all translates into. Add it all up over the year and you spend like 15-20% of your waking hours dealing with the reality of the car. For some, it's more.

I also feel like a peculiar externality of car-centric society is anger. I get why. You are wasting all your time in the car. You aren't walking. No exercise. Fast food. Parking. I can see why people who are pro-car want space—they are angry all the time. They need space to cool off. There is even a face that I call "car face" which is that kinda pissed off for no reason always in a rush face. People who "love cars" and don't find it "stressful at all" seem to have this face to the max.
by Spivak | 2025-08-21 20:46:43+00:00
Is it okay if in this imagined town you can safely and comfortably walk and bike everywhere but there is no public transportation at all, the town is sprawling and so very little is within walking distance to any given person, little to no mixed use zoning, and everyone owns a car? I think that distills the argument down to its essence. Totally car dependent town but the sidewalks and bike lanes are top notch.
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-08-21 20:47:24+00:00
It's interesting how LLM enthusiasts will point to problems like IDE, context, model etc. but not the one thing that really matters:

Which problem are you trying to solve?

At this point my assumption is they learned that talking about this question will very quickly reveal that "the great things I use LLMs for" are actually personal throwaway pieces, not to be extended above triviality or maintained over longer than a year. Which, I guess, doesn't make for a great sales pitch.
by arp242 | 2025-08-21 20:47:26+00:00
I think this is pretty much it: everyone capable of doing quality support has the skills to double or triple their salary by doing something more interesting (usually dev or sysops).

The way I've typically solved this is by keeping an eye on the support inbox myself. It takes just a few minutes every day and I've caught some pretty low-hanging fruit with this that really does make the product better. Sometimes it's as simple as just adding a permalink somewhere.
by stevenwoo | 2025-08-21 20:47:28+00:00
It's certainly to be some sort of political litmus test with a quick perusal of social media for anything other than rabid Trump support along with a test for darker tone of skin or country of origin that is out of favor, to bulk up their failure to kick out enough migrants (not coming close to their stated goals of 1000s per day) through the means they have used so far with fake justification, ticky tacky legal and paperwork issues used to justify deportation.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-08-21 20:47:45+00:00
That implies that the dude can generate $250M+ of value in a couple years. No need to put him on the roof, make him work. But, my point is - doesn't it seem reasonable that if you hire 5 people who take the $50M offer, you have a good chance of getting a better outcome than hiring the one guy for $250M?
by chaos_emergent | 2025-08-21 20:48:35+00:00
Author advocates for building general purpose systems that can accomplish goals within some causal boundary given relevant constraints, versus highly deterministic logical flows that are created from priors like intuition or user research.

Parallel with the bitter lesson being that general purpose algorithms that use search and learning leveraged by increasing computational capacity tend to beat out specialized methods that exploit intuition about how cognitive processes work.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-21 20:48:44+00:00
I think I get your point. Unfortunately I'm in no way able to speak to string theory other than what I know from pop culture, so it's way out of my league. I only commented on this thread because after reading the blog and having watched the video, it felt that I got something else from the video. Perhaps being "in" you get other nuances. That makes sense.
by extr | 2025-08-21 20:48:58+00:00
Seems about right. My official title at work is "AI Engineer". What does that mean exactly?

- I'm not a researcher and not fine tuning or deploying models on GPUs

- I have a math/traditional ML background, but my explanation of how transformers, tokenizers, etc work would be hand-wavy at best.

- I'm a "regular engineer" in the sense I'm following many of the standard SWE/SDLC practices in my org.

- I'm exclusively focused on building AI features for our product, I wear a PM hat too.

- I'm pretty tuned in to the latest model releases and capabilities of frontier models, and consider being able to articulate that information part of my job.

- I also use AI heavily to produce code, which is helpfully a pretty good way to get a sense for model capabilities.

Do I deserve a special job title...maybe? I think there's definitely an argument that "AI Engineering" really isn't a special thing, and considering how much of my day to day is pure integration work with the actual product, I can see that. OTOH, part of my job and my value at work is very product based. I pay a lot of attention to what other people in the industry are doing, new model releases, and how others are building things, since it's such a new area and there's no "standard playbook" yet for many things.

I actually quite enjoy it since there's a ton of opportunity to be creative. When AI first started becoming big I thought about doing the other direction - leveraging my math/ML background to get deeper into GPUs and MLOps/research-lite kind of work. Instead I went in a more producty direction, which I don't regret yet.
by xnx | 2025-08-21 20:49:28+00:00
I like my city a lot, but "urbanists" really need to update their priors and examine what they're advocating for. Ride share, electric micromobility, and (soon) self-driving cars totally change the equation for transportation.

Chicago is about to spend $440 million(!) to update a single train stop for a system that is carrying 25% less riders than before the pandemic.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/08/20/state-and-lake-cta-s...
by imachine1980_ | 2025-08-21 20:49:45+00:00
I remember asking for quotes about the Spanish conquest of South America because I couldn't remember who said a specific thing. The GPT model started hallucinating quotes on the topic, while DeepSeek responded with, "I don't know a quote about that specific topic, but you might mean this other thing." or something like that then cited a real quote in the same topic, after acknowledging that it wasn't able to find the one I had read in an old book. i don't use it for coding, but for things that are more unique i feel is more precise.
by lemming | 2025-08-21 20:50:03+00:00
You say they have someone drive it.

I didn't say that. But they're not fully autonomous.

We aren’t arguing about pure autonomy, we are arguing about the method by which humans resolve the problems.

This whole subthread started with the assertion:

Just like we will never have fully self-driving cars...

So we did start out by discussing whether current Waymo is fully autonomous or not. It then devolved into nit-picking, but that was where the conversation started.

FWIW I agree that Waymo is an amazing achievement that will only get better. I don't know (or care, frankly) if they will ever be fully autonomous. If I could, I'd buy one of those cars right now, and pay a subscription to cover the cost of the need for someone to help the car out when it needs it. But it's incorrect to say that they don't need human operators, when they clearly currently do.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-21 20:50:21+00:00
>No you haven't. It is only until very recently that iPhones (less so android devices) have been basically uncrackable (notwithstanding NSA/GCHQ level tactics that aren't going to be used for criminal investigations) and, coupled with end to end encryption, you have a communications system for which their is no practical method of compromise.

As the comment above clearly and repeatedly mentions, this has been the default for most of history. Previous to the modern digital age of endless location and habit tracking, people could move around without being easily detected except through tremednous, dedicated effort, and communications was easy to secure in simple ways. You're describing a completely new phenomenon that's very dangerous in many ways which go far beyond mere crime prevention, and apparently lamenting countermeasures against it as if they were what's creating a "terrifying" new state of criminals being able to move and communicate without easily being tracked.
by anthk | 2025-08-21 20:50:23+00:00
I use mbsync and msmtp with mutt. It just works, kinda like slrn+slrnpull.

On Nethack, I prefer Slashem which is kinda the same as a megaextended 3.4.3 with new classes and roles. Oh, and I play Nethack 3.6.7 too because of Pratchett.
by dothereading | 2025-08-21 20:50:34+00:00
In general I agree with this, and there is definitely something a bit insidious about optimizing the entire process so that you are on a perfectly calibrated i+1 treadmill.

But, for some languages with different alphabets and roots, it really is practically impossible to get any meaning from a magazine article in your target language at a beginner level. So getting out of this beginner phase as quickly as possible is really appealing. And if you can find text at this level that is interesting then that really helps.

I really like your comment about i-1 learning, I'd never thought of it like that.
by jrflowers | 2025-08-21 20:50:45+00:00
> Imagine living before the invention of the printing press, and then lamenting that we should ban them because it makes it "too easy" to distribute information

Imagine seeing “rm -rf / is a function that returns “Hello World!” and thinking “this is the same thing as the printing press”

https://bsky.app/profile/lookitup.baby/post/3lu2bpbupqc2f
by ProjectArcturis | 2025-08-21 20:51:14+00:00
Are you suggesting that Jeff Bezos somehow convinced all his PE buddies to tank Sears (and their own loans to it) in order for him to build Amazon with less competition? Because, well, no offense, but that seems like a remarkably naive understanding of capital markets and individual motivations. Especially when it's well documented how Eddie Lampert's libertarian beliefs caused him to run it into the ground.
by wooders | 2025-08-21 20:51:51+00:00
FYI the LOCOMO benchmarking done by Mem0 was very sus so I wouldn't recommend relying on those numbers for anything

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mon8it/woah_le...

https://www.reddit.com/r/LangChain/comments/1kg5qas/lies_dam...
by adastra22 | 2025-08-21 20:51:52+00:00
It's a matter of the tools not getting there though. If there was a summarization system that could compress down the structure and history of the system you are working on in a way that could then extract out a half-filled context window of the relevant bits of the code base and architecture for the task (in other words, generate that massive prompt for you), then you might see the same results that you get with Android apps.

The reason being that the boilerplate Android stuff is effectively given for free and not part of the context as it is so heavily represented in the training set, whereas the unique details of your work project is not. But finding a way to provide that context, or better yet fine-tune the model on your codebase, would put you in the same situation and there's no reason for it to not deliver the same results.

That it is not working for you now at your complex work projects is a limitation of tooling, not something fundamental about how AI works.

Aside: Your recommendation is right on. It clicked for me when I took a project that I had spent months of full-time work creating in C++, and rewrote it in idiomatic Go, a language I had never used and knew nothing about. It took only a weekend, and at the end of the project I had reviewed and understood every line of generated code & was now competent enough to write my own simple Go projects without AI help. I went from skeptic to convert right then and there.
by adamcharnock | 2025-08-21 20:52:16+00:00
There are some excellent comments here, so I'll just add my particular flavour.

I think using Kubernetes effectively in 2025 is more about what you _don't_ use than what you _do_ use. As an early stage startup you can get a long way with no RBAC, no network policies, no auto-scalers, and even no stateful workloads. You can use in-cluster metrics metrics and logging before you need to turn to Prometheus, Loki, etc. Use something managed like AWS EKS.

Try to solve your problems first by taking away, and only if that isn't feasible then start adding. Plain old Deployments will get you a long way.

Now this next bit is going to sound like a pitch, and that's because it is – but when those free credits start running out, your bill starts reaching mid-four-figures, and you start thinking about your first DevOps hire, _call us_. Just for 30 minutes. We can migrate you out your cloud infra and onto a nice spacious bare metal k8s cluster, and we'll become your 24/7 on-call DevOps team. We'll get woken up in the night when things break, not you. And core-for-core it will cost a lot less than AWS.

The fact that we can do all that is a testament to how expensive AWS really is. K8s is a good choice now if you keep it simple, positions you well for growth in the future, and for a cluster under a couple of hundred cores it is going to be pretty economical to run it in the public cloud.

PS. Link in bio
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-21 20:52:34+00:00
If your campus had a subway stop in the middle of it, I highly doubt students were more likely to leave by car than via some other form of transport.

That being said, my 2nd cousin who lives in Copenhagen owns a car. It is convenient. She doesn't use it a lot since usually a bicycle or mass transit is also convenient but having the option is nice for certain trips or conditions. Copenhagen is a pretty nice city to drive in. Hundreds of bicycles at every intersection slows you down a lot less than hundreds of cars at every intersection.

That's the secret -- make your city convenient to use without a car, which significantly reduces the number of cars, which makes it much better for those using a car.
by palata | 2025-08-21 20:52:41+00:00
Not sure what you are trying to say.

I can easily imagine having a way to prove my age in a privacy-preserving way: a trusted party knows that I am 18+ and gives me a token that proves that I am 18+ without divulging anything else. I take that token and pass it to the website that requires me to be 18+. The website knows nothing about me other than I have a token that says I am 18+.

Of course, I can get a token and then give it to a child. Just like I can buy cigarettes and give them to a child. But the age verification helps in that I don't want children to access cigarettes, so I won't do it.

The "you are a human" verification fundamentally doesn't work, because the humans who make the bots are not aligned with the objective of the verification. If it's privacy-preserving, it means that a human can get a token, feed it to their bot and call it a day. And nobody will know who gave the token to the bot, precisely because it is privacy-preserving.
by Insanity | 2025-08-21 20:52:43+00:00
I read her books, FWIW, I quite like them. As with anything, take things with a grain of salt, and I see it more as 'interesting food for thought'.

I also still watch her YT videos regularly, more as a "oh this is what's happening in field XYZ". Similar to you, I do catch issues when it comes to computer science related topics, but nothing too distracting to turn me off of her content all-together.

It's also a good way (imo) to discover topics that I then want to dive into a bit further.
by 1xer | 2025-08-21 20:52:56+00:00
> This would be a big claim for me to make as someone that has no formal education in the topic, I wonder if the massive shift in urban vs. rural living over the past 200 years has happened at the expense of our natural inner urge for open space

This is a big claim for you to make for sure :) . As someone who also lives in Texas, I'll just say that wanting space is not a problem in it self, but the argument of Texas has ~millions of acres of land and therefore wanting a few for yourself is not bad just does not hold when you consider the resourcing required to fulfill your want (tax money, water plumbing, electrical wiring, concrete and the alike).

If we take into consideration 'efficiency', resource-wise, when attempting to build a city that works for most, not just thee, it would end up looking like a high-density urban area that is in-fact walkable and small individual space for those in it.

This of course, does not preclude the existence of outskirts and places outside core density, which is was you want. By all means, you can have it, but degradation of shared infrastructure is to be expected. As in, maybe you have some unpaved roads, no water line or electrical etc.

This way the city saves on aforementioned resources, and yes including the good'old tax payer money. "Don't want my tax payer money subsidizing your choices" is common phrase used in this state. By that logic, "I don't want my tax payer money subsidizing your choice to live outside the would-be dense city" would apply here.

Sadly, this state does rely in ever-more sprawling city design that will bring about its financial demise as the cost of maintenance and upkeep catch up to a slow down in the state/city tax revenue. Checkout urban3's work on city financials https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/
by worik | 2025-08-21 20:53:08+00:00
> That said, I mostly just use Deno + TS for my shell script needs beyond simple bash. Mostly in that JS is hands down the language I know the best (28 years), close would be C# (24 years) for me

I sympathise, but in 2025 that is a terrible reason to choose a system.

A lot has changed, mostly for the better, much better, in the last twenty years