MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by worldsayshi | 2025-08-14 15:48:42+00:00
> LLMs have really started to plateau

That doesn't seem unexpected. Any technological leap seem to happen in sigmoid-like steps. When a fruitful approach is discovered we run to it until diminishing returns sets in. Often enough a new approach opens doors to other approaches that builds on it. It takes time to discover the next step in the chain but when we do we get a new sigmoid-like leap. Etc...
by rmah | 2025-08-14 15:48:46+00:00
The other religious texts you mentioned are not part of the western civilization canon and did not have much effect on western literature. Thus, while I think they should certainly be available in school libraries as they are important works, they need not be required reading.

On the other hand, in different areas with different cultural traditions, each of those books should be required reading as they were central to their literary tradition. And, one assumes, are.

To deny that contemporary American culture has its roots in European culture (i.e. western culture) is to deny reality. And honestly, it mystifies me why so many seem to want to be ignorant of their own cultural roots.
by dinfinity | 2025-08-14 15:48:51+00:00
Ignore the insanity of banning books for a second. What about the Victorian-era insanity of preventing children from being exposed to the mere concept of sex and labeling it 'obscenity'?

On one hand we want kids to learn about consent, what 'normal sex' is like and all that, but simultaneously there is this idiotic push to prevent them from encountering any of it until they are 18. If we don't want kids to see bad porn, we need to ensure that there is lots of good porn available, and not just some boring sex ed bullshit. I mean actual benign everyday sex that kids can safely watch and learn from because otherwise they will never see it anywhere else (it's not like they regularly watch their parents or other people do it).

You have to be incredibly regressive to think 18 is somehow a good cutoff for this.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-14 15:49:18+00:00
Indeed that part seems more like an artist’s study than an attempt at actual usefulness, but that’s okay when figuring out if anything at all in the neighbourhood of what you’re trying to do with SIMD is even possible. As far as constructing heaps, don’t forget about (linear-time) heapify, which can be significantly faster if you have a bunch of elements and want to construct a heap with all of them in it. (This doesn’t get you a linear-time heap sort because you’ll still pay the full linearithmic price for the subsequent pop_heaps.)
by taude | 2025-08-14 15:49:18+00:00
I think he had a blog called LifeHacker and/or 36 folders (I don't know if they were his or just a writer, but I remember following him back in the day).

It's wild to think that was almost 20 years ago when Getting Things Done was going through tech circles as the organization method dujour. (I also equate the same time period with learning Ruby on Rails.)
by keybored | 2025-08-14 15:49:20+00:00
Empathize with what? Many people have experience with having free time and thus know what it’s like to do things that they like doing. Replace all of this job-passion with the fantasy of winning enough millions in the lottery to retire and yeah, there you go. People already fantasize about that.

But the above doesn’t involve making a profit for an employer. I don’t know if that was supposed to be part of the empathizing.
by al_borland | 2025-08-14 15:49:30+00:00
There could be a lot of reasons why they may have passed, and it could have absolutely nothing to do with you or your personality.

If it was just one company, I wouldn’t start trying to change who you are. If you make up a new personality for the interview and get the job, then what? How long can you keep the character going? Do you want to work with people you can’t be yourself around?

In terms of what to possibly change, that’s almost impossible to say without seeing what you’re like in an interview.
by mock-possum | 2025-08-14 15:49:36+00:00
That’s my experience as well - I’m the one with the mental model, my responsibility is using text to communicate that model to the LLM using language it will recognize from its training data to generate the code to follow suit.

My experience with prompting LLMs for codegen is really not much different from my experience with querying search engines - you have to understand how to ‘speak the language’ of the corpus being searched, in order to find the results you’re looking for.
by Arainach | 2025-08-14 15:49:37+00:00
>Uncle Bob's general principles of balancing terseness/efficiency with ergonomics and readability (in most, but not all, cases).

Have you read Uncle Bob? There's no need to strawman: Bob's examples in Clean Code are absolutely nuts.

Here's a nice writeup that includes one of Bob's examples verbatim in case you've forgotten: https://qntm.org/clean

Here's another: https://gerlacdt.github.io/blog/posts/clean_code/
by _swfb | 2025-08-14 15:49:58+00:00
I used to be a lecturer and I did notice that that really helped my public speaking; I tend to talk really fast and being a lecturer forced me to learn how to speak slower, so it wouldn't surprise me that being a waiter or waitress would be helpful for this stuff.

I've always found it very irritating when I felt people were trying to force saying my name in a conversation, but I think you're probably right and I'm just a weird case.

Salary requirements are a valid point; in this most recent example my salary requirements were smack in the middle of the listed range so I don't think it was an issue for this particular one but it's possible that they feel I'm too expensive.
by tootie | 2025-08-14 15:50:07+00:00
The methodology and data is all publicly available. Just go to bls.gov.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/

Every time I've seen someone talk about "real" inflation or unemployment they're just applying a different view on the same BLS data. Metrics like CPI or PPI are derived via a formula to create an indicator. A benchmark that should be apples to apples over a period of time. It's not meant to be comprehensive. But the comprehensive data is all there too.
by aaroninsf | 2025-08-14 15:50:11+00:00
My preferred formulation is Ximm's Law,

"Every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon.

Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false.

Lemma: contemporary implementations have almost always already been improved upon, but are unevenly distributed."
by guywithahat | 2025-08-14 15:50:15+00:00
> Let educators rather than politicians decide which books should be in a school library

We already don't do this though, between state laws, federal laws, and the department of education. I am fine getting rid of the department of education though since it seems you're opposed to it too.

And it was 20 years ago, you'd have to look up the specific policies. The point is acting like this is the first time people have tried banning books from young children in school is ignorant of all recent history
by CalChris | 2025-08-14 15:51:06+00:00
Massimo invented this technology (yay Massimo!) in the 90s yet their Japanese patents [1] weren't considered prior art (WTF?) because of technical legal reasons.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/JP2002542493A5/en%EF%BF%BC

So I suppose if Massimo is going to use a technical legality to extend then Apple can use a technical legality to avoid.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-08-14 15:51:54+00:00
> Trump won over 40% of asians and nearly 50% of hispanics last year.

I can't find a single exit poll that says Trump won over 40% of the Asian American vote.

> I hate the idea that my kids would think that they have more in common with another ethnic Bangladeshi in Queens than she does with a random person in Appalachia.

Nobody is claiming otherwise. They're only saying that on the narrow topic of racism, Trump and many (though certainly not all) of his supporters will treat your daughter differently than they do a random light-skinned Appalachian.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-08-14 15:51:56+00:00
Yes this is exactly it, you need to talk to Claude about code on a design/architecture level... just telling it what you want the code to output will get you stuck in failure loops.

I keep saying it and no one really listens: AI really is advanced autocomplete. It's not reasoning or thinking. You will use the tool better if you understand what it can't do. It can write individual functions pretty well, stringing a bunch of them together? not so much.

It's a good tool when you use it within its limitations.
by matt_kantor | 2025-08-14 15:51:58+00:00
I'm having trouble understanding your perspective.

> It's not about the writing.

But earlier you said:

> Writing ungendered text is exhausting?

So are you saying that being careful with pronouns is exhausting, or that others correcting you is exhausting? If it's the latter, I find that defaulting to ungendered pronouns results in fewer corrections (though even that bothers some people; you can't make everyone happy).
by jonahx | 2025-08-14 15:52:17+00:00
> Maybe much learning is an individual activity and learning in groups is just ineffective?

Learning in groups is wildly ineffective from the perspective of gaining functional mastery over some subject (whether writing well, solving algebra problems, etc).

However, it does have a lot of unrelated benefits, arguably more important: learning to collaborate with others, understanding how others think and learn, understanding your own skill level by direct comparison with others, competition as a motivator for learning, and more.
by ranger207 | 2025-08-14 15:52:37+00:00
Bitcoin's high volatility means that it's impossible to predict exactly how much value one Bitcoin will have tomorrow, next month, next year, or next decade. USD has comparatively low volatility. It's possible, but very unlikely, for USD to go to zero tomorrow, and while the uncertainty around exactly how likely USD is to collapse increases as you look further towards the future, most people would consider it less likely for USD to collapse than Bitcoin. Since markets are made up of "most people", most people are more willing to accept USD to exchange value than they are Bitcoin. Therefore, USD is a better store of value than Bitcoin
by Spivak | 2025-08-14 15:52:44+00:00
I think it a distinction without a difference. To make it more obvious imagine it was one of those AI assistant devices that records your conversations so you can recall them later. Plainly obvious that accessing this data for any purpose other than servicing user requests is morally equivalent to easedropping on a person's conversations in the most traditional sense.

If the company sends your conversation data to Facebook that's bad and certainly a privacy violation but at this point nothing has actually been done with the data yet. Then Facebook accesses the data and folds it into their advertising signals; they have now actually looked at the data and acted on the information within. And that to me is easedropping.
by jeffwask | 2025-08-14 15:52:56+00:00
Yeah, they famously missed the boat on Digital Cameras when they held one of the earliest patents but decided to not produce and sell them due to the impact to the film side of the business but like you say even if they hadn't made that error, digital cameras were replaced in 10-15 years by smart phones anyway so it would have only been a temporary reprieve.
by watusername | 2025-08-14 15:52:57+00:00
From git's perspective, jj bookmarks are just regular git branches, so you can just do `jj git push` and open a PR as usual.

However, unlike git, jj bookmarks are pinned to change IDs instead of immutable commit SHA-1s. This means that stacked PRs just work: Change something in the pr-1 bookmark, and all dependent bookmarks (pr-2, pr-3, ...) are automatically updated. A `jj git push --tracked` later and everything is pushed.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-14 15:53:13+00:00
> There has been an organizing current in US politics around the theology and political theory of dominionism -- that a certain set of related religions have a responsibility to take over governmental authority in order to make the law support their particular belief set so that things they view as sinful are not supported, or actively discouraged, by the legal framework.

Reading your comment, I feel like the word religion is misleading. You see the same dynamic in how progressive political ideology, despite it not having to do with a god, has been introduced into many layers of government and other institutions. All the things said here can be demonstrated for the religious right but also the non religious left. It’s less about religion in my opinions, and more about how politics is about winning by controlling institutions instead of supporting individual freedoms.
by srichard16 | 2025-08-14 15:53:26+00:00
With nd, developers shouldn’t need to know how to build or deploy a service; they just need to know what service they want to interact with, and nd helps whether go, webpack, bazel, or docker builds that service. Likewise, deploying a service automatically checks if it was built, and if not, nd will build it for them (or warn them if it's production-bound and they want a CI build instead).
by diwank | 2025-08-14 15:53:34+00:00
yup. I started a fully autonomous, 100% vibe coded side project called steadytext, mostly expecting it to hit a wall, with LLMs eventually struggling to maintain or fix any non-trivial bug in it. turns out I was wrong, not only has claude opus been able to write up a pretty complex 7k LoC project with a python library, a CLI, _and_ a postgres extension. It actively maintains it and is able to fix filed issues and feature requests entirely on its own. It is completely vibe coded, I have never even looked at 90% of the code in that repo. it has full test coverage, passes CI, and we use it in production!

granted- it needs careful planning for CLAUDE.md and all issues and feature requests need a lot of in-depth specifics but it all works. so I am not 100% convinced by this piece. I'd say it's def not easy to get coding agents to be able to manage and write software effectively and specially hard to do so in existing projects but my experience has been across that entire spectrum. I have been sorely disappointed in coding agents and even abandoned a bunch or projects and dozens of pull requests but I have also seen them work.

you can check out that project here: https://github.com/julep-ai/steadytext/
by barbazoo | 2025-08-14 15:53:37+00:00
I keep sharing stories like this with them. Privacy violations, genocide, mental health, …. Whenever I think it might be something someone cares about I share with them. I also make an effort to explain to my non tech folks that meta is Facebook, instagram, WhatsApp, to make sure they understand recognize the name. Many people do not know what meta is. Sometimes I suspect it was a way to capture the bad publicity and protect their brands.
by zarzavat | 2025-08-14 15:53:53+00:00
The point is that "best model you can train in 5 minutes" is hardware dependent, the answer will be different depending on the hardware available. So it's necessarily a single-player game.

"Best model you can train with X joules" is a fairer contest that multiple people could take part in even if they have different hardware available. It's not completely fair, but it's fair enough to be interesting.

Training models with an energy limit is an interesting constraint that might lead to advances. Currently LLMs implement online learning by having increasingly large contexts that we then jam "memories" into. So there is a strict demarcation between information learned during pre-training and during use. New more efficient approaches to training could perhaps inform new approaches to memory that are less heterogenous.

tl;dr: more dimensionally correct
by SilasX | 2025-08-14 15:53:59+00:00
Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm missing something, and I don't like to defend FB, but ...

AIUI, they have a system for using data they receive to target ads. They tell people not to put sensitive data in it. Someone does anyway, and it gets automatically picked up to target ads. What are they supposed to do on their end? Even if they apply heuristics for "probably sensitive data we shouldn't use"[1], some stuff is still going to get through. The fault should still lie with the entity that passed on the sensitive data.

An analogy might be that you want to share photos of an event you hosted, and you tell people to send in their pics, while enforcing the norm, "oh make sure to ask before taking someone's photo", and someone insists that what they sent in was compliant with that rule, when it wasn't. And then you share them.

[1] Edit: per your other comment, they indeed had such heuristics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44901198
by wahern | 2025-08-14 15:54:39+00:00
A perspective on abstracting SIMD that emphasizes how to expose intrinsics seems like its lost in the weeds. Is there anything like ISPC for Rust? One of the critical features of ISPC is language support for transforming arrays-of-structs (AoS) to structs-of-arrays (SoA). You can define, declare, and reference your data structures as you normally would, e.g.

struct { float x, y, x } arr[100]

which is easier to grok and maintain, but the internal memory layout transparently becomes more like

struct { x[100], y[100], x[100] } arr

See https://ispc.github.io/ispc.html#structure-of-array-types.

When such semantics are provided by the language itself, the need to resort to explicit SIMD intrinsics (directly or indirectly via API abstractions) is tremendously reduced as most of the biggest impediments to auto-vectorization are lifted. ISPC also provides complementing language features for managing parallel control flow, e.g. conditional masking, that significantly obviates much of the remaining use cases for explicit SIMD procedures.
What happened to ZIRP = Bitcoin price bots?
by wistleblowanon | 2025-08-14 15:54:56+00:00
In last years, here and across SM there were so many bots and humans saying "ZIRP" lead to Bitcoin ATH and Bitcoin price. After ZIRP ended, they said rates are higher now, so no more high price.

But this week price of Bitcoin is few times higher than those days? So what stopped these bots and humans, does anyone know? Do you still exist?
by zahlman | 2025-08-14 15:54:58+00:00
The point is that he could have just as easily suffered this injury in his home country going about day to day life, where his eyesight, balance etc. would have been just as bad. The causal link between the chatbot's flirting and his death is shaky at best. This was tragic, and also the result of something clearly unethical, but the death was still not a reasonably foreseeable consequence.
by _swfb | 2025-08-14 15:55:09+00:00
I just think it has to be soft skills in a few particular cases; I always check my work after the interview to see if I got the questions right, almost always by writing a PlusCal spec and checking against the invariants that they specified. Sometimes my answer is wrong and doesn't satisfy the invariant and there's edge cases that I didn't consider, and when that's the case I'm not really surprised when I'm rejected.

But when I get the technical questions correct and TLA+ seems to agree with me, that's where I get really confused. I'm not typically interviewing for management positions, I'm interviewing for engineering jobs.
by cedws | 2025-08-14 15:55:18+00:00
I live in Japan at the moment and from what I've observed, people enjoy the night a lot more than in London. I'm 24 and almost never see people my age in central London - it's simply too expensive for anyone to really hang out there. The busy pubs that people do go to are £8 a pint and have terrible service.

I feel that Japan is a place where you can really enjoy yourself at night. You don't have to worry about your phone being stolen, being ripped off or drugged, or having to pay for an extortionate taxi ride as long as you can wait long enough for the first train. London nightlife is worse in every way besides nightclubs.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-08-14 15:55:23+00:00
> AI needs to more hard-coded w/r/t honesty & clarity about what it is

That precludes the existence of fictional character AIs like Meta is trying to create, does it not? Knowing when to stay in character and when not to seems like a very difficult problem to solve. Should LLM characters in video games be banned, because they might claim to be real?

The article says "Chats begin with disclaimers that information may be inaccurate." and shows a screenshot of the chat bot clearly being labeled as "AI". Exactly how many disclaimers should be necessary? Or is no amount of disclaimers acceptable when the bot itself might claim otherwise?
by bikenaga | 2025-08-14 15:55:31+00:00
This is the scale they use, reproduced from their table. There wasn't a great way to reproduce the table here, so I used dokuwiki table formatting (since that's what I use). I hope it's readable enough (or can be easily converted to whatever table format you like better). (Edited: Fixed formatting errors)

^ Level ^ Color ^ Significance Category ^ Key Observable Criteria ^ | 0 | White | Insignificant | Consistent with known natural phenomena. | | 1 | Green | Normal Natural Variation | Minor deviations, likely natural variations. | | 2 | Yellow | Meriting Attention | Non-gravitational acceleration exceeding cometary models. Single major anomaly in trajectory, composition, or morphology. Non-gravitational acceleration is marginally inconsistent with measured outgassing. | | 3 | Yellow | High Confidence Anomaly | Non-gravitational acceleration vastly exceeding maximum cometary outgassing given absence or weakness of visible coma. Multiple persistent anomalies across observable categories. No satisfactory natural explanation after a comprehensive analysis. | | 4 | Yellow | Anomaly Meeting Potential Technosignature Criteria | Non-gravitational acceleration exceeding cometary models. Spectral signatures absent in known asteroid taxonomy, including anomalous spectrum inconsistent with solar reflection. Albedo variations inconsistent with known materials. Deviation from Keplerian hyperbolic orbit inconsistent with outgassing models. Unusual shape inferred from lightcurve of reflected sunlight. Trajectory anomalously aligned with planetary orbital planes or selective inner planet targeting. | | 5 | Orange | Suspected Passive Technology | Unusual speed. Strong, persistent indicators of artificial, non-operational origin. Surface composition inconsistent with cosmic-ray bombardment for implied age or velocity. Absence of cometary activity despite substantial non-gravitational acceleration. | | 6 | Orange | Suspected Active Technology | Level 5 criteria plus at least one of the following: (i) Signs of being operational (e.g., maneuvers, signals); (ii) Electromagnetic signals in non-natural origin; (iii) Trajectory changes incompatible with gravitational or outgassing models; (iv) Detection of deployed sub-objects. (iv) Artificial illumination or heat that cannot be explained by solar irradiation. | | 7 | Orange | Suspected Active Technology with Unclear Intent | Level 6 criteria plus at least one of: (i) Responsive behavior to observations; (ii) Signals of unknown purpose; (iii) Operational intent that cannot be determined or appears potentially hostile. | | 8 | Red | Confirmed Technology (No Impact) | Direct investigation confirms extraterrestrial artificial origin. No collision trajectory. | | 9 | Red | Confirmed Technology (Regional Impact) | Confirmed extraterrestrial artificial origin. Impact trajectory with regional consequences. | | 10 | Red | Confirmed Technology (Global Impact) | Confirmed extraterrestrial artificial origin. Impact trajectory with global terrestrial consequences. |