MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rbanffy | 2025-10-21 08:30:51+00:00
> it may just mean very narrow scenarios where you see the benefit.

I would assume this to be the case. It should be beneficial at higher thread counts if more code and shared data is in the cache. All the tests, however, seem to be very CPU-bound and graphics related. I'm curious about the chess ones, where it seems one model benefited more from the extra L3 than the other, as well as the one where Windows had significantly lower performance (could it be small file IO?).

Finding the cases where the larger cache is most beneficial would be an interesting project on its own.
by nhanb | 2025-10-21 08:31:09+00:00
I read somewhere that Hacker News should have been named Startup News, and sometimes interactions like the one upthread reminds me of that. I'm not saying it's wrong - if you're good at something don't do it for free and all that - but it's kinda sad that in-depth discussions on public forums are getting harder and harder to find these days.
by marcogarces | 2025-10-21 08:31:31+00:00
Most people look at computers as a commodity that needs to perfectly balance performance and price; most really expensive computers usually are acquired by professionals that do need the specs and within small time, it gets paid off quickly. I have a 16" Macbook Pro M2 with 96GB of RAM. Costs without VAT around €4k, but a client paid half of it as a one year retainer for my work, so the device ended up costing me €2k. You would say those specs are over the top, but it's been 2 years and I still have an amazing work machine and there's not enough things I can do to make it feel slow; it pays off, because I don't waste my time waiting for my device, it's the other way around. Would my dad buy such a machine for browsing? Absolutely not! Me as a professional? Makes no sense not to!
by billfruit | 2025-10-21 08:31:58+00:00
While I still use emacs, I find that that despite the "batteries included" narrative about emacs, the things which are not included are causes of major frustration.

Such essential functionality like grep-find and LSP servers which is required for out of the box auto complete are not bundled with emacs. Most modern IDEs/editors have these functionality baked in.

If you install emacs for windows you find that grep-find doesn't work, because it depends on support from environment. A full text search should be built into the editor.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-10-21 08:32:23+00:00
> Nuclear electricity generation has been only 33% efficient (and no imminent breakthroughs are expected).

This is a good example of the pointless numerology deployed against renewables by people like Smil, because he's doing it to nuclear here.

What does this number mean in real life? Basically nothing. Why is he bringing it up then?. Because it sounds like a low number.

Most of the numbers he uses are used because they sound like a big number. That's the level of debate he's aiming for.
by elcritch | 2025-10-21 08:33:05+00:00
Googling TSMC margin and it looks to be 53%-59% gross margin. That is after they became the leading global fab of course.

No doubt keeping costs low helped them get to that stage. Still that's a crazy margin. I imagine much of it's re-invested.

IMHO, Intel could've kept up but dropped the ball pretty hard. The volume of ARM / cell phone cpus caught them off guard and huge amounts of revunue let TSMC drive forward.
by kiselitza | 2025-10-21 08:33:24+00:00
Ah, yes, the cloud-dependent tool that forces you to pay per seat and log in for any type of collaboration is down when their cloud provider is.

Anyways, the folks have spoken, no need to double down. There are more than a dozen alternatives to it, and new ones are coming up.

I'm helping build a new one.

- Completely offline.

- Gives the ability to build reusable blocks (headers, query params, etc)

- Let's you document everything in Markdown.

- Imports your collections and cURLs.

https://voiden.md/
by highwaylights | 2025-10-21 08:33:25+00:00
This.

Surprisingly few ER docs anywhere in the world have even a rudimentary understanding of the risks of CT scanning patients. There's a lot of information around about this, but my own first hand (anecdotal) experience is that I've had ER docs try to convince me that it's basically the same as an X-Ray and act like I'm a crazy person when I explain that it's orders of magnitude higher and cumulative over a lifetime. On one hand, it's not their job to care about your long term health - they need to rule out an emergency and get you out the door as quickly as possible - but it's very concerning.

It's a bit like how general practitioners aren't taught about nutrition at all, so give out really poor advice for heart disease patients (the leading cause of mortality in Western economies).
by 1dom | 2025-10-21 08:33:32+00:00
We all watched this happen across FAANG, right? In the early/mid 2010s working at Amazon meant you were cream of the crop.

By 2020, no engineer in their right mind wanted to work there because it was an infamously bad employer for people who wanted to create great tech in a nerdy-fun environment.

The AI space is showing how the "darling fun tech company" to "aggressive tech employer full of psychopaths" trope can take less than a few years now!
by johnisgood | 2025-10-21 08:34:23+00:00
> needing an excuse to lack knowledge is how we end up with people afraid to ask.

While we should encourage people to ask questions without fear, this doesn't mean we should lower standards or simplify everything for the lowest common denominator (which seems to be trending a lot!).

That said, there is the real issue of "this must stay complex because that's how it really is" as well, undeniably so.

> It used to be that learning was almost a hazing ritual of being belittled and told to RTFM.

Been there! I think it did more good than bad to me though. Survivorship bias? In any case, I don't try to make the case here that it is optimal pedagogy. I wouldn't know. Thoughts?
by halb | 2025-10-21 08:34:56+00:00
This is mostly an educational tool, and it's intentionally designed to present data in a similar way to GDB. The idea is that students will use this tool to learn basic assembly concepts without the extra friction of GDB, and when they are ready they will move to the real tools, where hopefully they will already recognize some of the elements.

I am intentionally not implementing any useful feature beyond single stepping so that students will not remain stuck on a local minimum using this website.
by 0xEF | 2025-10-21 08:35:27+00:00
I’d argue that the fear you speak of spread because it was profitable. I hit the 90’s in my mid-teens and boy howdy did it seem like every news outlet, especially the local ones, had their sites set on making us terrified to eat or drink things we previously consumed without much thought. Fear gets viewers, which is how revenue is generated, so there’s an arguable conflict of interest there.

The real problem is some of those claims and reports were true, but we were so inundated with the rhetoric that everything was going to kill us that many of us sort of lapsed into apathy about it. Stepping back, the food industry in the US clearly does not have consumer health at heart and we struggle to find healthy options that avoid heavy processing or synthetic fillers. Those parents who sheltered their babies back then may have been on to something when it came to stuff we consume and we should have been on the path to demand better from our food sources had more of us been more diligent with our grocery choices (myself included, at the time), but instead we ended up with bread that lasts unnaturally long and has an allowable amount of sawdust as an ingredient.
by pols45 | 2025-10-21 08:35:45+00:00
Look at how India works and its history. The British did not control the whole subcontinent. There were 600 "princely states" running parallelly with many different kinds of agreements with different European colonial powers. Some were small city states and some larger than most countries in the EU. So how did a single federal structure emerge and survive? They have more issues, many more divisions, less resources, and yet have survived a whole lot more chaos the EU ever has. Through out its history the pressure has produced many leaders that don't just have regional influence but pan India influence. The EU hasn't produced such people. It hasn't felt enough pressure to do it yet. So thank Putin and Trump for increasing that pressure.
by rcxdude | 2025-10-21 08:36:05+00:00
And, to pick an example from the research, being able to generate output that rhymes. In fact, it's hard to see how you would produce anything that would be considered coherent text without some degree of planning ahead at some level of abstraction. If it was truly one token at a time without any regard for what comes next it would constantly 'paint itself into a corner' and be forced to produce nonsense (which, it seems, does still happen sometimes, but without any planning it would occur constantly).
by vanderZwan | 2025-10-21 08:38:34+00:00
Occam's razor is basically (paraphrased) "given two explanations where all else is equal, the one with the fewest added assumptions is most likely true." Based on that Occam's razor is already out the window because all else isn't equal.

Also this "more fragile people" argument assumes the "fragility" is both inherent and of a lifelong kind. This ignores that most causes of infant mortility are external, and that for many of those being exposed to them results in a lifelong increased mortality risk. Excessive hygiene leading to more allergies is a direct example of this.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-10-21 08:40:02+00:00
Expensive is relative. I'm the CTO of a small startup and we're leasing our laptops from Apple. We don't have huge budgets. I got my 16" M4 Max, 48GB, 1TB model a few months ago. Costs us 105 euro/month. That includes 3 years of extended warranty. After the lease is over (3 years), we have the option to buy the laptops at a discount typically. The new value of this thing is around 4500 euro, I think. We could have gone cheap and gotten something for 70-80 or so Euro per month. It's not worth the savings. Over 3 years that adds up to about 900 euros saved. That's nothing in the grand scheme of things.

105 euro per month is a very reasonable cost from a business point of view and not at all expensive. People think nothing of spending the same on LLM tokens, or getting a lease car for their commutes (typically spending >2-3x per month). But when it comes to laptops, people suddenly become irrationally frugal. If you use your laptop to produce things and benefit from having a fast laptop in any way for that, don't be frugal like that.

I get a lot of value out of having a fast laptop. For example, our entire integration test suite (Spring Boot) can run in under 30 seconds making use of all the CPU this thing has and running against docker containers with DB, Valkey, and Elasticsearch. That's a build that takes a lot longer on crappy CI vms or one of my old laptops. Basically, it runs almost like a small unit test suite. I can just invoke that whenever and not be blocked by it. I do this a lot. It helps me catch things early and keeps my feedback cycles short. Which helps me maintain flow state when I'm working. That is priceless.

30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping) and CPU and just ran a bit slower. Still reasonable. But a 7x improvement is massive for me. Times 10 or so per day adds up to really significant time savings. If you compile stuff, run expensive test suites, or whatever: you could use a fast laptop.

I used to freelance / consult and charge more per hour than this thing costs me per month. In retrospect, for me the lesson on updating here is to never ever allow myself to penny pinch on laptop cost again.
by wiesmann | 2025-10-21 08:41:07+00:00
The program existed six months ago. That said, currently it only allows to render old QuickDraw pictures on a modern Mac OS X. A tool going the other direction would be simple for bitmaps (just use PNG) or very complicated for vector data.

One thing I'm thinking about making a tool that uses old codecs to make compact images for 68K machines. Basically, use today's CPU power to make efficient road-pizza images.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-10-21 08:44:12+00:00
> If 1 Billion people voluntarily use a product and many claim to be productive, there must be something good about the product right?

Not necessarily. That METR study was interesting in that participants reported that they were more productive, but the hard data disagreed. This is incredibly common when looking at humans, we're generally bad at knowing what hurts or helps us in this sphere.

And personally, I think LLMs are super useful, but I'm pretty sceptical about valuations and returns in this space over the short to medium term.
by pjc50 | 2025-10-21 08:44:23+00:00
> isn't possible with current economic system and with current population

> This means degrowth, which isn't compatible with modern capitalism.

The reason people don't like discussing this stuff is that the logical conclusion is that the world will transition towards authoritarianism, in the form of fascism and/or something labelled "communism", while along the way a huge number of people will get killed.

Which is yet another reason to try to rush renewables.
by earthnail | 2025-10-21 08:45:12+00:00
Edit: just tried it for serving a fastapi. It's fantastic. Instant TLS via Let's Encrypt. There may be other webservers that are equally easy, but this one is certainly easier than Apache or ngninx, which I used so far. Love it.

--

Reach out to the guys at Kamal. They wrote their own reverse proxy because they thought Traefik was too complex, but they might be super happy about yours if Ferron is more powerful yet easy to configure because it might solve more of Kamal’s problems.

Not affiliated with Kamal at all, just an idea.
by pjc50 | 2025-10-21 08:46:32+00:00
Indeed. I didn't read the whole thing but presumably that's Carnot efficiency of the nuclear reactor as heat engine? In which case .. who cares? The important factors are "is there going to be sufficient fuel?" (insert argument about breeder reactors), "is it cost (money or resource) effective", and "is the proliferation risk important".

By comparison, the increase in power/area efficiency of solar panels is useful but not very significant either; again, the critical factor is the cost falling by several orders of magnitude in the past decades.
by Someone | 2025-10-21 08:46:36+00:00
There are many optimizations that are guaranteed to make code run faster, but even then, that does not mean you should use them.

There can be competition between optimizations. At a given moment, the preconditions for both optimization O1 and optimization O2 may hold, but if you then apply O1, the precondition for O2 may no longer hold and vice versa.

In such cases, the best solution is to pick the better of O1 and O2.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-10-21 08:46:56+00:00
> Unfortunately, his argument very often happens to be that AI is not useful, that there are no customers for it, that AI coding agents do not work...

He definitely changed his mind on AI coding agents based on reader feedback. Ultimately though, you need incredible productivity growth/massive layoffs to make the numbers work for the current spending and RN, I don't see large signs of this.

> I happen to agree with the overall sentiment (that AI buildout is overextending the tech sector and the financial markets), but he is utterly fixated on the evils of AI and unable to admit either the current usefulness or the future potential of the technology. This does not make him look like an honest broker.

I think this is probably because he feels like he's taking crazy pills when he hears what CEOs/leaders are saying about this. It's some kind of mind virus. Like, I was at a meetup a few months back where a senior data/code person was saying that nobody would write code in 5 years, which (if you've used the tools heavily) seems pretty absurd.
by lurk2 | 2025-10-21 08:47:08+00:00
This is the conclusion I lean towards, but anecdotally one of my grandparents knew something like 3 or 4 kids who died before the age of 15, all in preventable accidents. Disease got at least a few more. It’s possibly just a coincidence but hearing the stories of how inattentive people could be to their children back then, I’ve always suspected current helicopter parenting norms must have accounted for at least some of the decline.

There’s been a similar shift with people letting their dogs roam free. When I was a kid I remember hearing stories about a dog getting run over by a car every year. I rarely hear these stories anymore because people usually keep their dogs supervised or in a fenced yard. I don’t have any hard data, but I suspect there’s something to these cultural shifts.
by rich_sasha | 2025-10-21 08:47:25+00:00
I might have messed it up, but as a follow up to your follow up, I think the depth of the ocean is comparable to the width of a single human hair compared to the head.

If you inflate a 18cm diameter head to the size of our planet, a 75um hair would be about 5km wide - which is about the average depth of our oceans.

It's one hair, not a whole head of hair!
by brainwad | 2025-10-21 08:47:29+00:00
No, on average people in 1600s England (who were overwhelmingly peasants) worked almost all daylight hours, 6 days a week - perhaps 3000 hours a year. It's simply not possible for the hours worked to have increased a further 80% from that baseline.

Also most labour was not wage labour in the 17th century, so you need to be careful looking at wages. Especially comparing the the 19th century since there was a vast expansion of wage labour.
by mariusor | 2025-10-21 08:48:02+00:00
Off topic, but would there be a way to integrate marginalia with a specific website? Similarly to how people use google search for their forums or how HN uses algolia?

I'm asking this as one of my projects is a link aggregator similar to old reddit (and HN to some extent) and I would like to be able to present to users a search box, but without having to implement document indexing and search. (I assume ad principio that the website is already aligned ethically and technologically with what Marginalia stands for :D)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-10-21 08:48:56+00:00
They also dissed Fyre festival, We Work and basically all of the frauds in the last ten years. Would I use them as my only source? Of course not, but they're definitely useful and (importantly for my point), in the professional finance space.

FWIW, I personally think they're correct on both bitcoin and Tesla, but apparently people disagree.
by garmjenif | 2025-10-21 08:49:53+00:00
Might be region specific, where I live you can't default or do bankruptcy, it just goes to the National Enforcement Authority that haunts you until you pay for the rest of your life. They don't care about any valuables without clear resell value like a newish car or jewelry or a house.

You also lose your credit status, making you unable to get new loans or phone plans, and often making apartment finding really really difficult
by lll-o-lll | 2025-10-21 08:50:41+00:00
Umm. Is this some sort of troll article? It sucks you in with nerd nostalgia and slowly becomes more and more esoteric and insane.

Here’s the final two lines:

> We should know better than to prematurely optimize for order when all of all time arrowpoints in and down to the absolute return 0. Words of wisdom, let it be: your world is a fine stream of consciousness, lacking only a decent editor.

If that feels like your jam, go for it, but personally I feel in need of an exorcist after letting my computer load this…
by alex-moon | 2025-10-21 08:51:04+00:00
This is beautifully designed and engaging and potentially a fun way to learn things! Amazing work.

Some things you could add to make it stickier:

1. Have a natural end where you "win" - possibly I just didn't hit this, it's the kind of game I'd play in bed in the morning as long as the play time was similar to Wordle and the other NYT games.

2. Have facts show up when you get something right! Could literally just be the opening sentence from the article and a link to the article. This extra context stimulates curiosity - I'd love to be able to have "Space physics? That doesn't sound like a real thing..." and then have the hat guy pop up and go, "You cracked it chief. Space Physics is the study of high atmosphere plasmas."

EDIT: for comparison, have a look at Metazooa - https://metazooa.com/ - which did this very well.
by ktallett | 2025-10-21 08:51:18+00:00
I have the base amd and found it perfectly acceptable for everything I have need and it has 32 gb of ram with a 2tb ssd in, and it cost all in around £1000. It can do 3d work, both lab based in Lumerical and Blender plus Cad. I would say considering workstations and comparable macs would cost around double minimum I am not of the view it is particularly expensive.
by rsynnott | 2025-10-21 08:51:42+00:00
What’s this increase in fragile adults you’re talking about? Are you sure it’s a real thing? Are you aware how staggeringly high rates of institutionalisation were in most western countries in the early to mid 20th century? And then there were the adults who were considered ‘sickly’. Like, _fainting_ wasn’t considered dramatically abnormal behaviour until quite recently.

A lot of people who today would be considered to have a condition which is entirely treatable by doing (a), taking (b), not doing/avoiding (c), etc, would, a century ago, have just been kind of deemed broken. Coeliac disease is a particularly obvious example; it was known that there was _something_ wrong with coeliacs, but they were generally just filed under the 'sickly' label, lived badly and died young.

(And it generally just gets worse the further you go back; in many parts of the world vitamin deficiency diseases were just _normal_ til the 20th century, say).
by tecleandor | 2025-10-21 08:52:00+00:00
I don't think so, but corrections are welcome.

It's also mentioned in another comment and (I think) the video about how it wouldn't work in chocolate. As it works creating oxide layers, not a diffraction structure:

If you try it directly on PMMA it won't create a diffraction structure, but a kinda slightly melted surface. I don't know if etching would be possible with enough precision on PMMA.

If you do it on steel and use it as a mold to pour (?) PMMA, as people do with chocolate and diffraction grates on plastic, there's no structure to transfer.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-21 08:52:06+00:00
And it's little brother, autoexec.bat! The thing I found most bemusing through all of this is people insisting that people growing up with tech would somehow have this deep intuitive understanding of it. It made no sense. Using tech doesn't somehow make you aware of how it works. If anything, the refined final product can end up hiding it from people.

We all use elevators but know basically nothing about them -- hence the countless nonsense Hollywood scenes with a cut elevator cable (spoiler: you'd be fine). By contrast when they were first being introduced, every single person that rode on an elevator was probably quit well aware of the tension brake systems and other redundancies - because otherwise, stepping foot in one would feel insane. But when you grow up with them and take everything for granted, hey who cares - it works, yeah?
by loveparade | 2025-10-21 08:52:59+00:00
I don't really see how examples are useful because you're not going to understand the context. My prompt may be something like "We recently added a new transcription backend api (see recent git commits), integrate it into the service worker. Before implementing, create a detailed plan, ask clarifying questions, and ask for approval before writing code"

Does that help you? I doubt it. But there you go.