MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nevermark | 2025-10-19 18:34:36+00:00
I will add that rarely are the reasons we believe something enough to change the minds of people with different views. No matter how well reasoned or how often we explain ourselves.

If we don’t understand why they hold their views, we inevitably leave valid (real, or in their best experience real) concerns, or knowledge we take for granted, but they don’t have, both totally unaddressed.

We have to understand others well, in their terms, to effect change.

And, of course, to learn from others when they see something, however sharply or dimly, that we have missed. Generally people with differing views, do see something we don’t.

Unfortunately, expressing frustration or impatience with viewpoint intransigence, faithfully reveals we don’t understand the views we are critiquing. Don’t call people “deplorables”. That is footgun credibility suicide.

Understanding, respect, and patience; none are optional.

Make everyone your ally in figuring out a way through any mess.

Pete Buttigieg in the hot seat of Fox News interviews is incredible at this. He also becomes disarmingly likable as a result. Credibility armor upgrade achieved. One wonders why something that works so well, is so rare.
by skybrian | 2025-10-19 18:34:56+00:00
Can't find it now, but I read an article about someone adding AI help to a large appliance. Can't assume WiFi is set up, so it has to work offline. Frontier model not required.

I don't think we will be building these things ourselves, but I think there will still be products you can just buy and then they're yours.

It would be the opposite of the "Internet of things" trend though.
by tacker2000 | 2025-10-19 18:34:57+00:00
Yea at this point updating stuff is just almost more pain than pleasure, since new features are very limited nowadays and most of the time things end up being more broken.

For example, the latest MacOS sequoia security update broke the touch id reader when logging in, i need to type my password now everytime. And lets not forget about the new glass design and UI changes in the latest iOS.

Im pretty tired of updates at this point and will push them out unless absolutely necessary.
by Ancapistani | 2025-10-19 18:36:40+00:00
I like this a lot :)

A senior engineer has knowledge and experience. A staff engineer has discernment.

In an ideal world, people should be promoted to staff and above when they demonstrate that discernment. We should always be unafraid to share our perspectives, but staff engineering is about knowing when to get involved, when to watch, when to ignore, and when to actively look away.

As “Sr. Staff”, I see my job as knowing when to exercise authority far more than merely exercising it.
by seec | 2025-10-19 18:36:52+00:00
So basically, that kills the whole argument about Apple Silicon efficiency.

Which I know is almost a lie, since it's quite efficient but if you really hit the SoC hard you are still getting around 3hrs battery life at most. Of course, that's better than the 1,5hrs you would get at best from an efficient x86 SoC but it makes the advantage not as good as they make it out to be. You are going to need a power source, a later sure, but that's just a problem displacement.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2025-10-19 18:37:06+00:00
I go back and forth on this. A year ago, I was optimistic and I have had 1 case where RL fine tuning a model made sense. But while there are pockets of that, there is a clash with existing industry skills. I work with a lot of machine learning engineers and data scientists and here’s what I observe.

- many, if not most MLEs that got started after LLMs do not generally know anything about machine learning. For lack of clearer industry titles, they are really AI developers or AI devops

- machine learning as a trade is moving toward the same fate as data engineering and analytics. Big companies only want people using platform tools. Some ai products, even in cloud platforms like azure, don’t even give you the evaluation metrics that would be required to properly build ml solutions. Few people seem to have an issue with it.

- fine tuning, especially RL, is packed with nuance and details… lots to monitor, a lot of training signals that need interpretation and data refinement. It’s a much bigger gap than training simpler ML models, which people are also not doing/learning very often.

- The limited number of good use cases means people are not learning those skills from more senior engineers.

- companies have gotten stingy with sme-time and labeling

What confidence do companies have in supporting these solutions in the future? How long will you be around and who will take up the mantle after you leave?

AutoML never really panned out, so I’m less confident that platforming RL will go any better. The unfortunate reality is that companies are almost always willing to pay more for inferior products because it scales. Industry “skills” are mostly experience with proprietary platform products. Sure they might list “pytorch” as a required skill, but 99% of the time, there isn’t hardly anyone at the company that has spent any meaningful time with it. Worse, you can’t use it, because it would be too hard to support.
by lukan | 2025-10-19 18:37:13+00:00
I am not justifying anything, I merely said there is a difference to me and I like to know more before forming a final opinion, see my shared anecdota as for why.

The post above where I replied literally said: "young male children"

But are 16 year olds really "young male children"?

I don't think so, but stating it like this makes it a much, much worse accusation against Ginsberg in my eyes.
by leobg | 2025-10-19 18:37:31+00:00
Well said. And it makes sense, if you define intelligence as the ability to successfully predict the future.

And how interesting that that is literally how LLMs are trained during pretraining. Like Ilya said: To predict the name revealed as the murderer at the end of a detective novel, you must have followed the plot, have world knowledge about physics, psychology, etc..

And that’s what you’re pointing at here. Testing yourself on the ability to predict during a lecture is like running a loss function to keep you on your toes.
by netsharc | 2025-10-19 18:37:53+00:00
I wonder if the Paris city hall can do a rebate program of "Dear Paris residents, mail in your ticket stub and we'll give you a partial refund" - this is a first draft of an idea, it's flawed because it would lead to opportunistic Parisians asking tourists for their ticket stubs, and then telling the city hall that they visited the Louvre 30 times last month.
by mschild | 2025-10-19 18:38:08+00:00
At a previous job my manager complained. They weren't mad about the extra work itself but rather that I didn't go through the entire change process. That meant writing a user story, creating a ticket, bringing it to refinement, agreeing with colleagues that it's something we should do, planning for it in a sprint, etc, etc. For large tickets/tasks/projects that makes sense.

However, I outright refuse to go through this process for a minor annoyance that needs 2-3 lines of code and 30 minutes until its in production.

Since then I steer clear of companies and teams that have an incredibly strict sprint schedule were no unplanned work, even if its tiny, is allowed. I hate that way of working and refuse to do it.
by exceldrawing | 2025-10-19 18:39:05+00:00
> There's probably some piece on Fox News

CNN published articles pushing the narrative that the 50 so called security experts believed Hunter's laptop was fake. It turned out to be true.

CNN also famously had the two reporters standing in the same parking lot pretending to be in different geographic locations. Viewers called out their bullshit when the noticed the exact same traffic driving through the backgrounds of both reporters.
by jijijijij | 2025-10-19 18:39:11+00:00
Also, no state-actor would ever blow an immensely costly and rare backdoor like that on us peasants here. Even, if you would threaten to kill all the puppies. That's the sort of thing they reserve for state-level shenanigans, 100% targeting servers, infrastructure and industry, not individuals.

Though, I also doubt, they would just shelve these epic exploits, since a universal Linux backdoor likely puts themself at risk too, unless you can pull off a grand conspiracy, or deliver patched packages to your own people without questions asked. Maybe a completely locked down country like North Korea could do it. I doubt many other countries got an incentive, unless in preparation of a specific attack.
by xmprt | 2025-10-19 18:39:31+00:00
You are typically the average of the people you keep around you. If you feel like you're going to get ahead by tricking your friends/peers then it likely means that you're not going to gain much when compared to the rest of the class (unless you're somehow able to deceive an entire class of 100+ students). On the flip side, if you and all your friends are supportive of each other then you're more likely to succeed when compared to the rest of the class. This does have the opposite effect of making it harder for students that don't have the same support/study groups but it goes completely against the point you're trying to make.
by ArcHound | 2025-10-19 18:39:37+00:00
Why would the AI owners want to distribute wealth equitably? They want to get rich.

What government in the foreseeable future would go after them? This would tank the US economy massively, so not US. The EU will try and regulate, but won't have enough teeth. Are we counting on China as the paragon of welfare for citizens?

I propose we let the economy crash, touch some grass and try again. Source: I am not an economist.
by Ancapistani | 2025-10-19 18:40:45+00:00
This - and how to deploy that “easy fix” in a way that watches for unexpected consequences, and with a plan in hand to mitigate them or revert the change without undue disruption if necessary.

As I go through this thread, one word keeps coming to mind: discernment. The more senior you become as a SWE, the more you’re expected to know what to address, when, and how to address it. The actual addressing of the problem is table stakes, and as you move from senior to staff you’ll find yourself directing more and implementing less.
by rpcope1 | 2025-10-19 18:40:53+00:00
That will also likely be the very end of our society as we know it. If you thought TFR was in the shitter today, having robot prostitutes (because let's be real, that's what you're suggesting) will not only probably grant a select few some unreal control over many, but will be the end of any society dumb enough to permit it entirely.
by aperture147 | 2025-10-19 18:41:01+00:00
They might flip the emergency switch that burns a little more money to improve the cold start, schedule more CPUs to each V8 process or remove the `sleep(100)` somewhere in the code. I kinda doubt that they have actually made any code improvement but just a marketing stunt that make everything seems to be faster for a month then everything will be just as slow as it is, or they are buying time to actually improve the code.
by kakacik | 2025-10-19 18:41:03+00:00
None of them will be around for long, and if yes only by pure unintended accident.

But dont blame the participants, they fight for money in system setup for them. If people will reward clearly more moral businesses, over time even the most hardened sociopath will pick up the cues.

If you want to hate something, hate how uncaring an average person is, driven by simple, easy to manipulate emotions, not fighting primal urges even if they drive them off the cliff, or even caring more deeply about themselves, who they are and where they go.
by PhilippGille | 2025-10-19 18:41:29+00:00
> cmd/myapp is not a local path, it’s a universal path

In `go run` the CLI interprets it as universal path, to be precise. That's exactly the point.

> go run github.com/user/name/cmd/myapp

That's not an alternative when you're working on the app's code locally. You have to use `./cmd/myapp`.

And when you do that multiple times per day/week, after a while you just start always using `./` prefix for local paths.
by idreyn | 2025-10-19 18:41:33+00:00
This sounds a lot like a sovereign wealth fund. The government obtains fractional ownership over large enterprises (this can happen through market mechanisms or populist strongarming — choose your own adventure) and pours the profits on these investments into the social safety net or even citizens' dividends.

For this to work at scale domestically, the fund would need to be a double-digit percentage of the market cap of the entire US economy. It would be a pretty drastic departure from the way we do things now. There would be downsides: market distortions and fraud and capital flight.

But in my mind it would be a solution to the problem of wealth pooling up in the AI economy, and probably also a balm for the "pyramid scheme" aspect of Social Security which captures economic growth through payroll taxes (more people making more money, year on year) in a century where we expect the national population to peak and decline.

Pick your poison, I guess, but I want to see more discussion of this idea in the Overton window.
by jeffbee | 2025-10-19 18:41:47+00:00
This is not really a problem introduced by the thing in the article, but the "UI" for duckdb just kinda sucks. When I want to interactively explore some data, I want to easily add conditions and aggregates, but there's nothing in the Duck UI that actually does this. It will make a little table of the top 20 values of irritating_column_name but there's not a 1-click way to add `where irritating_column_name = 'incredibly inconvenient value'` to the query and re-run, which is an absolutely basic data exploration feature.
by tekbruh9000 | 2025-10-19 18:41:51+00:00
Also note Karpathy notes the problems with agents are tractable but hard.

He's vague on the paths being explored to resolve them. His "higher level" view is probably awareness the solutions to software problems are hardware based fixes, but he cannot say that to software developers. Which has been the back and forth of tech since I was a kid in the 80s writing Basic; new state management unlocked by old software logic being embedded into new hardware.

Two main problems to solve for: too many people bought in to a status quo. And much simpler, the actual engineering of new hardware. One is only resolved by generational churn without resorting to all out police state action. So tech jobs as we know them will fade away slowly to not upset too many, and younger generations will not care as they will never experience anything else.
by iamnothere | 2025-10-19 18:42:04+00:00
> within a generation we have two separate countries and war

Or do we? Some states don’t seem to want these things, or at least that’s what their representatives say. So let them experiment. My guess is the loss of benefits will outweigh the meager tax savings, but there may be a couple of states that are fine with the tradeoff. As long as people can move freely, it should be a self-correcting problem.

The problem with centralization is that it creates an all-or-nothing battle for federal control. Right now the people winning that battle don’t seem to share your vision for social programs. Could be an issue, especially with ongoing gerrymandering efforts!

In a big country with strongly polarized political opinions, federalism is the best way to fight this sort of political capture and the associated back-and-forth escalation. As tensions boil over, the only other option that can maintain a semblance of order is brutal repression.
by the__alchemist | 2025-10-19 18:42:05+00:00
I want to try this for my molecular dynamics simulations in rust I have the pipeline set up (core::simd mimic with vector support and doesn't need nightly), but am focused on GPU now since this won't be as good as that. Obviously good for the case of the user not having an nvidia GPU, so want to add eventually.

I mean, why have 1 f32 when you can have 16? (The answer is you have to be careful about how you load and unload them, and it can be tedious). Also, the tablet I'm typing on now can only do 8 f32s, which is half as impressive.

From the article: > A 30x Speedup

Yes; that's good! If you don't have a GPU. Then you are looking at more than those gains, so the question is: Do you have the time to implement, and make sure it's working correctly? (Maybe the language or toolkit you're using has low-friction abstractions. Rust doesn't. I made some helpers, but they're still not great)
by rafabulsing | 2025-10-19 18:42:06+00:00
A land value tax is based on the value of the land only, with no input from whatever improvements are or are not built on it. So, with a proper LTV implementation (i.e., one where LTV is the only tax incurred on real state), there would be literally no tax incentive to tear down a usable (but unused) building. You would be paying the exact same amount of taxes on an empty lot as on a high end modern building on that same lot.
by madaxe_again | 2025-10-19 18:42:07+00:00
Urban Heat Islands are far stronger than people generally realise.

I live in a forest. When it’s 28C here, it’ll be 36C in the village a few km away. It’ll drop to 16C overnight here but they have a low of 28C.

All that masonry, concrete, blacktop, the absence of shade, and you basically just have a great big passive thermal accumulator.
by infecto | 2025-10-19 18:42:22+00:00
Was not immediately apparent in article but I did not read the whole thing. Beyond general repairability the other issue to me is the cost of labor. In Vietnam I can get near anything repaired because the cost of labor is so darn cheap. In America it makes no sense to be paying $100/hour usually minimum two hour repair plus the cost of the part.

I am ok with generally with having less ability to repair but I do wish more cities and companies and trade in programs for proper recycling.
by copacopab | 2025-10-19 18:42:23+00:00
A college where in order to get in you have to show you've been diligent on grades, extracurriculars, and testing for 18 years straight. Ofc exceptions to this, like Trump; but most of the student body of such a college would fit this description. That's a good college.

PT just doesn't like the world that these people ended up creating after being enointed elites, which in parts I agree with.
by guerby | 2025-10-19 18:42:32+00:00
I got a rated "A" for one year, this model (256 liter fridge + 122 liter freezer) :

https://eprel.ec.europa.eu/screen/product/refrigeratingappli...

Rated for 113 kWh/year

I left a powermeter on it for one year and got 130 kWh.

It's amazing that the average power consumption is less than 15 Watt.
by anonym29 | 2025-10-19 18:42:39+00:00
The value of your labor is being systemically destroyed through deliberate currency manipulation by the US Federal Reserve, in conjunction with the US Government and US Treasury.

You are more than twice as productive as your equivalent 1971 counterpart, but relative to inflation, he was being paid about the same as you. You make your employer twice as much money as he did but you're not rewarded twice as much.

Five, ten, twenty years from now, when the trend that has been visible in the data since the 1970s is complete, and your labor has no value at all, are you going to be okay?

The people who spent large majorities of their income accumulating scarce stores of value (gold, bitcoin, housing, profitable businesses, land, etc) are going to be fine.
by fleahunter | 2025-10-19 18:42:53+00:00
Interesting point about the difficulty of parsing all those parentheses! I remember getting pretty frustrated with it when I first picked up Scheme. It felt like trying to read a book written in a strange code. But then I stumbled onto paredit in Emacs—it totally transformed the way I interacted with the code. The structured editing made it feel more like composing music than wrestling with syntax.

And you're right—working through "The Little Schemer" was a game-changer for me too. There's something about gradually building up to complex concepts that really clicks, right? I wonder if there could be a way to create more beginner-friendly editors that visually guide you through the syntax while you code. Or even some sort of interactive tutorial embedded in the editor that helps by showing expected patterns in real-time.

The tension between users wanting features and implementers wanting simplicity is so prevalent in so many languages, isn't it? Makes me think about how important community feedback is in shaping a language's evolution. What do you all think would be a good compromise for Scheme—more features or a leaner report?
by jokellum | 2025-10-19 18:43:13+00:00
> Places with a lot of background noise are bad and have a research-supported negative impact on learning. Libraries and Reading rooms work best.

This was horrible advice for me and caused my a lot of grief for many years wondering why I still couldn't focus.

Nothing against Andrej, part of the reason I hate this advice is that this is very common advice for what your environment should look like. This was advice given by study workshops at my college. I'm sure this works for a decent chunk of the student population.

Quiet places cause me to mentally drift into outer space and I just zone out.

You know what is a great environment? Semi-busy coffee shops + headphones + instrumental music. I'm able to consistently lock in for 4-5 hours. When I go back to my "nice quiet home environment" I get distracted immediately and refocusing is super hard.

Like I said, this is standard advice that works for a portion of the population, but I think this makes a ton of other people in the same boat as me feel lazy/discouraged/unfocused/stupid losers when in reality "nice quiet places" might not work for them.
by dmurray | 2025-10-19 18:43:30+00:00
And that's why there are a hundred different possible values for LC_COLLATE, and it's completely normal that two popular Unix distributions picked different default values for that setting...right?

It would have been reasonable to conclude the article a third of the way through, and say "sorting is locale-dependent, if what you value is consistent behaviour between different OSs (instead of sorting based on the user's preferences) you need to implement the sorting yourself."
by anon7725 | 2025-10-19 18:43:49+00:00
Our moral and political development severely lags our technological development. I have very little confidence that it will ever catch up. Looking back over the post-WW2 era, we have seen improvements (civil rights, recognition of past injustices, expansion of medical care in many countries) but also serious systemic regressions (failure to take climate change seriously, retreat to parochial revenge-based politics, failure to adequately fund society's needs, capture of politics and law by elites).

My main concern about AI is not any kind of extinction scenario but just the basic fact that we are not prepared to address the likely externalities that result from it because we're just historically terrible at addressing externalities.
by raincole | 2025-10-19 18:43:57+00:00
> All human life matters, has value, and should be treated with kindness, respect, and dignity

This is reasoning.

However people don't always act based on reasoning.

And even if you act based on reasoning, you can't trust others to act based on the same kind of reasoning.

---

If a more serious response, (some) feminists see sex robots as objectification of women and that's why they're against them.
by coredog64 | 2025-10-19 18:44:06+00:00
Something that's in my personal backlog is fine-tuning of TrOCR for purse seine observer workbooks. The default TrOCR is expecting English words, and so the FAO species codes used in the workbook result in terrible accuracy. LLMs do poorly in this space because you'll commonly see repeats (e.g. 100 out of 120 samples all have the same species code) which then leads to hallucination.