MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by awalsh128 | 2025-09-28 15:20:52+00:00
I don't think they are necessarily saying that. The data driven aspect is to connect users actually wanting or interested in something. The measure of this is the conversion rate, which is where the user actually clicks on the ad. You can also connect these with purchases from the ad buyer. The data driven piece is all the variables involved in developing functions that maximize this. At that point it is basically data science.
by zamadatix | 2025-09-28 15:21:11+00:00
Spot on about the memory, even some of the actual M* models don't have all that high of memory bandwidth and still kick ass just as well as the ones that do in this kind of benchmark.

I do feel like x86 has more technical roadblocks, but disagree the amount of investment is not the primary driving factor at this point. I haven't seen designs from ARM itself beat x86 on raw performance yet, and 100% of their funding goes towards this point. E.g. the X925 core certainly doesn't, nor does the top single core Android device on e.g. Geekbench come close to current iOS/PC device scores. They've announced some future shipping stuff like the C1 which is supposed to, but now we're talking marketing claims about upcoming 2026 CPUs vs Zen 5 from 2024. Perf/Watt wise absolutely of course, that ship sailed long ago. Z1/Z2 were admirable attempts in that regard, but still a day late and a dollar short to leading ARM designs.

The other factor to consider is scale-out CPUs with massive DC core counts tend to have mediocre single core performance, and that's what AMD really builds Zen for. Compare to Graviton in the DC and AMD is actually performing really well in both single/multi performance, perf/watt, and perf/dollar. It just doesn't scale down perfectly.

Apple/Qualcomm have certainly dumped more R&D into their cores being low core count beasts, and it shows vs any competition (ARM or x86). The news likes to talk about how many of the Nuvia developers came from working on Apple Silicon, but I think that is a bit oversold - I think it's mostly that those two development programs had a ton of investment targeting this specific use case as the main outcome.
by dandanua | 2025-09-28 15:21:14+00:00
There are no traits in Julia by default, that's true. But since types are first class citizens in Julia, traits can be implemented within the language. There is a package SimpleTraits.jl that implements Holy's trait trick, see also this tutorial https://ahsmart.com/pub/holy-traits-design-patterns-and-best...

An ability to work with types within the language is already a win for me.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-09-28 15:21:29+00:00
traditional "scatter-shot" approaches.

Who are these folks doing this "scatter-shot" approach? How do we get some insight into their practices?

The major company doing context sensitive advertising nowadays is Amazon. When you search on Amazon, they display relevant "sponsored" products that are clearly labeled as such.

So how is Amazon's "context sensitive" advertising business doing? By most accounts, pretty good actually.

https://www.campaignlive.com/article/amazons-ad-business-soa...

The real problem in my opinion is the lack of competition to the "personalized" approach. Everyone (except Amazon) just accepts "personalized" as the default --- mainly because there is no credible, large scale, organized, generally available alternative to compare it to.
by spookybones | 2025-09-28 15:21:29+00:00
I once lent my copy to a friend of a friend prone to conspiratorial thinking, who professed to be open-minded and interested in my viewpoint. A few years later, after many reminders, he returned it to me. I asked him what he thought of it. He said he never read it, but it made for a great paper weight. This was the first of many realizations for me that magical thinking cannot be altered with logic.
by Syntaf | 2025-09-28 15:22:00+00:00
This resonates with me this so much. I feel like half the comments in this thread are missing the value typing, but maybe they've never had the misfortune of working with hundreds of other developers on a project with no defined contracts on aggregates / value objects outside of code comments and wishful thinking.

I've worked on large python codebases for large companies for the last ~6 years of my career; types have been the single biggest boon to developer productivity and error reduction on these codebases.

Just having to THINK about types eliminates so many opportunities for errors, and if your type is too complex to express it's _usually_ a code smell; most often these situations can be re-written in a more sane albeit slightly verbose fashion, rather than using the more "custom" typing features.

No one gets points for writing "magical" code in large organizations, and typing makes sure of this. There's absolutely nothing wrong with writing "boring" python.

Could we have accomplished this by simply having used a different language from the beginning? Absolutely, but often times that's not a option for a company with a mature stack.

TL;DR -- Typing in python is an exception tool to scale your engineering organization on a code-base.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-28 15:22:01+00:00
> They shouldn't be that close to the absolute maximum voltage ratings on the components.

This appears to be a situation where the engineering team determined the absolute maximum input voltage and the marketing/product people put that number straight into the documentation.

Standard practice with electronic parts is to determine the absolute maximum rating, then to specify a recommended maximum that allows for some safety margin and variation.

Instead, this company determined the absolute maximum and then just shipped it.
by throwaway_7274 | 2025-09-28 15:22:37+00:00
Couldn't have said it better myself. Plus, you're not supposed to notice any of this. If you do, the TeX masters will put their fingers in their ears and tell you it's PEBKAC. "Get good, n00b. RTFM. It's not happening, but if it is, it's a good thing. It has to be designed this way, actually, you're just too thick to understand why. No, I won't explain."

Also, every part of the system is like this, not just the language-qua-language. The architecture of the compiler is like this. The compiler UI is like this (yes for every TeX engine). The package management/distribution situation is like this.

It basically has two things going for it: it's highly portable, backwards-compatible, and stable, and it produces really pretty documents.
by theptip | 2025-09-28 15:22:54+00:00
> a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors.

Yes of course it’s not going to increase exponentially forever.

The point is, why predict that the growth rate is going to slow exactly now? What evidence are you going to look at?

It’s possible to make informed predictions (eg “Moore’s law can’t get you further than 1nm with silicon due to fundamental physical limits”). But most commenters aren’t basing their predictions in anything as rigorous as that.

And note, there are good reasons to predict a speedup, too; as models get more intelligent, they will be able to accelerate the R&D process. So quality per-researcher is now proportional to the exponential intelligence curve, AND quantity of researchers scales with number of GPUs (rather than population growth which is much slower).
by hannasanarion | 2025-09-28 15:23:10+00:00
This is fascinating for the ways that it's wrong, like, subscription services are as old as newspapers, and early internet news sites including Wall Street Journal had paywalls at the same time or earlier.

Also this:

> Video teleconferencing, with the proto-Zoom platform CU-SeeMe

Apparently Skype has completely disappeared from the cultural memory. Video conferencing was invented in 2020, everybody.
by kbolino | 2025-09-28 15:23:15+00:00
I don't follow. If it's in ssh_config, then it's client-side. Either that's the client initiating the request, in which case it's not server-controlled like HTTP virtual hosts, or else it's the "client" involved in the hop through the jump server, in which case it's going to be specific to a single username. Also the Remote* options have to do with remote port forwarding, which is in the wrong direction.

What am I missing?
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-28 15:23:37+00:00
I also thought of it through the lens of comparing him to Marc Andreessen, who played a huge role in the open internet with Mosaic and Netscape and now sits at the far, far other end of the spectrum with his VC investments and government involvement. It's plausible that Berners-Lee could have followed a similar trajectory and notable that he has not.
by Arch-TK | 2025-09-28 15:23:42+00:00
I don't believe control master solves the problem, as long as Ansible is configured to create a new session within the long-running SSH connection then it will still have the session setup overhead. I tested this myself when prototyping the replacement.

However, it looks like pipelining (and obviously forking) could do a lot to help.

That being said, there were _many_ reasons for me to drop Ansible. Including poor non-linux host support, Yaml, the weird hoops you have to jump through to make a module, and difficulty achieving certain results given the abstraction choices.

I think Ansible is great, it solves a problem, but my problem was very specific, Ansible was a poor fit for it, and performance was just one of many nails in the coffin for me.
by andsoitis | 2025-09-28 15:24:24+00:00
If you want to invest in US equities and are looking for something other than the S&P 500 index or individual stocks, you could also consider other major indexes like:

- NASDAQ Composite (heavily tech & growth)

- Russell 2000 (2,000 small cap companies)

- Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index (exposure to nearly all publicly traded companies in the US)

- S&P MidCap 400 (as the name implies; bridges gap between large and small cap)

- S&P SmallCap 600 (600 small-cap US companies, emphasizing firms with strong financial health)

You could also put your money into bonds, but they don't perform as well as equities, but are lower risk. Even though government (muni, state, federal) come with tax benefits, they typically still underperform something like the S&P 500 after tax.

You can also invest your money into property with rental incomes, start your own business, etc., but these all come with the burden of additional effort.

Other alternative assets you can push your money into are things like commodities, collectibles, or cryptocurrencies, with the first having a more predictable, though not guaranteed, demand. And if you want to get more esoteric, you can put your money into derivatives.

All in all, S&P 500 index has stood out for its simplicity, low cost (expense ratios), low effort (you don't have to work or manage), and high returns.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-09-28 15:24:47+00:00
Another 'numbrr go up' analyst. Yes, models are objectively better at tasks. Please include the fact that hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into making them better. You could even call it a technology race. Once the money avalanche runs it's course, I and many others expect 'the exponential' to be followed by an implosion or correction in growth. Data and training is not what LLMs crave. Piles of cash is what LLMs crave.
by bartread | 2025-09-28 15:24:50+00:00
> The reason is that they are not really a part of the language, they violate the spirit of the language

This is a good way of expressing my own frustration with bolting strong typing on languages that were never designed to have it. I hate that TypeScript has won out over JavaScript because of this - it’s ugly, clumsy, and boilerplatey - and I’d be even more disappointed to see the same thing happen to the likes of Python and Ruby.

My background is in strongly typed languages - first C++, then Java, and C# - so I don’t hate them or anything, but nowadays I’ve come to prefer languages that are more sparing and expressive with their syntax.
by zahlman | 2025-09-28 15:25:59+00:00
This is a strange and aggressive bit of pedantry. Yes, you'd also need `__radd__` for classes that participate in heterogenous-type addition, but it's clear what was meant in context. The fundamentals are not all "beginner" level and beginners wouldn't be implementing operator overloads in the first place (most educators hold off on classes entirely for quite a while; they're pure syntactic sugar after all, and the use case is often hard to explain to beginner).

Regardless, none of that bears on the original `slow_add` example from the Reddit page. The entire point is that we have an intuition about what can be "added", but can't express it in the type system in any meaningful way. Because the rule is something like "anything that says it can be added according to the protocol — which in practical terms is probably any two roughly-numeric types except for the exceptions, and also most container types but only with other instances of the same type, and also some third-party things that represent more advanced mathematical constructs where it makes sense".

And saying "don't rely on magic methods" does precisely nothing about the fact that people want the + symbol in their code to work this way. It does suggest that `slow_add` is a bad thing to have in an API (although that was already fairly obvious). But in general you do get these issues cropping up.

Dynamic typing has its place, and many people really like it, myself included. Type inference (as in the Haskell family) solves the noise problem (for those who consider it a problem rather than something useful) and is elegant in itself, but just not the strictly superior thing that its advocates make it out to be. People still use Lisp family languages, and for good reason.

But maybe Steve Yegge would make the point better.
by gruez | 2025-09-28 15:26:43+00:00
>If all of the cleaning businesses in the area slash their marketing budget to 0, the author is not going to fail to find a cleaner.

You're right, they'll find whatever incumbent cleaner instead. A marketing ban is something that all incumbents would love, because they don't need to attract more customers whereas marketing is basically the only way that upstarts can get a foothold.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-09-28 15:27:18+00:00
I almost always want the version-sorting that's being presented in this article, rather than an "alphabetical" sort. But on the other hand, it absolutely seems like a valid bug that this is presented as an "alphabetical" sort, rather than something like "alphabetic/numeric" or similar. In other words, a problem of labeling rather than one of sorting.
by jmclnx | 2025-09-28 15:27:18+00:00
If I understand the article, the author wants magic :)

I take it to mean they want the system to know file_9.txt is less then file_10.txt.

I never saw that happen in any OS, so I do not know what he is referring to. Maybe whatever that old system was, it sorted by create time as opposed to file name.

So, the author can try and create "aisort" that will look at all file names and add leading zeros to the file numeric portion, sort, then remove the zeros added. That will probably as slow as s***t and use gobs pf memory, depending on the number of files.
by cornstalks | 2025-09-28 15:27:30+00:00
A lot of people here are saying things are mislabeled, but every single solar panel comes with a datasheet that shows its Voc and temperature coefficient.

Solar panel manufactures can’t give you a hard maximum on voltage because temperature will make that vary. Anyone who is buying solar panels without understanding the temperature coefficient shouldn’t be buying solar panels. It’s not hard to understand and there are hundreds of guides out there explaining it if you just search for terms on the datasheet.
by rini17 | 2025-09-28 15:27:33+00:00
The solar panel with inverter does not have any inertia so it can survive power spikes more easily, can lower the voltage till it's over. The generator on the other hand has physical rotating parts that could be damaged by sudden torque asked by increased load. Of course it could be mitigated with additional "soft start" circuitry on the motor but that's usually not included. Not capacitor alone please, you risk more damage.
by antononcube | 2025-09-28 15:29:52+00:00
Specifications for asynchronous LLM computations with Raku's "LLM::Graph" detail how to manage complex, multi-step LLM workflows by representing them as graphs. By defining the workflow as a graph, developers can execute LLM function calls concurrently, enabling higher throughput and lower latency than synchronous, step-by-step processes.

"LLM::Graph" uses a graph structure to manage dependencies between tasks, where each node represents a computation and edges dictate the flow. Asynchronous behavior is a default feature, with specific options available for control.
by Narushia | 2025-09-28 15:30:24+00:00
I disagree with `Optional`. It can cause confusion in function signatures, since an argument typed as "optional" might still be required if there is no default value. Basically I think the name is bad, it should be `Nullable` or something.

I believe Python's own documentation also recommends the shorthand syntax over `Union`. Linters like Pylint and Ruff also warn if you use the imported `Union`/`Optional` types. The latter even auto-fixes it for you by switching to the shorthand syntax.
by mothballed | 2025-09-28 15:30:25+00:00
And that is part of the reason why the 10th amendment left many/most the functions the feds are currently performing to the states, and barred the feds from performing them.

i.e. California for a very long time, and even on rare occasion today, is constantly harassed by the DEA over intrastate commerce of marijuana despite the federal government having no power to do so. Californians were basically made to fund the extra-constitutional enforcement against them voted for by other states with per-capita outsized votes.
by magicalhippo | 2025-09-28 15:30:59+00:00
It's my understanding that dropout[1] is also an important aspect of training modern neural nets.

When using dropout you intentionally remove some random number of nodes ("neurons") from the network during a training step.

By constantly changing which nodes are dropped during training, you effectively force delocalization and so it seems to me somewhat unsurprising that the resulting network is resilient to local perturbations.

[1]: https://towardsdatascience.com/dropout-in-neural-networks-47...
by namibj | 2025-09-28 15:31:23+00:00
The problem is that you run higher voltages with the same hardware if your in Alaska than if you're in Florida. Substantially so.

"Wasting" those 5~10% during severe winter conditions isn't worth splurging on the voltage converter.

Though then selling units that suggest to not run a few hundred volt strings before paralleling instead does sound bad, as the string doesn't need separate fuses rated to many volts DC.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-28 15:32:10+00:00
This is a bad idea.

Let's start off with the first point "They are just easements on private property" That's what most public roads are. They are still owned by the public (the government) and maintained by the public (the government). Where I'm from, we have plenty of dirt and gravel roads just like this. Once every 10 years or so the county comes in and re-gravels them. They are mostly only ever used by private individuals and they cross through private land, but they are ultimately public. There are actual dirt roads which are also publicly owned but unmaintained.

Where there are private roads, they've been an absolutely nightmare. What's happened with private roads is rich individuals tend to like to throw up gates and no trespassing signs on the roads. Particularly if it blocks off public land, which they don't own, and turns it into their playground. That happens all over the country. In particular you'll see it happen to lakes an on beaches all the time.

But finally, you benefit from the public road whether you want to admit it or not. And particularly when population density goes up, public roads become much MUCH more important. The model you propose is one that only works if we are in very rural locations. It completely breaks down as soon as you need to get goods into a grocery store or supermarket. We subsidize with our taxes the damage done to roads by shipping products and goods. Because I like eating fresh fruit and vegetables, I don't mind that I'm paying a little more taxes so I can have access to those goods. Along with amazon shipments and my mail.

There's a reason no ideal libertarian society exists, because they go to shit when they are tried (see Argentina who is currently looking for a bailout from the US because of their dumb economic policies that you likely support). There are plenty of failed "free town" experiments. The book "A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear" is an amusing story about exactly how this system ultimately turns into a trash heap city.
by Tenemo | 2025-09-28 15:32:11+00:00
I agree with all your points, just wanted to say that transistor count is probably a counter example. We have been keeping with the Moore's Law more or less[1] and M3 Max, a 2023 consumer-grade CPU, has ~100B of transistors, "just" one order of magnitude away from yout 1T. I think that shows we haven't stagnated much in transistor density and the progress is just staggering!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
by mackeye | 2025-09-28 15:32:14+00:00
i think it's the opposite, that they _want_ file_10.txt to come before file_9.txt by default, but that file explorers fail at this. it's rare that i want true alphabetical sort, but it's convenient for cases like tfa where alphabetical sort is more predictable if i have filenames that look like <letters>_<numbers-of-same-length>.txt.
by DamonHD | 2025-09-28 15:32:17+00:00
For the Google AdSense slots I run I have attempted* to turn off ALL ad personalisation for ethical reasons, hoping that G reverts to purely contextual clues like in the GoodOldDays(TM) when my revenue from Google ads was >1000x higher also!

*I am not convinced that AdSense is really doing this everywhere, in spite of the need to do so for (UK/EU) GDPR reasons etc once I have told it to.
by delichon | 2025-09-28 15:32:46+00:00
I had a sales guy at my employer tell me excitedly that he and a client were inventing a new thing for us to support on their website, selling a book before it was even finished, one chapter at a time! He was crestfallen when I told him that Charles Dickens had done it in the 1830s, and that I learned Ruby on Rails from a book published that way by Pragmatic Programmers around 2005.
by zamadatix | 2025-09-28 15:33:27+00:00
Of course e.g. MKBHD wants more ad revenue. To do so his only option is to put additional contextual ads as part of the video itself, so he does. MKBHD has no way to make a section of the video target individual viewers based on their history. YouTube does, so they do - because they know it makes them more money to do it that way.
by neuralkoi | 2025-09-28 15:33:42+00:00
The stock market is not the economy. While the economy seems to be entering a period of stagflation, the stock market keeps ticking up. The magnificent seven are living in their own kind of alternate reality. There's only so much they can squeeze from their current hyper aggressive approach. Maybe they are hoping on interest rate cuts or AI to save them?

When the tide goes out, it's the people with the 401k's who are be going to be left swimming naked.
by downboots | 2025-09-28 15:33:52+00:00
"While asleep I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of results in elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing..."

- Srinivasa Ramanujan