MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by m_a_g | 2025-09-05 17:26:24+00:00
The cost can be significantly reduced immediately and drastically if OpenAI or Anthropic were to choose to do so.

By simply stopping the training of new models, profitability can be achieved on the same day.

With the existing models, we have already substantial use cases, and there are numerous unexplored improvements beyond the LLM, tailored specifically to the use case.
by bediger4000 | 2025-09-05 17:26:33+00:00
Am I reading this correctly, because if I am, this post is a wreck.

1. Cryptocurrency might be good in places that don't have well-regulated banking systems. 2. Cryptocurrency could be a way to dodge rules that we don't like, because the rules keep modern society from functioning. 3. Hinting that Trump takes bribes via cryptocurrency.

The summary is certainly interesting, although it's also off the rails.

The hypothetical swimming pools legally not allowing arbitrary people in is quite a choice, given that during a lot of the 20th Century, many public pools in the US discriminated on skin color. People in the US didn't build and open beeblebroxes to get around patently ridiculous laws. Then, the laws changed, and people closed the pools to avoid following the law.
by cs702 | 2025-09-05 17:26:40+00:00
Yeah, the masses now decide who is in control of their narrative.

Unfortunately, the masses today tend to be poorly educated in history, politics, philosophy, economics, the sciences, and mathematics. Look around.

Poorly educated people can be persuaded to believe in far-right and far-left ideologies which have failed in the past: mercantilism, nationalism, communism, central planning, etc.

They don't even know that those ideologies have failed in the past. They remind me of George Santayana's most famous aphorism:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
by jandrewrogers | 2025-09-05 17:26:50+00:00
I know people like to post this rant but in this case Linus simply doesn't understand the problem domain. O_DIRECT is commonly used in contexts where the fundamental mechanisms of the kernel cache are inappropriate. It can't be fixed with hints.

As a database example, there are major classes of optimization that require perfect visibility into the state of the entire page cache with virtually no overhead and strict control over every change of state that occurs. O_DIRECT allows you to achieve this. The optimizations are predicated on the impossibility of an external process modifying state. It requires perfect control of the schedule which is invalidated if the kernel borrows part of the page cache. Whether or not the kernel asks nicely doesn't matter, it breaks a design invariant.

The Linus rant is from a long time ago. Given the existence of things like io_uring which explicitly enables this type of behavior almost to the point of encouraging it, Linus may understand the use cases better now.
by km3r | 2025-09-05 17:27:35+00:00
> At this point, it's becoming obvious that it is not profitable to provide model inference, despite Sam Altman recently saying that OpenAI was.

Except the authors own provided data says it cost them $2B in inference costs to generate $4B in revenue. Yes training costs push it negative, but this is like tech growth 101, debt now to grow faster leads to larger potential upsides in the future.
by GuB-42 | 2025-09-05 17:27:36+00:00
https://www.demoparty.net/

The biggest pure demoscene event is Revision in Saarbrücken, Germany. The 2026 edition has yet to be announced, but it is always during the Easter week-end. They have a dedicated newbie corner if you are interested https://2025.revision-party.net/about/newcomers/
by glenstein | 2025-09-05 17:28:12+00:00
Exactly the right question. If atoms are forever retained as a locally true-in-its-domain and at-its-level-of-description phenomena in every future theory, I think they count as real in any important sense. Even classical mechanics is true in the sense of strongly accurate and predictive at its scales of description, as an approximation of something more precisely described by QM.

One thing that gets me excited is that there's a tantalizing possibility that the 21st century might have an Einstein-level breakthrough that treats holography and some principle of informational consistency as more fundamental than QM, which is amazing, and would change everything.

But even in that hypothetical future paradigm, an "atom" would still be something true and meaningful against that backdrop, and our measurements or knowledge claims about it would still be meaningful. And our progress toward knowledge of the atom was still real progress.

It's legitimate to treat our knowledge as limited, subject to revision, or approximating. But treating that grain of truth like it implies no knowledge or progress is in hand is an abuse of the concept.
by stripe_away | 2025-09-05 17:28:20+00:00
I'm less sure that there is an endgame. Seems more likely to me that it is being run as a reality TV show where the idea is to maintain a high level of viewer engagement.

And no-one is thinking that the only reason reality tv shows don't end in disaster is because it is a tv show, i.e. an artificial and contained/constrained environment.
by tshaddox | 2025-09-05 17:28:25+00:00
> Name another serialization declaration format that both (a) defines which changes can be make backwards-compatibly, and (b) has a linter that enforces backwards compatible changes.

The article covers this in the section "The Lie of Backwards- and Forwards-Compatibility." My experience working with protocol buffers matches what the author describes in this section.
by ktosobcy | 2025-09-05 17:28:57+00:00
Yes, they are (not sure about US).

In general the mere fact that there is limited number of contributors that are known and indicated authorship goes a long way. Also - all publishers have to register indicating who is behind particular "medium".

Contrary, social-"media" there is no accountability. Anyone can publish anything and there is basically no information who published that. You can sue but then again publishing platform has no information about the author so the process is long and convoluted.

Making social-media what it started from (network of close friends) where you only see the content they publish and requirement of actual details who is behind the particular profile (could be for pages/profiles with more than something like 10k followers, in which case - let's be honest - it's not "friend" at that point) would go a long way.
by sunshine-o | 2025-09-05 17:29:16+00:00
When they saw Bitcoin and Ethereum they obviously understood a great disruption was coming and acted on it. SWIFT too.

A Central Bank do not share everything they consider/plan with the public. It is not really hidden or secret, but they also do not make a press release about it.

Also if they are fundamentally gonna transform our banking system they better start early because a lot of things can go wrong. I estimate the time to build such a system is about 10 years if everything goes well.

I do not know exactly what went wrong, my guess is the banks pushed back as much as they could because most of them would have been made irrelevant under that model. Now they are talking about Ethereum and Solana because they understood they have to fight against the Dollar in this arena.
by saltcured | 2025-09-05 17:29:25+00:00
If you can stomach the bravado and unclear factual accuracy, the 2007 book Lone Survivor gives an account of a similar failure, in Afghanistan, where a SEAL team was discovered early in their mission. But, it devolved into a running battle and a disaster for the US special forces where most of the team and many rescuers also died. As a result of those prior events, I can imagine they have different rules of engagement in the event of being detected.

But, what's most crazy to me is that these details are being published in such a short time. My impression is that these clandestine forces used to have much more strict control, and details would not emerge for many decades or even during the lives of the participants?
by WorldMaker | 2025-09-05 17:29:29+00:00
> Like, in TNG people walking around with glorified e-readers but having to go to the big computer or to ask Alexa things instead of just tapping on their screens.

People do that in real life all the time even with the ability to do everything on one handheld device today. People pick up preferences for using "apps" on specific devices, or have multi-tasking use cases where flowing across devices feels nice or makes the most sense.

For instance: Using an iPad to read a kitchen recipe and calling to Alexa or Siri on a nearby Echo or HomePod to set a kitchen timer while watching a show on a kitchen screen, say powered by an Apple TV. The iPad could picture-in-picture the show and track the timer and show the recipe all at the same time, but that's not the experience everyone wants. It's not even the experience that Apple wants to sell to people. If you've got an iPad and HomePod in the same room and call for Siri, the software is built to prefer the HomePod and its smarter array of microphones to listen for what comes next. It's better, more dedicated hardware to help the software deliver a better experience.

It's great that one device can do everything, but we rarely want to use one device to do everything when we don't have to. Especially because human memory is contextual and spatial it becomes easier to remember where we "left" things if they are on different devices in different places.

Especially in TNG it feels like a lot of the screens are designed for exactly that: the screens can change to other displays but most often don't because they are very specifically tailored to each specific place they are. That seems somewhat intentionally designed to help the human memory and better muscle memory, knowing what we knew in the 90s and knowing what we know today. "I don't want to lose my place in this recipe just to set a timer or to catch up on TV" is a human problem and TNG showing "I don't want to lose my place on this PADD so I'll ask the computer to do something or walk to engineering to touch a specific dedicated panel that my fingers have already memorized" is maybe just a reflection that in Star Trek's future humans are still, you know, human.
by krapp | 2025-09-05 17:29:46+00:00
It works so well that people literally fall in love with AI, organize their entire lives around it, form religions around it, prefer interacting with an AI over real people, and consider AI to be an extension of their own soul and being. AI gaslights people into insanity all the time.

Most people aren't like you, or the average HN enjoyer. Most people are so desperate for any kind of positive emotional interaction, reinforcement or empathy from this cruel, hollow and dehumanizing society they'll even take the simulation of it from a machine.
by adverbly | 2025-09-05 17:30:12+00:00
Let's be honest: the trouble here is that both of those numbers are wrong.

They have been changing and adding exceptions to the basket of goods measuring inflation for many years now.

Unemployment statistics have a long series of problems that have to do with considering who is counted.

The current administration is actively putting pressure on the staff publishing these numbers and replacing key stats people.

You gain a competitive power advantage through information asymmetry. It comes at great cost to the overall economy but it seems to be too juicy for politicians to ignore at this point.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-09-05 17:30:30+00:00
not to nitpick because i mostly agree, but the second example (scaling a button on press/hold) is so ugly and weird that it comes across more like a glitch than an intentional animation. maybe it doesn't fit as well into a (post-)flat UI world but i always liked the bevel-shade-inversion technique of old MS Windows buttons to simulate pressing them "down".
by preisschild | 2025-09-05 17:31:04+00:00
> The first, second and third law of RedHat sysadmin work is "disable SElinux".

Must not be a good sysadmin then. SELinux improves the security and software like podman can be relatively easily be made to work with it.

I use podman on my Fedora Workstation with selinux set to enforce without issues
by gyrovagueGeist | 2025-09-05 17:31:16+00:00
In the middle term, I almost feel less productive using modern GPT-5/Claude Sonnet 4 for software dev than prior models, precisely because they are more hands off and less supervised.

Because they generate so much code, that often passes initial tests, looks reasonable, and fails in nonhuman ways, in a pretty opinionated style tbh.

I have less context (and need to spend much more effort and supervision time to get up to speed to learn) to fix, refactor, and integrate the solutions, than if I was only trusting short few line windows at a time.
by cousin_it | 2025-09-05 17:31:21+00:00
I think if the animation "helps you understand what's changing and why", sometimes that's a sign that the change could be redesigned - moved to a different part of the screen, for example - so that it becomes clearer without needing to be animated.

For example, if pressing a "Save" button makes a "Save successful" toast appear on top of the screen, it's tempting to animate it in, so that the user notices it. But it's better to replace the button text with "Saved" and gray it out, which achieves the same goal and feels great without any animation.
by teddyh | 2025-09-05 17:31:40+00:00
If I strike up a conversation with you, and suddenly I don’t want to talk to you anymore, then what, if any, obligations do I have? Can I just stop talking mid-sentence and begin to completely ignore you? After all, I did not promise you a complete conversation.

Or did I, by engaging in a civil conversation with you, implicitly promise to abide by the normal social rules of etiquette, as far as I am reasonably able?

It is similar with software. If you, say, put up a web site (or even just a README.md) containing blurbs about how useful your software is, extolling its virtues, you are implicitly promising future updates and support, to the best of your (limited) ability. If you need to step away from the project, you are expected to do so in an orderly fashion (again, to the best of your – possibly limited – ability), announce it publicly, etc.

If you have no web site, but you have given similar indications in conversations, the same principle is applicable, but you have fewer people to notify.

> Who get to decide where the line is?

If a user can reasonably feel let down by your actions, or can reasonably feel that you have misled them, then I feel that a line has been crossed.
by soneca | 2025-09-05 17:31:43+00:00
I think the most interesting part is that, in AI, software does not have zero marginal cost anymore. You can’t build once and scale to billions just investing in infrastructure.

Still, companies like OpenAI and Twitter are doing just that. Thus losing money.

Will AI evolve to be again as regular software or will the business model of tech AI become closer to what traditional non-tech companies are?

How the WalMart of AI will look like?

Does SaaS with very high prices and very thin margins even work as a scalable business model?
by esalman | 2025-09-05 17:31:46+00:00
I lived mostly car free in Atlanta because the Marta station is one flight of stairs down from the airport terminal, and I could get to my lab in GSU in downtown Atlanta in less than 30 minutes, midtown Georgia tech campus in similar time, my first apartment in Lindberg in 40 minutes, and my second apartment in Sandy Springs on the other side of the city in less than an hour from the airport. Commute to and from my school/lab/apartment was always under 30 minutes and always faster by train compared to car.

These days I fly to the bay area to my office in East Bay. It's 2+ hours commute from either SFO or even OAK because you need to change buses 2 or 3 times. Add 1 more if you count taking the airport shuttle to the BART station. And SJC does not even have a BART connection.

There's fundamental design flaw in public transportation in the US, they almost never connect the population centers. Part of the reason why people are discouraged from using them and they don't get the funding to stay up to date.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-09-05 17:31:47+00:00
No, because an unstable regime and desperate economy increases the relative power of billionaires even if it decreases their absolute wealth somewhat. You don't see oligarchs abandoning russia en masse due to the constraints the system places on their growth.

So even if this ends up direly for some of them individually, they all personally are confident that won't be them. And as long as it isn't this aligns with their general interests.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-05 17:31:48+00:00
This Fred Pohl book

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

has a short story The Midas Plague in it where the problem is that post the development of cheap fusion resources are so abundant and production so efficient that keeping the economy working requires that people stay on a treadmill of consumption. This is such a burden that lower-class people are forced to consume more than upper-class people. The protagonist of the story gets his robots to consume his good and fears that he'll get in trouble for this but instead he gets a medal. The original version of the short story as it appeared in the April 1954 Galaxy magazine is linked from the Wikipedia article.
by dcposch | 2025-09-05 17:31:56+00:00
> If my account tries to send someone $3 million, I'd prefer that it's intermediated by a confused bank employee staring at a screen

This is a nice lens for looking at when stablecoins make sense.

If you're an American using your Chase account to buy coffee at Starbucks, the permissioned, heuristically fraud-checked, slow-settling tradfi system is well optimized for you.

If you are an importer buying $3m worth of bulk coffee from Kenya, you would much rather have an instant 1:1 USD transfer on beautifully efficient machine consensus.

In many countries in the world, the banking system is extractive and unreliable. The "confused employee" is not there to help you. The two weeks of money in transit is no benefit, just a source of additional counterparty risk, cost, and delay.

An immutable and transparent ledger is not for everything but it is a useful primitive.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-09-05 17:32:16+00:00
Any inspiration from https://enso.sonnet.io?

I'm a big fan of everything Rafał Pastuszak does.

They also recently announced a public beta of a rewrite of that product

https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/new-enso-first-public-beta/

Oh - looks like it's been on HN too. Some good discussions...

New version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44421776

Original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38025073
by guywithahat | 2025-09-05 17:32:22+00:00
Are you just following me around to every comment?

I am not an immigration judge or a prophet, so I don't know how every case will turn out, but 450 is a lot. It's enough that even if some are here legally, as would be expected since people are detained for reasonable suspicion not proof, it would still be hundreds of illegal immigrants.

Most of the immigrants are not from South Korea, they're from central/south america. My understanding of the situation so far is that some South Koreans came here to manage the project, some on questionable visas themselves, and they hired hundreds of laborers (illegally). If you want to build a factory in the US you should follow the laws we have, you can't pick and choose which laws to follow.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-05 17:32:30+00:00
Can the AI find alternative suppliers when your current ones go out of business or closes down production lines (even just for short term re-tooling)? Can AI negotiate when you get a big sale and need a huge production run? There are so many moving parts that a human juggles, more than what you list. All AI solutions seem like this. Automate the day to day duties of a job, when the real value of the person doing the jobs are much more than that. Maybe you can automate away 2 purchasing jobs down to 1, but what happens when that 1 person gets sick, when they go on vacation, when they retire/move to a better job?

And the sick thing is that the company that tries to be smart longer term won't be able to compete with the short term companies that cut as much as possible using AI to maximize short term benefits. Long term these 'cut everything' AI leaning zombie companies won't last, but they will last long enough to undercut and take out the longer term thinking companies with them.

AI is an entropy machine. It sucks all momentum from everything it touches.
by dilyevsky | 2025-09-05 17:32:48+00:00
Hilarious that from 2020 and to this day ridership has collapsed but BART operating expenses went up despite that and all the efficiencies they talk about in your link. Kind of tells you everything you need to know about where the money is actually going...

Just to compare with another expensive city - BART serves 1/20th of London's Tube rides while operating on 1/5th of the Tube's budget.
by JohnBooty | 2025-09-05 17:33:16+00:00
Respectfully, not from my angle!

From a purely hardware perspective, I think it's always been in that "limbo" for almost every use case anyway.

For a hobbyist even in Ye Olden Days (before there were other single board computers) you were always able to pull up Craiglist or walk to the thrift store and buy a $50 PC that vastly outperformed a Pi anyway. Underclock that PC and it could be a fanless power miser too, albeit not quite down to Pi levels. (Pretty sure I remember people clocking 900mhz P3's down to 500mhz fanless, that kind of thing. Still faster than a O.G. RPi...)

So the Pi's hardware was really only a revelation if you needed that semi-embeddable form factor, or if you wanted to do something like manage a classroom of cheap low-performance PCs without the nightmare of managing a fleet of heterogeneous junk PCs.

It was always all about the objectively awesome ecosystem of support and peripherals, and deciding whether that ecosystem mattered for you and your use case. Sometimes that ecosystem is a massive boon and sometimes it doesn't matter at all.
by yehat | 2025-09-05 17:33:40+00:00
You seems as somebody who has inside information, or maybe you're just speculating, too? People are right to question RPI offerings because most of us still remember the core idea from the inception of that project. Luckily there're still Zero's and Pico's that make for something intriguing (and the CMs, too). The core product for the most people (yes, really for most) has become too far away from attractive.
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-05 17:33:40+00:00
At this point, it is really important for everyone in the industry to recognize that the industry leaders (in terms of "running the most successful companies") should not be considered ethical or moral leaders.

It's a categorical error. Like expecting a boat captain to be Descartes because they're good at leading people to operate a boat (or, for that matter, expecting Descartes to take first in a marathon because he was really good at applying logic to philosophical questions).
by flail | 2025-09-05 17:33:46+00:00
Oh, development sure does mean the whole package. Architectural design, automated tests, coding, refactoring, code review and post-review changes, deployment, manual tests, etc.

A question: what if all those activities are to build a feature that will harm user retention or a product no one wants?

A follow-up question: what if we could have known that up front, or there was a simple way to learn that?

Because so often we build stuff that shouldn't have been built in the first place (appalling startup success rate is probably a good enough statistical measure of that). And yes, there are ways to learn that we're building the wrong thing, other than building a fully-fledged version of it.