MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jiggawatts | 2025-10-05 21:27:19+00:00
I was the principal consultant at a subcontractor to a contractor for a large state government IT consolidation project, working on (among other things) the data centre design. This included the storage system.

I noticed that someone had daisy-chained petabytes of disk through relatively slow ports and hadn’t enabled the site-to-site replication that they had the hardware for! They had the dark fibre, the long-range SFPs, they even licensed the HA replication feature from the storage array vendor.

I figured that in a disaster just like this, the time to recover from the tape backups — assuming they were rotated off site, which might not have been the case — would have been six to eight weeks minimum, during which a huge chunk of the government would be down. A war might be less disruptive.

I raised a stink and insisted that the drives be rearranged with higher bandwidth and that the site-to-site replication be turned on.

I was a screamed at. I was called unprofessional. “Not a team player.” Several people tried to get me fired.

At one point this all culminated in a meeting where the lead architect stood up in front of dozens of people and calmly told everyone to understand one critical aspect of his beautiful design: No hardware replication!!!

(Remember: they had paid for hardware replication! The kit had arrived! The licenses were installed!)

I was younger and brave enough to put my hand up and ask “why?”

The screeched reply was: The on-prem architecture must be “cloud compatible”. To clarify: He thought that hardware-replicated data couldn’t be replicated to the cloud in the future.

This was some of the dumbest shit I had ever heard in my life, but there you go: decision made.

This. This is how disasters like the one in South Korea happen.

In private organisations you get competent shouty people at the top insisting on a job done right. In government you get incompetent shouty people insisting that the job gets done wrong.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-05 21:28:15+00:00
The LLM training process doesn't operate at that conceptual level. What it's doing is closer to examining a large number of possible meanings, seeing which fit the most, and moving its "understanding" in that direction. Repeat enough times, and it develops an association between the new word and the context in which it's used.

New words will usually be combinations of existing tokens, but at the beginning of training a new model, it doesn't "know" what any of the tokens mean. And there's no reason you can't treat every UTF-8 byte as a separate token, but that would require a larger model before you got results that look to a layperson like intelligence, understanding, or knowledge. Tokenisation lets you use a system like word2vec to assign each token a semantic embedding in a vector space, giving the model a bit of a leg up.

---

Response to the sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45485439, since I've hit the rate limit:

> During learning, the model […] starts by grouping tokens together

You probably could design a ML system that works like this, and it'd probably be more efficient to train than a hundred-billion parameter GPT model, but that's not how GPT model training works. Instead, it attempts all of those things in parallel (although I would expect the solutions to the earlier, easier parts to settle down before the solutions to the later parts do), and the same process is responsible for all of the behaviour in a straightforward fashion.

We do understand the "magic": it's just that it produces a really complicated system that we can't characterise the iterative behaviour of. (For comparison, the iterative function f_c(z) = z² + c, iterated starting at 0, produces the Mandelbrot set.) To use an analogy: imagine the training data is a landscape, and the behaviour of the GPT model trained on it is a weather system. (The parameter count is the amount of atmosphere, or something.) There's nothing magical going on in the weather, but it's just too complicated to predict ahead of time, and tiny gaps in our understanding can magnify into extremely inaccurate long-term predictions. We can, despite this, make some blanket statements about the possible capabilities of a GPT model, of the form "a GPT model will never be able to do X unless you cheat".

The RL magic is, I believe, well understood, but I don't personally understand it. (I know what it does, since RL always does the same thing, but I don't know what it's doing to the model to achieve that.)

> "as a child" starts being internally represented by the same neurons as "als ich ein Kind war"

Yes and no. For a few reasons, including that this kind of association can occur without the same "neurons" getting involved until past the point where that representation exists, it's better to say that they're embedded in nearby regions of a vector space. The actual nodes of the neural network are an implementation detail.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-05 21:28:16+00:00
I mean, it's sarcasm but it's also an argument you can actually hear from plutocrats who don't like competition.

The flaw in it is, of course, that capitalism is supposed to be all about competition, and there are plenty of good reasons for capitalists to want that, like "Commoditize Your Complement" where companies like Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, AWS, Google Cloud, etc. benefit from everyone having good free models so they can pay those companies for systems to run them on.
by bassamhameed | 2025-10-05 21:28:24+00:00
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What makes this guide unique is that it doesn’t just show what works — it explains why it works. From prompt weighting (::) to advanced style tuning, it provides a complete foundation for anyone who wants to become an AI art expert.

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by immibis | 2025-10-05 21:28:48+00:00
From hn@ycombinator.com:

> Yes, we turned off the flags from your account at some point. Most probably this is because they seemed politically motivated. Of course we can't know this for sure, but when accounts seem largely to be flagging for political reasons, we tend to make the flags not count. We do this, btw, regardless of the political position they seem to be coming from.
by MBCook | 2025-10-05 21:29:11+00:00
It could be accurate. Let’s say, for whatever reason, it is.

Ok.

Then it wasn’t a workable design.

The idea of “backup sites” has existed forever. The fact you use the word “cloud” to describe your personal collection of servers doesn’t suddenly mean you don’t need backups in a separate physical site.

If the government mandates its use, it should have a hot site at a minimum. Even without that a physical backup in a separate physical location in case of fire/attack/tsunami/large band of hungry squirrels is a total must-have.

However it was decided that not having that was OK, that decision was negligence.
by kevincox | 2025-10-05 21:29:22+00:00
I would use XHTML but IIUC no browser have streaming XHTML parsers so the performance is much worse than the horror of HTML.

And now that HTML is strictly specified it is complex to get your emitter working correctly (example: you need to know which tags are self closing to properly serialize HTML) but once you do a good job it just works.
by roenxi | 2025-10-05 21:29:28+00:00
Well that is progress because now you're attributing something to me that is close to what I do believe, which is poor people who gamble probably are poor because they make terrible financial decisions. I mean, you linked an article earlier suggesting that there are people who spend more than 5% of their income on lotto tickets [0]. No mystery why they're poor, they make bad decisions with money. In percentage terms, 25% of income in savings is probably the magic line where suddenly the whole thing becomes financially self-sustaining. 5% is not an inconsiderable chunk of that. Someone who just donates that sort of chunk to a gambling company is not competent with money.

But that isn't "poor people", and it isn't reasonable to just assume that poor people are all incapable. Most are perfectly reasonable people who happen to be poor despite generally being responsible with what money they do have. And presumably not throwing away 5% of their income for no good reason. I suppose I might be over-estimating poor people, but that isn't any reason for you to start misrepresenting my beliefs.

> I say you don't have a good enough grasp of it to present it in an understandable way since this "misinterpretation" of your view seems to match pretty well with what you've actually said.

Bullshit. You claimed my opinion was "poor people are poor because they're irrational". That is both a ridiculous statement and a gross mischaracterisation of what I said. Realistically I probably should get an apology, although getting you to understand what I actually wrote is enough for me.

[0] If you read the article closely though, that isn't actually mathematically guaranteed. Means can be deceptive like that.
by AdrianB1 | 2025-10-05 21:30:13+00:00
These days I am working on some 20 year old code used in a few dozen manufacturing plants around the globe; the reason I asked to be allowed to fix it and the reason my manager allowed me to do it is that we have performance issues in some of the biggest plants (by the number of production lines) and this code is part of the problem. If that would not be the case, that code would continue to run as is for another 10 years.

Code modernization in some circumstances does not bring business value. In the plants we have some hardware that is decades old and it works as well as the one built last year, more modern software would bring no difference as physical limits (ex: how many bottles you can fill on a line) makes a line capable to run on a smartphone with MS-DOS and Turbo Pascal on it (we don't use that, of course). If it runs and you cannot improve it more than the cost of the improvement, leave it as is.
by immibis | 2025-10-05 21:31:51+00:00
ed25519 (and ec25519) are generally understood not to be backdoored by the NSA, or weak in any known sense.

The lack of a backdoor can be proven by choosing parameters according to straightforward reasons that do not allow the possibility for the chooser to insert a backdoor. The curve25519 parameters have good reasons why they are chosen. By contrast, Dual_EC_DRBG contains two random-looking numbers, which the NSA pinky-swears were completely random, but actually they generated them using a private key that only the NSA knows. Since the NSA got to choose any numbers to fit there, they could do that. When something is, like, "the greatest prime number less than 2^255" you can't just insert the public key of your private key into that slot because the chance the NSA can generate a private key whose public key just happens to match the greatest prime number less than 2^255 is zero. These are called "nothing up my sleeve numbers".

This doesn't prove the algorithm isn't just plain old weak, but nobody's been able to break it, either. Or find any reason why it would be breakable. Elliptic curves being unbreakable rests on the discrete logarithm of a random-looking permutation being impossible to efficiently solve, in a similar way to how RSA being unbreakable relies on nobody being able to efficiently factorize very big numbers. The best known algorithms for solving discrete logarithm require O(sqrt(n)) time, so you get half the bits of security as the length of the numbers involved; a 256-bit curve offers 128 bits of security, which is generally considered sufficient.

(Unlike RSA, you can't just arbitrarily increase the bit length but have to choose a completely new curve for each bit length, unfortunately. ed25519 will always be 255 bits, and if a different length is needed, it'll be similar but called something else. On the other hand, that makes it very easy to standardize.)
by DiscourseFan | 2025-10-05 21:31:57+00:00
Well yes but its not what you think. Philosophy as a field in the US has become too narrow. I remember taking a class in the German department on German Romanticism, which was actually very important for understanding later developments in German philosophy and some of the authors involved are even referenced directly by Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics. But when I was doing my Philosophy MA one of the faculty members was complaining once, in a class on Aesthetics, that they couldn’t teach German Romanticism as a class because the school had deemed it “too literary” and we just had one seminar on it.

Its also the case that you wouldn’t have a great understanding of, say, Plato or maybe even Aristotle if you studied them in philosophy vs Classics, since in the latter you actually read and analyze the text at the level of the grammar and open up the complexity of the potential intepretations, whereas in Philosophy there is often a somewhat rote or dumbed down version of Plato and Aristotle taught to undergrads because the teachers don’t actually know any Greek. But that depends on the faculty and the course obviously, I just wouldn’t trust most philosophy departments to teach Plato well these days.
by sakopov | 2025-10-05 21:33:03+00:00
If Elon leaves, Tesla is cooked. Tesla nosedives every time his focus is on something else which is what's happened since he purchased Twitter, became a political activist and then left to work with Trump. The only reason Tesla trades at such high valuation is because of Elon and the cult following he built around the vision for the company. As soon as he's out of there the stock will lose all of its premium. Institutional investors like Ron Baron who are open supporters of Elon's vision will leave and the business will go to carmaker-like or negative margins. There is absolutely no evidence that Tesla can function at all without Elon but there is plenty of it floundering when he's not focused on it.
by meffmadd | 2025-10-05 21:33:40+00:00
As an EU citizen hosting LLMs for researchers and staff at the university I work at, this is hits home. Without Chinese models we could not do what we do right now. IMO, in the EU (and anywhere else for that matter), we should be grateful for the Chinese labs to release these models with such permissive licenses. Without them the options would be bleak. Sometimes we would get some non-frontier model „as a treat“ and if you would like something more powerful the US labs would suggest your country pay some hundred millions for an NVIDIA data center and the only EU option is to still pay them a license fee to host on your own hardware (afaik) while they protect all the expertise. Meanwhile DeepSeek has a week where they post the „secret sauce“ to host their model more efficiently, which helped open-source projects like vLLM (which we use) to improve.
by pvankessel | 2025-10-05 21:33:47+00:00
Well that's kind of my point - liberal arts and humanities set you up with a very versatile baseline. With a proper education in those disciplines you learn how to think, and that's applicable to a wide range of fields. The woman I dated in grad school at UChicago studied war history and wound up being an analyst for a prominent wine auctioneering firm as a key researcher. My master's thesis was on the meaning of life, and now I'm running data science at a non-profit. So many of my fellow liberal arts grads have gone on to do incredible things entirely unrelated to their chosen subject of study.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-05 21:35:18+00:00
In software development specifically, as line-level coding and testing becomes more automated, CS skills are going to migrate more to architecture, rigorous design documents, scalability, design patterns, and managing fleets of AI agents. All that is conceptually hard.

And then communication, management, and people skills become more important each year. That's not stopping. It's only becoming more valuable, and a lot of people need to get a lot better at it.

Being an effective software developer is going to get much more challenging, skills-wise, over the next couple decades as productivity expectations rise exponentially.

And this is going to be the same in every knowledge work field. People will be using AI to orchestrate and supervise 20x the amount of work, and that's an incredibly demanding skill set.
by Veserv | 2025-10-05 21:36:45+00:00
So if I get 12% of the profit from music sales that is not “compensation”? Share ownership is, at its foundation, a profit (and asset) sharing agreement.

You are getting confused by the fact that this class of profit sharing agreement can be easily sold for its expected net present value of all future cash flows and that they frequently retain earnings in tax advantaged forms instead of directly distributing their generated income in highly taxed forms.
by NoahZuniga | 2025-10-05 21:37:09+00:00
> The group cited what it called the board's "relentless pursuit" of retaining Musk, saying it has delayed progress on key goals set at the last annual meeting, and pointed to declining operational and financial performance and a "failure to provide meaningful real-time oversight of management."

Seems to me like Musk being head of Tesla is the only thing keeping the share price up, so this is probably what you want as a Tesla shareholder.
by AdrianB1 | 2025-10-05 21:37:45+00:00
As a manager you may have 10 people reporting to you. Some do more important work, some do less important work, but when you are considering them for promotions there are other factors too. I am not talking about promotions from junior dev to regular or regular to senior, I am talking about promotions to positions where they are responsible for other people. In my almost 30 years working in IT in multiple companies I found that most good technical people are not good managers; similarly most managers are technically bad. Best managers are the ones that Steve Jobs described in one of his famous interviews (I will leave the pleasure of having him tell it, it is worth spending the 3 minutes).

In any case, there may be others doing more important work and there may be others better suited for promotions. It is a zero sum game, the number of people, positions and promotions is always limited so if X is promoted, Y cannot be and if X is a better one for the promotion, Y will have to either wait, move on or keep doing what they do.
by BrenBarn | 2025-10-05 21:37:51+00:00
> I don't want to defend humanities academia too much, but you could ask the same about pure math too.

That's true to some extent. I think math has built up enough credibility though because such a huge amount of mathematical investigation has turned out to have relevance in science which eventually trickles down to applied science. Even if the specific content of esoteric math isn't of practical use, the "machinery" developed for navigating the concepts often becomes an essential tool for other things that are more practical. It's interesting to think, though, if the prestige of math could decline as the stuff left to discover becomes more and more remote from practicality.

> Now the steelman is that they make a complex literary work better understood by unfolding its layers, relating it to the context, analyzing its impact and influence etc. so the work becomes better and deeper understood.

Yes, and I think that steelman is true. The important thing, though (like I said in another comment) is that it means what is important is not the specific content of the opinion but that process of unfolding, relating, analyzing and so on. So it can be useful to write about that, and to read what others wrote about it, even though in the end no one is really going to "find the right answer".

> But simply writing about that is the equivalent of a reaction YouTuber.

I'd say at the low end it can be like that. At the high end it can be more like one of those videos that breaks down "how movie X creates its suspense", or reading a good travelogue. Reading a book about someone's travels in Tibet isn't going to be the same as going to Tibet, and it would be foolish to read it hoping to replace such an experience. But if the book is good, you can still gain something from it, and it can potentially include things you wouldn't have gained by going there yourself, because the author can articulate insights you might not have been able to formulate yourself.
by cweagans | 2025-10-05 21:38:24+00:00
We may be optimizing for different needs. For instance, while I was able to get a significant amount of extra height, I didn't have a lot of cabinet depth to work with, which is somewhat limiting for traditional server hardware. There are short-depth options out there, but I also wanted at lease some GPU capability. The integrated GPUs in the SER9s are not top of the line by any means, but they're more than capable for what I want to be working on.
by Razengan | 2025-10-05 21:38:44+00:00
I'm gonna say that we need MORE "assholes" in the industry, the way things are now. Or rather, that being a perfectionist kinda makes one an asshole, because by definition you don't tolerate anyshit less than perfect.

Recall all the things in tech that have peeved you since a long time:

If you were to be given charge of those companies, would you waste time asking people nicely?

I mean, sure, maintain basic humanity, don't devolve into Linus Torvalds, but to make major changes you HAVE to not put up with bullshit.

iTunes in Jobs' era had no overly intrusive DRM; you could literally copy purchased songs to another computer and play them there.

Now, Apple TV+ is so anal about DRM that skipping a few times causes it to get stuck, while it tries to reestablish that you are free of sin. Trying to watch on iPad on a slower-than-lightspeed connection while on travel requires a restart of the app every few minutes. I had to cancel my subscription and just pirated a copy of Severance just to be able to finish the show.

You can't even take screeshots. You can't even copy text from Books.app (in some/most books). There's so much user-hostile bullshit in iOS/macOS now that would get employees/managers lashed if Jobs was there. And I, a user, would be all for it.

I could keep going but I don't want to ruin my own day.