MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gyomu | 2025-09-26 09:33:42+00:00
Their point is that ChatGPT is clearly maximizing for engagement with the product, rather than working as a straightforward tool that aims to solve your problem at hand as fast and efficiently as possible.

The decision to begin every response with “that’s a fascinating observation” and end every response with “want me to do X?” is a clear decision by PMs at OpenAI.

Poster is questioning what might motivate those decisions.
by ljm | 2025-09-26 09:34:32+00:00
I personally don't understand what makes executives so special that they are exempted from the same sort of criminal proceeding the average Joe is faced with. By all accounts they hold these lofty positions precisely because they can (and should) be held responsible for their company's dirty deeds.

A fine is low stakes because the company more likely than not will have a way to recoup that loss. There is an obvious calculus to that which is practically a cliché to mention. A lawsuit just puts it on the people to succeed in civil proceedings at their own expense, over a potentially lengthy period of time.

Western countries like the UK and US tend to be quite soft on businesses engaging in practices that would land an unremarkable working class person in prison if they were caught doing the same.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-26 09:34:43+00:00
"Multiple contradictions in logic are complex statements where two or more propositions, taken together, assert the logical impossibility of their own truth, often resulting in two mutually exclusive conclusions"

if you understand logic, you may grasp logic was not required to reach any analytic conclusions in multiple contradictions, scientific discourse does just fine without it and probably needs to jettison logic en route to new formats.
by motorest | 2025-09-26 09:35:03+00:00
> The main issue is that a reader might mistake Redis as a 2X faster postgres. Memory is 1000X faster than disk (SSD) and with network overhead Redis can still be 100X as fast as postgres for caching workloads.

Your comments suggest that you are definitely missing some key insights onto the topic.

If you, like the whole world, consume Redis through a network connection, it should be obvious to you that network is in fact the bottleneck.

Furthermore, using a RDBMS like Postgres may indeed imply storing data in a slower memory. However, you are ignoring the obvious fact that a service such as Postgres also has its own memory cache, and some query results can and are indeed fetched from RAM. Thus it's not like each and every single query forces a disk read.

And at the end of the day, what exactly is the performance tradeoff? And does it pay off to spend more on an in-memory cache like Redis to buy you the performance Delta?

That's why real world benchmarks like this one are important. They help people think through the problem and reassess their irrational beliefs. You may nitpick about setup and configuration and test patterns and choice of libraries. What you cannot refute are the real world numbers. You may argue they could be better if this and that, but the real world numbers are still there.
by tromp | 2025-09-26 09:35:29+00:00
That's ceil(log2(~4.8x10^44)) = 149 bits. But to make it efficiently decodable you'd use the ceil(log2(8726713169886222032347729969256422370854716254)) = 153 bit representation of the ChessPositionRanking project linked to in my other comment. The ChessCounter project does not provide an efficiently decodable code.
by odie5533 | 2025-09-26 09:35:44+00:00
At 10k RPS you'll see a significant cost savings with Redis over DynamoDB.

ElastiCache Serverless (Redis/Memcached): Typical latency is 300–500 microseconds (sub-millisecond response)

DynamoDB On-Demand: Typical latency is single-digit milliseconds (usually between 1–10 milliseconds for standard requests)
by motorest | 2025-09-26 09:38:02+00:00
> "I'll use postgres" was going to be your conclusion no matter what I guess?

Would it bother you as well if the conclusion was rephrased as "based on my observations, I see no point in rearchitecting the system to improve the performance by this much"?

I think you are too tied to a template solution that not only you don't stop to think why you're using it or even if it is justified at all. Then, when you are faced with observations that challenge your unfounded beliefs, you somehow opt to get defensive? That's not right.
by amenhotep | 2025-09-26 09:38:52+00:00
That's a cute story. I asked ChatGPT to suggest "a topic for a midterm essay that addresses our relationship to technology", since that was all the information he gave us. It came up with:

The Double-Edged Sword: How Technology Both Enhances and Erodes Human Connection The Illusion of Control: How Technology Shapes Our Perception of Autonomy From Cyberspace to Real Space: The Impact of Virtual Reality on Identity and Human Experience Digital Detox: The Human Need for Technology-Free Spaces in an Always-Connected World Surveillance Society: How Technology Shapes Our Notions of Privacy and Freedom Technology and the Future of Work: Human Adaptation in the Age of Automation The Techno-Optimism Fallacy: Is Technology Really the Solution to Our Problems? The Digital Divide: How Access to Technology Shapes Social Inequality Humanizing Machines: Can Artificial Intelligence Ever Understand the Complexity of Human Emotion? The Ethics of Technological Advancements: Who Decides What Is ‘Ethically Acceptable’?

They're still pretty samey and sloppy, and the pattern of Punchy Title: Explanatory Caption is evident, so there's clearly some truth to it. But I wonder if he hasn't enhanced his results a little bit.
by palata | 2025-09-26 09:38:55+00:00
> It’s not what you meant but it’s what you said.

Technically, I did not say it, I wrote it. Normally, the way it works is that you don't take a single sentence out of its context and then say it's wrong. You take the context.

I specified my thought in the next sentence:

> Even though the OS has to "read" your messages in order to print them on your screen.

Nobody would say that the OS is watching your communications, even though the OS has to "read" your messages to print them on your screen.
by flyinghamster | 2025-09-26 09:39:59+00:00
You and me both, and that became a cycle with each new generation of technology. I remember that FidoNet (and Usenet, for that matter) had a lot of that ham radio ethos, with commercial messages most unwelcome. But once the internet got too big, Usenet drowned in spam. It was too easy to crapflood newsgroups into oblivion, and once the politicians started grandstanding, ISPs wasted no time nuking their NNTP servers.
by Gareth321 | 2025-09-26 09:40:25+00:00
Things happen slowly, then all at once. Many people think ChatGPT appeared out of nowhere a couple of years ago. In reality it was steadily improving for 8 years. Before then, LLMs were being developed for Word2Vec. Before then, Yoshua Bengio and colleagues proposed the first neural probabilistic language model, and introducing distributed word representations (precursors to embeddings). Before then we had Statistical NLP took hold, with n-gram models, hidden Markov models, and later phrase-based machine translation. Before that we had work on natural language processing (NLP) which began with symbolic AI and rule-based systems (e.g., ELIZA, 1966).

These are all stepping stones, and eventually the technology is mature enough to productise. You would be shocked by how good Tesla FSD is right now. It can easily take you on a cross country trip with almost zero human interactions.
by moomoo11 | 2025-09-26 09:41:05+00:00
I personally think peer (pair?) programming is not a very effective way to work or learn.

I think it is far better for individuals to work on planning better (together) so they can work on atomic pieces of work independently.

Having a dedicated mentoring session (like a 1:1 sync 2x a month with the principal architect) to go over what you're working on and learning from them is better. Both for your potential, and for overall productivity.
by hexo | 2025-09-26 09:41:05+00:00
Filesystem is essentially a "simple" database. If it is not performing, then it is not a good db. It shouldn't really matter how many files you have if metadata, and indexing of that metadata is done properly (i.e. like in good db). It also has additional benefits to DB that usually do not even exist there as they aren't practical at all (like random access).
by Frieren | 2025-09-26 09:41:24+00:00
That is because we are moving away from Democracy and rule of law and towards Feudalism and aristocracy. In such a system, the law is not blind but it is applied depending on the accused social status.

Feudalism is not a good goverment system to produce wealth nor well-being. It is very good at concentrating the diminishing wealth in a few hands, thou.
by senko | 2025-09-26 09:41:53+00:00
Ars has fallen a long way from what they used to be (I say this as a former subscriber).

Expect clickbait articles, shallow tech coverage, rabid commenters (I don't visit the forum but the comments were previously - mostly - of higher quality).

I still follow it because I haven't found a worthy replacement yet.

As for the article, it actually says this was within a routine consultation, ie. EU asked companies what they think and (as you point out) Apple politely responded.
by nuc1e0n | 2025-09-26 09:44:22+00:00
The Latin alphabet that we use is itself an evolution of Heiroglyphics. The linked site also says we have no knowledge of how the ancient Egyptians reached their mathematical conclusions.

That's not true. The Rhind mathematical papyrus documents worked mathematical problems. Matt Parker of the youtube channel "stand up maths" did a collaboration video recently with Ilona Regulski of the British Museum about it.
by tzahifadida | 2025-09-26 09:45:45+00:00
I think this is amazingly great. If they can compete with AWS SES on pricing then, why should I work and pay to 2 services if I already use cloudflare and just use AWS SES for transactional emails. BUT and this is a big one. Most OSS already integrates with SES, so I doubt it will be easy to replace, it may take years, unless.... they can replace them completely as is without adding new codes and apis...
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-26 09:46:25+00:00
Yes. SpaceX was experimenting with private money until something stuck with a few tiny pushes from the government buying risky launch contracts after they had already proven themselves.

Looking at the current crop of nuclear startups they are relying on government handouts until those run out and then they silently disappear. Making absolutely no progress on the economics of nuclear power.

Today no one talks about NuScale anymore, because they had to admit not solving the problem. Instead it is the latest PowerPoint reactor still being able to claim it is cheap, fast to build and ”by default safe”.

5-10 years earlier the name of the game was mPower. Until that became too expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%26W_mPower

Keep throwing private money at it, and launch demonstrators when they like SpaceX prove they have something to the world.

The current status of massive handouts with nothing in return is just laughable.
by mattacular | 2025-09-26 09:46:28+00:00
For cache, having TTL is invaluable. Having to tune cleanup jobs in Postgres is annoying. Deletes create dead rows (so do updates) so now you have to deal with vacuum as well. The method the author suggested will run into a lot more problems if the service ever needs to scale up beyond what they estimated than a traditional dedicated cache like Redis in front.
by qcnguy | 2025-09-26 09:47:37+00:00
> I had a Claude Sonnet 4 agent try your prompt. It produced a 90 line python file in 7 minutes that reads the entire file into memory, performs floating point multiplication, doesn't correctly display the money values, and would crash if the price column ever had any currency symbols.

OK, that ups the stakes :)

I'm working on my own agent at the moment and gave it this task. I first had it generate a 10M row CSV with randomize product code, price and quantity.

It has two modes: fast and high quality. In fast mode I gave it the task "add to products.csv a column containing the multiple of the price and quantity columns". In 1m21s it wrote an AWK script that processed the file in a streaming manner and used it to add the column, with a backup file. So the solution did scale but it didn't avoid the other edge cases.

Then I tried the higher quality mode with the slightly generalized prompt "write a program that adds a column to a CSV file containing the multiple of the price and quantity columns". In this mode it generates a spec from the task, then reviews its own spec looking for potential bugs and edge cases, then incorporates its own feedback to update the spec, then implements the spec (all in separate contexts). This is with GPT-5.

The spec it settled on takes into account all those edge cases and many more, e.g. it thought about byte order marks, non-float math, safe overwrite, scientific notation, column name collisions, exit codes to use and more. It considered dealing with currency symbols but decided to put that out of scope (I could have edited the spec to override its decision here, but didn't). Time elapsed:

1. Generating the test set, 1m 9sec

2. Fast mode, 1m 21sec (it lost time due to a header quoting issue it then had to circle back and fix)

3. Quality mode, 48sec on initial spec, 2m on reviewing the spec, 1m 30sec on updating the spec (first attempt to patch in place failed, it tried again by replacing the entire file), 4m on implementing the spec - this includes time in which it tested its own solution and reviewed the output.

I believe the results to be correct and the program to tackle not only all the edge cases raised in this thread but others too. And yet the prompt was no more complex than the one I gave originally, and the results are higher quality than I'd have bothered to write myself.

I don't know which agent you used but right now we're not model intelligence constrained. Claude is a smart model, I'm sure it could have done the same, but the workflows the agents are implementing are full of very low hanging fruit.
by runeblaze | 2025-09-26 09:47:44+00:00
I mean sure we can do ZFC or ZF as the foundation, and I am sure with enough effort we can make metamath or some modern derivative great again. At some point though I like having years of type-directed program synthesis research helping me write proofs; I like type-checking research helping me check my proofs, and I like my proof assistants to work well for verified program extraction if I also happen to write code because the mathematics academic job market is quite shit for your average pure maths PhD, and if I were to do logic then it might be even shittier.

Admittedly the above (except program extraction I suppose) can all be achieved with ZFC + a layer of type theory on top, and again that's a reasonable thing to do, but I hope this makes a strong enough case for the type theoretical foundation.
by alephnil | 2025-09-26 09:48:04+00:00
> 1 nautical mile equals to one minute in the 90 degrees hemisphere arc

The nautical mile is not an SI unit, so it is not defined by a single organization, Your definition used to be the common definition, but it seems like the relevant organizations has updated the definition to be exactly 1852 m. If the original definition of the meter applies, then it would have been 1851.85 or 15 cm shorter, but with newer measurement of the earth, it would have been more like 1855 m.
by palata | 2025-09-26 09:48:31+00:00
> You can't for a second imagine how that could possibly go wrong?

I can, and that is why I am against ChatControl. But many many comments here say stuff like "it breaks encryption", and that's not actually what it does.

The debate should focus on what ChatControl cannot solve, not on details it could solve. If you spend your day complaining about something that can be solved, politicians will (rightfully) say "I hear you, don't worry we will solve that".

> There won't be any false-positives because just trust me bro.

"There will be false-positives, but they won't have any impact on you". You find it invasive? 99% of people don't care, they already give all their data to private companies like TooBigTech.

> whether adversaries have compromised the system to add their own hashes.

So what? Legal material gets reported to the authorities, they see it's legal, and they realise that the list has been tampered with.

> And we don't know that the mechanism that sends our private messages

"Don't worry, we will make the code open source, you'll be able to audit it!"

> The hashes are "only for what's deemed illegal" because just trust me bro.

YES. That's my problem with it. It can be abused because fundamentally we cannot audit those hashes. We don't want to create a system that gives that power to whoever controls it.
by preommr | 2025-09-26 09:48:37+00:00
I hate AI, the other day a goblin broke in just as I was talking to chatgpt and asked me how many Ls in apple, and before I could say anything, the ai gave the wrong answer and I got stabbed.

But seriously, what're these scenarios? Waiting until the last minute for an ending to a script? Apparently a twist ending that somehow works with the rest of the movie, and is also used in another movie - with identical dialogue. You can't just copy and paste endings like that. Also, who cares? This is a world where the director instead of just saying the problem, sends a vague text, lets the writer go see the movie, and then deal with the fallout. In this world, the writer goes on to win the lottery and live happily ever after.
by clan | 2025-09-26 09:49:40+00:00
I missed the references:

[0] https://www.nets.eu/segments/Pages/for-banks-2.aspx

[1] https://musescore.org/en/download/musescore.msi

[2] https://www.youtube.com/@Tantacrul

[3] https://www.martinkeary.com/about-me

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/Musescore/comments/1e4a4is/musescor...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/Musescore/comments/16sq8tk/why_is_t...

[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/Musescore/comments/1h5pwt0/avoid_mu...

[7] https://www.reddit.com/r/Musescore/comments/ytbw01/musescore...

[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990543
by rollcat | 2025-09-26 09:50:25+00:00
> The writing was on the wall once Linux was a thing.

Linux didn't "win" nearly as much as x86 did by becoming "good enough" - Linux just happened to be around to capitalize on that victory.

The writing on the wall was the decreasing prices and increasing capability of consumer-grade hardware. Then real game-changer followed: horizontal scalability.
by Macha | 2025-09-26 09:50:43+00:00
As for alternatives: Bunpro (grammar + vocab + kanji), Marumori (tries to do everything), Wanikani (kanji) are the ones usually recommended. Personally I used Bunpro + Wanikani. That said, you do need to spread your wings out of the apps eventually. Learning words 5000-6000 are less helpful than practicing listening in context for example.
by wvh | 2025-09-26 09:51:15+00:00
I've done some benchmarks over the years and 6-7k/s for getting simple data out of a basic Postgres installation seems pretty spot on. The question is when using Postgres as a cache, are you taking away performance for actual, more complex business logic queries. That is going to depend on the level of overlap between endpoints that use caching and those that need more complex queries.

What I'd be interested to see is a benchmark that mixes lots of dumb cache queries with typically more complex business logic queries to see how much Postgres performance tanks during highly concurrent load.
by wartywhoa23 | 2025-09-26 09:51:34+00:00
Trainwreck spotting is best conducted from outside of the train.

I think that most cases of seemingly unwarranted depression and apathy in people today in fact stem from their subconscious acknowledgement of this trainwreck in progress, and failure of consciousness to accept that and/or do anything about it.

In other words, mass cognitive dissonance.
by ensocode | 2025-09-26 09:52:09+00:00
Thanks for your explanation. For my region, 2024 coverage is already available, which should be sufficient to get started. After looking into the library, I just want to make sure I understand the workflow correctly: I would use the Tessera interactive map to mark known locations of Giant Hogweed, label them, and export as GeoJSON; then train a k-NN model, make predictions, and finally export the results as a GeoJSON back to the map. Does that sound right?
by Findecanor | 2025-09-26 09:52:20+00:00
> keys to the right of heavily-used (r) Shift / Enter / Backspace would make it much harder to find these keys without looking at the keyboard.

I'd think that people who prefer mechanical keyboards already have the muscle memory so that that isn't a problem.

Personally, I depend on Delete and Home/End/Page Up/Page Down for my text/code editing and find any keyboard without them to be deficient.
by lossolo | 2025-09-26 09:52:38+00:00
> Is US dollar backed a good thing? At this point we should be backing things on gold, platinum.

It's about making free money, not about making sense. They back it with USD because recent US regulations allow stablecoins to be backed by US securities. They will buy these securities, and for every dollar converted into their coin, they will earn a percentage per year. Free money.
by motorest | 2025-09-26 09:52:51+00:00
> No need to be so combative.

You're confusing being "combative" with asking you to substantiate your extraordinary claims. You opted to make some outlandish and very broad sweeping statements, and when asked to provide any degree of substance, you resorted to talk about "chill pills"? What does that say about the substance if your claims?

> If postgres has issues, it can affect the reliability of the service further if it's also running the cache.

That assertion is meaningless, isn't it? I mean, isn't that the basis of any distributed systems analysis? That if a component has issues, it can affect the reliability of the whole system? Whether the component in question is Redis, Postgres, doesn't that always hold true?

> Besides, having the cache on separate hardware can reduce the impact on the db on spikes, which can also factor into reliability.

Again, isn't this assertion pointless? I mean, it holds true whether it's Postgres and Redis, doesn't it?

> Having more headroom for memory and CPU can mean that you never reach the load where ot turns to service degradation on the same hw.

Again, this claim is not specific to any specific service. It's meaningless to make this sort of claim to single out either Redis or Postgres.

> Obviously a purpose-built tool can perform better for a specific use-case than the swiss army knife. Which is not to diss on the latter.

Is it obvious, though? There is far more to life than synthetic benchmarks. In fact, the whole point of this sort of comparison is that for some scenarios a dedicated memory cache does not offer any tangible advantage over just using a vanilla RDBMS.

This reads as some naive auto enthusiasts claiming that a Formula 1 car is obviously better than a Volkswagen Golf because they read somewhere they go way faster, but in reality what they use the car for is to drive to the supermarket.
by close04 | 2025-09-26 09:53:02+00:00
From my experience the best person to read these images is the medical imaging expert. The doctor who treats the underlying issue is qualified but it's not their core competence. They'll check of course but I don't think they generally have a strong basis to override the imaging expert.

If it's something serious enough a patient getting bad news will probably want a second opinion no matter who gave them the first one.