MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrinterweb | 2025-10-17 18:56:55+00:00
One thing that frustrates me with estimating performance on AWS is that I have to dramatically estimate down from the performance of my dev laptop (M2 MBP). I've noticed performance tradeoffs around 15x slower when deployed to AWS. I realize that's a anecdotal number, but this is a fairly consistent trend I've seen at different companies running on cloud hosting services. One of the biggest performance hits is latency between servers. If you're server is making hundreds or thousands of db queries per second, you're going to feel that pain on the cloud more even if your cloud db server CPU is relatively bored. It is network latency. I look at the costs of AWS and it is easy to spend >$100,000 month.

I have ran services on bare metal, and VPSs, and I always got far better performance than I can get from AWS or GCP for a small fraction of the cost. To me "cloud" means vendor lock-in, terrible performance, and wild costs.
by refulgentis | 2025-10-17 18:57:03+00:00
If you're reading this article and wondering "When is this house of cards going to collapse!?", a little advice, gained at a high price to myself: you can waste years waiting for it to collapse, 95% of the time, it never will. I never thought Uber or Tesla would survive COVID. I'd have $450K in bitcoin if I held onto the "joke" amount I bought for $200 in 2013.

Thing that make me skip this specific narrative:

- There's some heavy-handed reaching to get to $400B next 12 months: guesstimate $50B = 1 GW of capacity, then list out 3.3 gigawatts across Broadcom chip purchases, Nvidia, and AMD

- OpenAI is far better positioned than any of the obvious failures I foresaw in my 37 years on this rock. It's very, very, hard to fuck up to the point you go out of business.

- Ed is repeating narratives instead of facts ("what did they spend that money on!? GPT-5 was a big let down!" -- i.e. he remembers the chatgpt.com router discourse, and missed that it was the first OpenAI release that could get the $30-50/day/engineer in spend we've been sending to Anthropic)
by platevoltage | 2025-10-17 18:57:17+00:00
Could be part of it, but the US just doesn't have cheap cars anymore. The days of the Geo Metro and the Dodge Neon with a 5 speed and crank windows is over. Car companies have decided to relegate people (in the USA) with either low income, or who cant stomach the type of depreciation every car suffers from, to the used market.
by marcusverus | 2025-10-17 18:57:23+00:00
Only if you did so in a passive-aggressive way ;)

From the relevant Wikis:

Chimps:

At the core of social structures are males, which patrol the territory, protect group members, and search for food. Males remain in their natal communities, while females generally emigrate at adolescence. Males in a community are more likely to be related to one another than females are to each other. Among males, there is generally a dominance hierarchy, and males are dominant over females.

Orangutans:

One to several resident female home ranges are encompassed within the home range of a resident male, who is their main mating partner.[50][51] Interactions between adult females range from friendly to avoidance to antagonistic.[52] Flanged males are often hostile to both other flanged males and unflanged males, while unflanged males are more peaceful towards each other.[53]

Orangutans disperse and establish their home ranges by age 11. Females tend to live near their birth range, while males disperse farther but may still visit their birth range within their larger home range.[51][54] They enter a transient phase, which lasts until a male can challenge and displace a dominant, resident male from his home range.

Gorillas:

Gorillas live in groups called troops. Troops tend to be made of one adult male or silverback, with a harem of multiple adult females and their offspring.[58][59][60] However, multiple-male troops also exist.[59] A silverback is typically more than 12 years of age, and is named for the distinctive patch of silver hair on his back, which comes with maturity. Silverbacks have large canine teeth that also come with maturity. Both males and females tend to emigrate from their natal groups. For mountain gorillas, females disperse from their natal troops more than males.[58][61] Mountain gorillas and western lowland gorillas also commonly transfer to second new groups.[58]

Mature males also tend to leave their groups and establish their own troops by attracting emigrating females. However, male mountain gorillas sometimes stay in their natal troops and become subordinate to the silverback.
by ben_w | 2025-10-17 18:57:35+00:00
> babies are already born with "the model of the world"

> but a lot of experiments on babies/young kids tell otherwise

I believe they are born with such a model? It's just that model is one where mummy still has fur for the baby to cling on to? And where aged something like 5 to 8 it's somehow useful for us to build small enclosures to hide in, leading to a display of pillow forts in the modern world?
by fair_enough | 2025-10-17 18:57:54+00:00
You're right, but it still sucks that my car now depreciates as fast as my Macbook. I don't think batteries will ever hold their value though, and those things constitute at least $10k of an EV's sticker price.

Hopefully as EVs become less ugly-looking, the body and interior hold their value, even if the value of the battery depreciates rapidly.

If somebody made an EV that looked like a 1980s Rolls Royce Corniche- something tasteful- I would buy an EV.
by jakeydus | 2025-10-17 18:58:03+00:00
This is 100% unrelated to the original article but I feel like there's an underreported additional first half. As a bigger runner who still loves to run, the first two or three miles before I have enough endorphins to get into the zen state that makes me love running is the first half, then it's 17 miles of this amazing meditative mindset. Then the last 10k sucks.
by autoexec | 2025-10-17 18:59:14+00:00
> The LLMs really, really want to be our friend

They want you to think they are your friend but they actually want to be your master and steal your personal data. It's what the companies who want to be masters over you and the AI have programed them to do. LLMs want to gain your confidence, and then your dependence, and then they can control you.
by tshaddox | 2025-10-17 18:59:21+00:00
It's controversial because of how specific the hypothesis is, now novel the physical mechanism would be if it existed, and how little evidence there is that it exists. I don't think it's controversial because people that evolution couldn't possibly explore that possibility space. The fact that evolution explores a very large possibility space doesn't mean that anything you can conceive of must exist. I mean humans aren't even capable of biological flight, and we know that has evolved multiple times!
by matt-p | 2025-10-17 18:59:36+00:00
I have done all of this also, today I outsource the DB server and do everything else myself, including a local read replica and pg_dump backups as a hail mary.

Essentially all that pain of yonder years was essentially storage it was a F**ing nightmare running HA network storage before the days of SSDs. It was slower than RAID, 5X more expensive than RAID and generally involved an extreme amount of pain and/or expense (usually both). But these days you only actually need SANs or as we call it today block storage when you have data you care about, again you only have to care about backups when you have data you care about.

For absolutely all of us the side effect of moving away from monolithic 'pets' is that we have made the app layer not require any long term state itself. So today all you need is N X any random thing that might lose data or fail at any moment as your app servers and an external DB service (neon, planetscale, RDS), plus perhaps S3 for objects.
by tekbruh9000 | 2025-10-17 18:59:40+00:00
Infinitely big little numbers

Academia has rediscovered itself

Signal attenuation, a byproduct of entropy, due to generational churn means there's little guarantee.

Occam's Razor; Karpathy knows the future or he is self selecting biology trying to avoid manual labor?

His statements have more in common with Nostradamus. It's the toxic positivity form of "the end is nigh". It's "Heaven exists you just have to do this work to get there."

Physics always wins and statistics is not physics. Gamblers fallacy; improvement of statistical odds does not improve probability. Probability remains the same this is all promises of some people who have no idea or interest in doing anything else with their lives; so stay the course.
by downrightmike | 2025-10-17 18:59:52+00:00
I can't believe that long gone maintainers still had root access, or any access at all to the core platform. Its has been wild to see ruby community members getting upset with modern and established security norms, for a platform that runs a lot of the web. Its not 2006 anymore, and we aren't just running random curl commands off the net to get rails installed. Scary to think how naive the backlash has been. Having an unmaintained security posture that is inherently insecure, just blows my mind. That supply chain was wide open to attacks, may still be, but at least someone tried to bring security up to this decade.
by xp84 | 2025-10-17 19:00:26+00:00
Today, nobody is really being “forced” to live in either of those environments. Anybody who doesn’t want to own a car and wants to walk everywhere and hates sprawl can live in a city - as long as that city contains a home that fits their family and budget.

It’s not the fault of the suburb people that the people who control city governments, the city dwellers themselves, continually thwart the building of housing in cities that is both suitable for families in terms of things like bedroom count, and affordable (dictated almost entirely by the amount of supply, but sadly all of those in charge seem to have failed economics class so they don’t acknowledge that fact).

Also, re:crime

SF for one still has a lot more crime than the state average by all types of crime except murder, and has more crime than its surrounding suburbs. The murder stat is nice, but I still don’t like how much Rape has gone up since 2011 in these stats. Overall the line that crime is way down across the board is not proven by long-term trends. I’m sure it is for some cities, but not all.

https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-San-Francisco-Californ...
by vuggamie | 2025-10-17 19:01:00+00:00
Why are you building projects? Why are you studying Software Engineering?

If you want a career in software development, it's better to learn, which means writing code. And maybe study AI tools as well because they will probably be part of the job.

If you want a career as a prompt engineer, study that. I'm not convinced this will be a viable path anytime soon, as in the next five years. But what do I know? I'm an idiot on the internet and am surprised as you are by this world.

If you want to build solutions for end users or customers, use whatever tools work for you. The only thing that matters is the functioning software and the technical debt to keep it functioning.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-17 19:01:18+00:00
It's going to be 2008 bailouts again, but much worse.

These companies are doing all sorts of round tripping on top of propping up the economy on a foundation of fake revenue on purpose so that when it does some crumbling down they can go cry to the feds "help! we are far too big to fail, the fate of the nation depends on us getting bailed out at taxpayer expense."
by badosu | 2025-10-17 19:01:19+00:00
This.

While I am all for making conscious choices on what to support I can't take anything phrased like that seriously "all is contributors".

Hyprland, while inferior (imo) in some aspects to sway on the wayland tiling manager landscape is a fine piece of software that I use on my non-work computer (I still use sway for stability).

Back on the topic: I reiterate I'd be happy to avoid using or supporting projects based on non-purely technical issues (discussion on "pure technicality" omitted for brevity).

It's just... What, do I need to know every persons imo completely irrelevant opinions on whatever du jour hot political topic? Maybe the answer could be yes,

I would be fine with dropping Hyprland support, maybe I will after digging a bit more. But this whole thing just reeks to me of terminally informed and ragebaited people looking for a platform to vomit their completely irrelevant opinions, actions speak more (e.g. fostering a dangerous environment _adjacent to the project_ based on discrimination).

I just feel I want to nope out of this industry and everything related to it, it's very overwhelming.
by jopsen | 2025-10-17 19:01:43+00:00
I think it's also fair to argue that it's probably more perceived, than actual.

People are obsessed with EV range, and massively concerned that used EV have degraded batteries.

Most likely there are some market inefficiencies here. Good for you, buy a cheap used EV ;)

Also many EVs are still not attractive to price sensitive consumers. And the price insensitive ones, won't buy used EV.
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-10-17 19:01:49+00:00
> plus there is all the energy needed for me to live in a modern civilization and make the source material available to me for learning (schools, libraries, internet)

To be fair, this is true of LLMs too, and arguably more true for them than it is for humans. LLMs would've been pretty much impossible to achieve w/o massive amounts of digitized human-written text (though now ofc they could be bootstrapped with synthetic data).

> but a modern human uses between 20x and 200x as much energy in supporting infrastructure than the food calories they consume, so we're at about 1 to 10 GWh, which according to GPT5 is in the ballpark for what it took to train GPT3 or GPT4

But if we're including all the energy for supporting infrastructure for humans, shouldn't we also include it for GPT? Mining metals, constructing the chips, etc.? Also, the "modern" is carrying a lot of the weight here. Pre-modern humans were still pretty smart and presumably nearly as efficient in their learning, despite using much less energy.
by godelski | 2025-10-17 19:01:56+00:00
It's a good way to think about lots of things. It's Pareto efficiency. The 80/20 rule

20% of your effort gets you 80% of the way. But most of your time is spent getting that last 20%. People often don't realize that this is fractal like in nature, as it draws from the power distribution. So of that 20% you still have left, the same holds true. 20% of your time (20% * 80% = 16% -> 36%) to get 80% (80% * 20% => 96%) again and again. The 80/20 numbers aren't actually realistic (or constant) but it's a decent guide.

It's also something tech has been struggling with lately. Move fast and break things is a great way to get most of the way there. But you also left a wake of destruction and tabled a million little things along the way. Someone needs to go back and clean things up. Someone needs to revisit those tabled things. While each thing might be little, we solve big problems by breaking them down into little ones. So each big problem is a sum of many little ones, meaning they shouldn't be quickly dismissed. And like the 9's analogy, 99.9% of the time is still 9hrs of downtime a year. It is still 1e6 cases out of 1e9. A million cases is not a small problem. Scale is great and has made our field amazing, but it is a double edged sword.

I think it's also something people struggle with. It's very easy to become above average, or even well above average at something. Just trying will often get you above average. It can make you feel like you know way more but the trap is that while in some domains above average is not far from mastery in other domains above average is closer to no skill than it is to mastery. Like how having $100m puts your wealth closer to a homeless person than a billionaire. At $100m you feel way closer to the billionaire because you're much further up than the person with nothing but the curve is exponential.
by benatkin | 2025-10-17 19:02:25+00:00
I think Skills might be coming from an AI Safety and AI Risk sort of place, or better, alignment with the company's goals. The motivation could be to reduce the amount of ad-hoc instruction giving that can be done, on the fly, in the favor of doing this at a slower pace, making it more subject to these checks. It does fit well into what a lot of agents are doing, though, which makes it more palatable for the average AI user.

Basically the way it would work is, in the next model, it would avoid role playing type instructions, unless they come from skill files, and internally they would keep track of how often users changed skill files, and it would be a TOS violation to change it too often.

Though I gave up on Anthropic in terms of true AI alignment long ago, I know they are working on a trivial sort of alignment where it prevents it from being useful for pen testers for example.
by QuiEgo | 2025-10-17 19:03:50+00:00
This is extremely common in the embedded and systems programming space, which Rust is otherwise attractive to use in.

For example, a very popular library in the systems/embedded space, cjson, works with C89. FreeRTOS works with C99. This is a very common pattern in major libraries. It is very rare that taking a dependency could force you to update your toolchain in the embedded space.

Toolchain updates invalidate your entire testing history and make you revalidate everything, which is often a giant PITA when your testing involves physical things (ex you may have to plug and unplug things, put the system in chambers that replicate certain environmental conditions, etc).
by bmurphy1976 | 2025-10-17 19:04:10+00:00
Oh I'm with you. I've been trying to clean up my setup and the Pi5 is still a problem. Even my Intel N100 NUC is using a USB-C to barrel jack adapter and working great with a perfectly normal multi-port GAN charger, but the Pi5? "Undervoltage Detected"

sigh
by KeplerBoy | 2025-10-17 19:04:36+00:00
I guess very few systems have better absolute time than a few microseconds. Those systems are probably exclusively found in HFT and experimental physics.

This past week I tried synchronizing the time of an embedded Linux board with a GPS PPS signal via GPIO. Turns out the kernel interrupt handler already delays the edge by 20 us compared to busy polling the state of the pin. Stuff then gets hard to measure at sub microsecond scales.
by bbatsell | 2025-10-17 19:04:37+00:00
There are multiple statutory routes to activate the NG, and nearly every time Trump has done so, it has been through a “federalized” route. Even red-state governors have requested this because it transfers the financial and legal obligations to the federal government. NG units activated by the governor must be paid, housed, transported, defended in court, etc by the state.

The catch is that the routes, as of yet, purport to impose operational restrictions on the federalized units. The administration isn’t exactly strictly following them, but they still exist and district judges are attempting to enforce them. The administration is hard at work developing a “colorable” basis to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to remove nearly all such restrictions.
by ben_w | 2025-10-17 19:04:47+00:00
AI has been helping with the development of AI ever since at least the first optimising compiler or formal logic circuit verification program.

Machine learning has been helping with the development of machine learning ever since hyper-parameter optimisers became a thing.

Transformers have been helping with the development of transformer models… I don't know exactly, but it was before ChatGPT came out.

None of the initials in AGI are booleans.

But I do agree that:

> "fast acceleration within two years" is unsupported, just wishful thinking

Nobody has any strong evidence of how close "it" is, or even a really good shared model of what "it" even is.
by vict7 | 2025-10-17 19:04:52+00:00
> relative lower quality in other fields except technology

As a political aficionado, some of the political takes are surprisingly primitive given the seemingly high IQ here.

It reminds me of the phenomenon wherein you trust the articles you read written by journalists, until you read an article where they are opining on a topic you actually know something about… and realize they have no idea what they are talking about.

No hate to anyone, just wanted to provide a perspective on my version of you seeing people talk about medicine.
by Milpotel | 2025-10-17 19:05:15+00:00
> fresh food is absurdly better vs say 1930-1995 or so

Not sure where you grew up. The variety reg. vegetables/fruits is larger (e.g. pomelos weren't a thing in my childhood) and the availability across the year is much better but the quality is worse. You now only get a few or sometimes even a single genetically modified kind because some big companies control seed production. Yes, meat doesn't go stale as fast as before - but it is full of chemicals now. Same for bread.
by busterarm | 2025-10-17 19:05:30+00:00
No, it's not. I haven't weighed in on that at all in this thread. This thread is very specifically about Andre Arko's credibility and the credibility of projects that associate with him.

Regardless of what Ruby Central did, his own actions warrant every bit of criticism he's getting. Stop trying to redirect the narrative. There are other threads where that discussion is happening.

You can view Ruby Central as being in the wrong all you want and I won't argue with you, but that doesn't mean Arko is not-wrong as well. It's not zero-sum.
by topspin | 2025-10-17 19:05:44+00:00
> Toyota LandCruiser for 20 years

Respectfully I specifically wrote "new." 20 year old SUVs predate the issues of new vehicles.

> my 2016 4runner

Even a 2016 vehicle predates what I'm pointing out. A 2016 4runner likely has a 270hp naturally aspirated V6 with modest power and a relatively basic 5 speed auto transmission. A 2025 4runner is a turbo charged 4 cylinder making nearly 2hp/cu in. and an 8 speed transmission. The former is much simpler and thus economic to maintain and repair compared to the latter.

ICE vehicle drivetrains have changed radically in only the last few years. They're almost universally using forced induction, integrated into unserviceable castings, to attain far higher volumetric efficiency, equivalent to high performance engines of not long ago. Gone are the 4-5 speed transmissions and transaxles: 8-10+ speed is the norm, and the complexity follows here as well. They are absolutely intolerant of neglect and abuse. Repairs are complex and likely to fail: manufacturers have taken to replacing major assemblies in leu of attempting repairs as they would have in the past. Part of that is due to the unserviceable nature of these components. Another part is the lack of dealer talent to deal with their own products. Another part is that the manufacturing lifecycle of major assemblies is now extremely short: only a couple years, whereas 10+ years was normal for common platforms as recently as the the 2010s.

What this means is: when these new products are no longer supported by manufacturers, who will drop their supply obligations rapidly as they legally can due to short lifecycles, parts will be fabulously expensive and difficult to obtain and the skills and tools necessary to repair them will be rarified and also expensive. Post-warranty ICE vehicles will be uneconomic, full stop.
by woodruffw | 2025-10-17 19:05:54+00:00
> The period from 1776-1913 arguably had as many changes as the period from 1913 to 2025.

I'm not arguing it didn't. But I think in kind the US's global economic position didn't change substantially between full independence in 1783 and 1913. It grew during that period, but the idea of the US as a peer (and then dominant) economic world power is a distinctly post-WWI one.