MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andai | 2025-11-14 16:57:20+00:00
I think current LLMs are trying to poorly emulate several distinct systems.

They're not that great at knowledge (and we're currently wasting most of the neurons on memorizing common crawl, which... have you looked at common crawl?)

They're not that great at determinism (a good solution here is that the LLM writes 10 lines of Python, which then feed back into the LLM. Then the task completes 100% of the time, and much cheaper too).

They're not that great at complex rules (surprisingly good actually, but expensive and flakey). Often we are trying to simulate what are basically 50 lines of Prolog with a trillion params and 50KB of vague English prompts.

I think if we figure out what we're actually trying to do with these things, then we can actually do each of those things properly, and the whole thing is going to work a lot better.
by redm | 2025-11-14 16:57:41+00:00
I've been following this report for many years, but Backblaze, as a backup service (traditionally), has very different IO patterns than many users. They originally started with consumer drives, which we found to be far too unreliable. In my experience, the BER and write cycles have a dramatic impact on overall drive performance. The MTBF declines sharply as write cycles increase, both as a percentage of IO and overall IO.

Backblaze changed IO patterns with B2, but that would be the key data for me to make this more useful: failure rate as a percentage of bytes read/written, etc.
by elzbardico | 2025-11-14 16:57:54+00:00
And yet, the source problem still remains. The company has a shitty way of reporting quality issues in relation to parts and assemblies.

Being an automaker, I can almost smell the silos where data resides, the rigidly defended lines between manufactures, sales and post-sales, the intra-departmental political fights.

Then you have all the legacy of enterprise software.

And the result is this shitty warranty claims data.
by yodon | 2025-11-14 16:58:18+00:00
This is likely a separate tool, but I suspect it is trivial to build given the framework you've set up...

What I most want is something that notices if Claude has been thinking for more than say 30 seconds, and if so sends me a slack message when the output is finished and ready to read.

Given that Claude is often thinking for 30 minutes, I context switch onto something else, and wish there were a way to get a notification so it isn't sitting idle waiting for me for ten minutes (or an hour, as sometimes happens)
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-11-14 16:58:19+00:00
as heartbreaking as it's been to realize that i no longer love the thing that used to bring me so much joy, i've found a lot of pleasure in more physical pursuits.

i picked up sewing (messenger bags, backpacks etc) with an industrial sewing machine - it's a real rabbit hole but i get a real, tangible reward for my hard work (something besides "hey cool, the blinkenlights do the thing now"). it's pretty amazing to assemble a physical good and then use it on a daily basis, and i've gotten to the point where i've even made bags for others who like my stuff.

it's not going to replace my tech career as far as paying the bills, but i get to use a lot of the same abstract mental tools (design, iteration, experimentation, learning from others and disassembling/reassembling things to learn how they work).
by bob1029 | 2025-11-14 16:58:31+00:00
To be fair to the raw capabilities of the semiconductor industry, a 100mm^2 die at 3nm can contain on the order of 1~10 trillion features. I don't know that we are actually that far off in terms of scale. How to arrange these features seems to be the difficult part.

The EDA [0] problem is immune to the bitter lesson. There are certainly specific arrangements of matter that can solve this problem better than a GPU/TPU/CPU can today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation
by everfree | 2025-11-14 16:58:40+00:00
I use AI in Firefox all the time. Obviously it seems like I'm in a minority.

* I summarize articles.

* When I need more context to understand an article, I ask AI what I'm missing.

* When I'm writing up something important, I ask AI to proofread it for me.

* When I'm using productivity web apps, I ask AI to help me learn the features.

* When I'm filling out convoluted forms, I ask AI what the writer could have possibly intended.

Non-exhaustive list. Each of these things has resulted in huge leaps in my productivity.

Instead of using Firefox, I should probably be using something like the ChatGPT Atlas browser - except it's super important to me to use a browser that is open source and respects my privacy, lets me opt out from the Chromium hegemony, and allows me full control not only over which AI agent I use, but also full control over the browser itself. With Firefox's AI features, only the data I want sent to an AI gets sent to an AI, and I can have confidence that the rest of my data stays private.

The real key for me is that Firefox's AI features are unobtrusive. They show up when I invoke them, then go away when I don't want to see them anymore. The Mozilla team seems to have struck a perfect balance with that so far, even going so far as to add "turn this off permanently" options directly in every AI-related shortcut and menu. If you don't want to use AI in your browser, it's not like you even have to dig through the settings. Just click the button that shows up. Technically speaking, this is actually more annoying for people who do use the AI features - in a reversal to the usual trope, the AI users are the ones forced to stare at a menu item that's useless to them all day.

As for me, if other browsers start to really leapfrog Firefox in terms of the useful kind of AI integration that accelerates my daily browsing tasks, I'll probably reluctantly switch away at some point. Thankfully, the vast majority of this can probably be done at the extension level, and it probably should be, rather than being directly integrated into the browser itself. That would be a win/win for everyone in my book. I just really don't want to give up Firefox or give up my productivity tools.

And before anyone asks, I did not use AI to write or proofread any part of this post. This one's all me.
by zerotolerance | 2025-11-14 16:58:47+00:00
It is such a pure thing when an engineer looks at the world and is surprised, frustrated, or disappointed at behavior at scale. This is a finance game which in itself is a storytelling / belief based system. It might seem like math, but when you're playing on the growth edges valuation is really is about the story you tell and the character of the players. Thats only worse when people stop caring about cashflows or only expect them to happen "in the future" because that makes it someone else's problem.
by claudiulodro | 2025-11-14 16:59:13+00:00
> I'd say about 25% of them came from a "moneyed" background. The rest were just regular people with regular backgrounds who were obsessive about starting businesses.

This is a very similar point to the article though -- the moneyed class is much smaller than 25% of the population, so they are disproportionately represented in even your anecdotal sample. To be clear, that doesn't mean that regular people can't make it though!
by underlipton | 2025-11-14 17:00:27+00:00
It's just returning to relative sanity. Go look at a 6-month chart. Of course, it's mostly risen with the SP500 tide. The mid-September jump was some sort of mechanical move caused by things deep in the market (and outside it) that you're not allowed to know about. Someone needed collateral.

I don't think Oracle's stock price has anything to do with AI. That's just the public narrative.
by lapcat | 2025-11-14 17:01:21+00:00
No. Here's the same author with a different article: "A UBI would free Americans to shift from scarcity to abundance mode, which would enable more people to take risks and engage in a greater, more expansive vision for their future. Yang’s freedom dividend would give Americans greater agency to leave codependent relationships, professional or otherwise, and operate as the CEO or entrepreneur of their own lives." https://qz.com/1687957/the-case-for-andrew-yangs-ubi-plan
by _pdp_ | 2025-11-14 17:01:22+00:00
I literally meant typescript types... i.e. define the types of the solution rather than an algorithm... it servers the same purpose as using something like terraform:

``` interface BaseEC2 extends AWSEC2 { type: '...' }

// export means build export interface MyInstance extends BaseEC2 { // some customisations }

// fleet export interface EC2Fleet extends EC2Fleet { instances: MyInstance } ```

etc...

wacky idea but I kind of like it
by bluGill | 2025-11-14 17:02:13+00:00
There are a lot of hobbies like that. More than half of woodworking discussions are not about woodworking, but how to setup a great shop and what tools to put into it. Musicians often talk about and trade guitars more than play. Sewing is often more about collecting fabric than doing something with it. That is just a short random example, there are plenty of more.

None of the above are bad things. There is nothing wrong with the above so long as you are honest about it, but it starts to consume time that you think you are spending on something else. Woodworkers need a place to work - while must great things are made in a kitchen that not an ideal location (OTHO I have a nice shop but still work in the kitchen because it is faster to get there). Likewise, your guitar is a part of your sound and so you really should try others from time to time; sewers should have some fabric to work with. Many "woodworkers" changed their goal is restoring old tools as well, which again is fine but not what the hobby it about.

So back to the question: what is the goal? If the goal is to write, then you need to write most of your time. Once in a while it is fine to ask "would a better keyboard be worth it", but if you are not spending the majority of your time on writing tasks (which is mostly editing) you are not a writer.
by paradox460 | 2025-11-14 17:02:19+00:00
The biggest problem is every story telling sub eventually grows the rule "don't question the story"

I'm not sure why the mods adopt it. Maybe they think having a comment section full of people calling out a lie isn't good or something, but whenever the rule goes into place it's like a switch is thrown, and shortly thereafter all the stores in that sub will rot away into lies

Happened to tales from tech support, I don't work here, several parenting subreddits, aita, and more
by moregrist | 2025-11-14 17:02:39+00:00
> The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment.

I think there are more mundane (and IMO realistic) explanations than assuming that this is some kind of weird power move by all of software. I have a hard time believing that Salesforce and Adobe want to advance an agenda other than selling product and giving their C-suite nice bonuses.

I think you can explain a lot of this as:

1. Executives (CEOs, CTOs, VPs, whatever) got convinced that AI is the new growth thing

2. AI costs a _lot_ of money relative to most product enhancements, so there's an inherent need to justify that expense.

3. All of the unwanted and pushy features are a way of creating metrics that justify the expense of AI for the C-suite.

4. It takes time for users to effectively say "We didn't want this," and in the meantime a whole host of engineers, engineering managers, and product managers have gotten promoted and/or better gigs because they could say "we added AI" to their product.

There's also a herd effect among competing products that tends to make these things go in waves.
by lapcat | 2025-11-14 17:02:46+00:00
This is a misinterpretation of the article and perhaps more of an indication of your own political ideology. Here's the same author with a different article: "A UBI would free Americans to shift from scarcity to abundance mode, which would enable more people to take risks and engage in a greater, more expansive vision for their future. Yang’s freedom dividend would give Americans greater agency to leave codependent relationships, professional or otherwise, and operate as the CEO or entrepreneur of their own lives." https://qz.com/1687957/the-case-for-andrew-yangs-ubi-plan
by vel0city | 2025-11-14 17:03:07+00:00
I live in Texas, but for a while my ISP issued me IP addresses that had some geolocation information suggesting I was in Québec. Hey, at least its still North America.

Tons of websites and apps would use that IP location to default payment to Canadian dollars, default language as French, incorrect timezone, metric units instead of imperial.

It was like that for a couple of years. Quite annoying.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-14 17:03:12+00:00
It's not a popular opinion but if I was the EU I would do the following:

(1) Fully fund Firefox or an alternative browser (with a 100% open source commitment and verifiable builds so we know the people who get ideas like chatcontrol can't slip something bad in)

(2) Pass a law to the effect: "Violate DNT and the c-suite goes to jail and the company pays 200% of yearly revenue"

(3) same for having a cookie banner
by incanus77 | 2025-11-14 17:04:09+00:00
I mean, muscle memory & fatigue may be part of it. I used MacOS for a number of years, then I used Mac OS X for 8 years, then OS X for 5 years, and now macOS for 9 years.

During that time I also used Windows and Linux from time to time. Their names didn't change in a way where just calling them that was perceived as incorrect.
by pjsg | 2025-11-14 17:04:26+00:00
The article seems to think that a word is untranslateable if there is no single word in the target language. If I'm not misreading the article, then this is completely obvious -- just consider the number of words in English and the number of words in almost any other language, and you will find that there are more English words than the other language. It is now clear that there exist English words that don't correspond to a single word in the other language.
by paradox460 | 2025-11-14 17:04:50+00:00
The only AI product where I've seen a meaningful quality of life improvement is the AI features in DaVinci resolve. They do things like detect music beats, automatically level audio, transcribe and detect audio, allow seamless redubs of flubbed voice lines with a good facsimile of the original voice, handle motion tracking, and more

Most (all?) of it runs locally too
by TheCoelacanth | 2025-11-14 17:05:01+00:00
No, that's not the point.

If you take a strong argument and through in an extra weak point, that just makes the whole argument less persuasive (even if that's not rational, it's how people think).

You wouldn't say the "Uyghur genocide is bad because of ... also the disposable plastic crap that those slave factories produce is terrible for the environment."

Plastic waste is bad but it's on such a different level from genocide that it's a terrible argument to make.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-14 17:05:20+00:00
You could do an architectural search, and Google previously did that for CNNs with it's NASNet (Network Architectural Search) series of architectures, but the problem is you first need to decide what are the architectural components you want your search process to operate over, so you are baking in a lot of assumptions from the start and massively reducing the search space (because this is necessary to be computationally viable).

A search or evolutionary process would also need an AGI-evaluator to guide the search, and this evaluator would then determine the characteristics of the solution found, so it rather smacks of benchmark gaming rather than the preferred approach of designing for generic capabilities rather than specific evaluations.

I wouldn't say we don't know how LLMs "work" - clearly we know how the transformer itself works, and it was designed intentionally with certain approach in mind - we just don't know all the details of what representations it has learnt from the data. I also wouldn't say LLMs/transformers represent a bitter lesson approach since the architecture is so specific - there is a lot of assumptions baked into it.
by fodkodrasz | 2025-11-14 17:05:25+00:00
Water usage largely depends on the context, if the water source is sustainable, and if it is freshwater.

Of course water used up will eventually evaporate, and produce rainfall in the water cycle, but unfortunately at many places "fossil" water is used up, or more water used in an area then the watershed can sustainably support.

This is a constant source of miscommunication about water usage, and that of agriculture also. It is very different to talk about the water needs to raise a cow in eg. Colorado and in Scotish highlands, but this is usually removed from the picture.

The same context should be considered for datacenters.
by indeed30 | 2025-11-14 17:05:42+00:00
I think we are just coming at this from different angles. I do understand and agree that we are estimating the parameters of the fit curves.

> That already makes strong modeling assumptions (usually including IID, Gaussian noise, etc.,) to get the parameter estimates in the first place

You lose me here - I don't agree with "usually". I guess you're thinking of examples where you are sampling from a population and estimating features of that population. There's nothing wrong with that, but that is a much smaller domain than curve fitting in general.

If you give me a set of x and y, I can fit a parametric curve that tries to minimises the average squared distance between fit and observed values of y without making any assumptions whatsoever. This is a purely mechanical, non-stochastic procedure.

For example, if you give me the points {(0,0), (1,1), (2,4), (3,9)} and the curve y = a x^b, then I'm going to fit a=1, b=2, and I certainly don't need to assume anything about the data generating process to do so. However there is no concept of a confidence interval in this example - the estimates are the estimates, the residual error is 0, and that is pretty much all that can be said.

If you go further and tell me that each of these pairs (x,y) is randomly sampled, or maybe the x is fixed and the y is sampled, then I can do more. But that is often not the case.
by noir_lord | 2025-11-14 17:06:04+00:00
5mm (cheap) A4 Pad on my desk and a pen - nothing important/with duration longer than a day or two goes in there (but I write the date at the top right of each page and keep them on a two month sliding date window), I tried taking a photo of each page but realised I never looked back more than a couple of months so just stopped bothering.

Everything else I just throw around on the filesystem wherever makes sense for the thing I'm doing.
by fatbird | 2025-11-14 17:06:06+00:00
Most civil servants are stand up people

I will agree with this from personal experience. I've worked with several gov'ts on various projects and found almost everyone to be simply interested in doing their job well.

The story of the Iraq War and how faulty intelligence played into it is very different from that view. You have George Tenet, head of the CIA, telling GWB that the intel was a slam dunk for Iraqi attempts to build nukes when there was no such intel. Colin Powell, the day before his presentation to the UN on the Iraqi nuke program, went to Langley and demanded to review the evidence himself. When shown the paltry shreds they'd collected, he blew up at Tenet, saying "this is all you've got?"

Cheney set up his own mini-intel operation in the White House, headed by Douglas Feith, to look at the "raw" intel and construct their own case because the CIA analysts were unwilling to produce a National Security Assessment saying the same. It was 100% a case of the admin claiming that the US IC supported their policies when they did not (and the IC wasn't free to publicly dispute it).

The integrity of the IC is not a reason to believe that any admin has their work product to justify their actions... especially when they won't reveal that evidence.
by chemotaxis | 2025-11-14 17:06:21+00:00
But it did. The efforts hastened the collapse of the USSR and led to good outcomes for Central Europe. The propaganda of that era wasn't supposed to be covert because it wasn't selling something objectionable. Everyone knew who's behind Radio Free Europe, for example. It was just a way to popularize Western values, and it worked.

Mind you, it's not like the Soviets were not doing the same to export their values. They were bankrolling overseas labor organizations, academics, etc.
by dpark | 2025-11-14 17:06:31+00:00
1. Browsers aggressively sandbox the code they run.

2. If you’re running curl | sh on random urls you don’t trust, you’re asking for trouble.

Running random executables you find online is a good way to get spyware and ransomware installed. I’m not saying that’s the case for re:Amp, but it’s absolutely still valid to tell people not to run random programs they find online.
by RaftPeople | 2025-11-14 17:07:25+00:00
> This is simply a scaling problem, eg. thousands of single I/O functions can reproduce the behaviour of a function that takes thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs.

I think it's more than just scaling, you need to understand the functional details to reproduce those functions (assuming those functions are valuable for the end result as opposed to just the way it had to be done given the medium).

An interesting example of this neuron complexity that was published recently:

As rats/mice (can't remember which) are exposed to new stimuli, the axon terminals of a single neuron do not all transmit a signal when there is an action potential, they transmit in a changing pattern after each action potential and ultimately settle into a more consistent pattern of some transmitting and some not.

IMHO: There is interesting mathematical modeling and transformations going on in the brain that is the secret sauce for our intelligence and it is yet to be figured out. It's not just scaling of LLM's, it's finding the right functions.
by susam | 2025-11-14 17:07:33+00:00
I remember that in the early 2000s, when Internet access was scarce where I lived, most of my writing (including writing software) happened offline. Everything I needed to do my work was available offline. This included physical books like K&R and the Core Java series that sat on my desk as well as entire sets of documentation such as MSDN discs, Javadoc HTML bundles, the Python documentation and whatever manuals shipped with compilers and IDEs. It was common to curate all the documentation you needed and keep it on your local disk as HTML or PDF.

In fact, back then the phrase 'online documentation' did not refer to anything hosted on the Internet. 'Online' simply meant 'on the computer' rather than 'in a printed manual'. So online documentation covered man pages, info manuals and the integrated help systems built into environments like QBASIC, Visual Studio (not to be confused with Visual Studio Code), Emacs, Vim or the WinHelp and CHM viewers on Windows.

I sometimes wonder whether that sort of entirely offline workflow is still viable with an ordinary computer with no Internet connection. In limited cases it is. Retrocomputing with something like QBASIC is an obvious example, since it comes with a complete hypertext manual accessible through Alt+H C (for Help > Contents) or F1 for looking up documentation for the current identifier. I still follow this style while working on my Emacs workflows and packages since all of Emacs documentation (including that of every single package installed) is available locally with the helpful C-h bindings. I am also glad that Go and Rust make viewing documentation on the computer so convenient.

But I'm not sure this style of development is possible, in general, anymore for the vast majority of software development since software today have so many dependencies and each dependency may have its own bespoke way of publishing documentation.