MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyberax | 2025-11-15 09:13:09+00:00
I recently switched from an NVidia card (5090) to a couple of AMD cards (R9700 32GB) for my inference server.

I must say it's been a completely positive experience. The mainline Fedora kernel just worked without any need to mess with the DKMS. I just forwarded /dev/dri/* devices to my containers, and everything worked fine with ROCm.

I needed to grab a different image (-rocm instead of -cuda) for Ollama, change the type of whisper build for Storyteller. And that was it! On the host, nvtop works fine to visualize the GPU state, and VAAPI provides accelerated encoding for ffmpeg.

Honestly, it's been an absolutely pleasant experience compared to getting NVidia CUDA to work.
by hulitu | 2025-11-15 09:14:01+00:00
> I was mostly surprised by the "Gnome 50" part. Last I remembered Gnome was still version 3. Turns out they jumped from 3.38 to version 40

I think GTK is version 5, so they have to converge somewhere.

This is an old trick from SW developers to show a suppose maturity: bump the version number.
by autoexec | 2025-11-15 09:14:24+00:00
They like it when old games are unplayable because if gamers can't find or play the old games they'll have to pay (and pay more) for their newest games. Why compete with your own back catalog? Especially when your old game isn't full of bullshit like day one DLC, lootboxes, season passes, and microtransactions.
by dabinat | 2025-11-15 09:16:20+00:00
Part of the problem is that in order to prove your age you need to hand over a bunch of unrelated data about yourself. Why do they need to know my name, address, signature, and what I look like? They don’t even need to know my actual age, just that I’m over 21. Laws like this would go down a lot better if there were privacy-respecting ways of verifying age.
by culebron21 | 2025-11-15 09:17:21+00:00
> It has proper enums.

Well, then they look awkward and have give a feel like it's a syntax abuse.

> Its arrays and slices are exactly the same as how you would do it in C. So while it is true that trips up many coming from languages that wrap them in incredible amounts of magic, but the issue you point to here is actually a lack of magic.

In Rust, I see exactly what I work with -- a proper vector, material thing, or a slice, which is a view into a vector. Also, a slice in Rust is always contiguous, it starts from element a and finishes at element b. I can remove an arbitrary element from a middle of a vector, but slice is read-only, and I simply can't. I can push (append) only to a vector. I can insert in the middle of a vector -- and the doc warns me that it'll need to shift every element after it forward. There's just zero magic.

In Go instead, how do I insert an element in the middle of an array? I see suggestions like `myarray[:123] + []MyType{my_element} + myarray[123:]`. (Removing is like myarray[:123] + myarray[124:]`.)

What do I deal in this code with, and what do I get afterwards? Is this a sophisticated slice that keeps 3 views, 2 to myarray and 1 to the anonymous one?

The docs on the internet suggest that slices in go are exactly like in Rust, a contiguous sequence of array's elements. If so, in my example of inserting (as well as when deleting), there must be a lot happening under the hood.
by esseph | 2025-11-15 09:17:51+00:00
Oh at this point, with the way we've treated countries with military action, insane tariffs, masked deportations, embargos/blockades, threatening the sovereignty of a G8 country, threatening to annex another, supporting Israeli genocide, the list goes on...

We're on the downward slope now, but it will take awhile.

The future requires investments in education, infrastructure, healthcare, and energy generation (in particular, cheap energy), and we're simply not doing it. Being lonely sucks, and the US govt has alienated long standing allies. Economically they doesn't bode well.
by bob1029 | 2025-11-15 09:17:58+00:00
How does the electricity get from the generating unit to the heat pump? What are the environmental conditions during heat pump operation?

These things sound so obvious when you don't factor in the annoying little details like transmission of energy. System complexity also matters. There's this thing called "total cost of ownership" that paints a more honest picture regarding how these economics interact.

Using heat pumps to solve a problem looks fantastic in operational efficiency terms, but what happens if the control board breaks and the vendor decided to move on? Dumb, slightly less efficient appliances might actually be cheaper and better for the environment in total. If I have to create a pile of e-waste every 3 years just to save 10% on my energy bill for something that is already incredibly cheap in absolute terms, I think it could be argued I've made everything worse.
by georgefrowny | 2025-11-15 09:19:48+00:00
> If we could do it in 1995 they should be able to do it 30 years later.

Google Drive still doesn't work on Linux.

So much big tech shit just didn't care about Linux and it's even worse in Asia and industry where up to now you might as well grow three heads before you suggest not using Windows.

It'll eventually change, but at least in China it'll probably be an even more closed down Huawei or similar OS rather then Linux. Neither WeChat or the commercial variant have Linux support, and at least the latter doesn't seem to have a PWA alternative. So I have a VM that absolutely destroys fan and battery life.
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-11-15 09:20:11+00:00
Technology Connections have a video about how water heaters work in detail and how much power can be saved by strategically turning them off when not needed.

https://youtu.be/Bm7L-2J52GU

However, the website has some weird vibes as well, like why would you say something like below?

> And some just want Dad Mode for when your teenager needs to finish that shower.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-15 09:20:19+00:00
Your brain has more capacity than an average LLM, and a self-supervised training regime etched into it by millions of years of evolution. Its inductive bias is very well tuned for the environment. It still takes decades to build itself up to peak performance.

And at its peak? Human brain doesn't actually have an overwhelming advantage over an LLM. It's a mixed bag of advantages and disadvantages.

LLMs think fast, and can input and output data much faster than a human. But they struggle to work on the same task for a long time, and have a problem with visual inputs and object manipulation. LLMs have more knowledge in total, but humans have better meta-knowledge, which is useful for hallucination avoidance. LLMs can only learn in context efficiently, but humans learn continuously and retain what they learned. LLMs and humans are currently trading blows when it comes to inference energy efficiency - especially when you account for things like sleep or rest.

I don't think there's a "right technology" at all. There may not be a state-change upgrade that gets us x100000 on a dime and goes all the way to an AGI on every smartphone and an ASI in any datacenter worth the name. I expect there to be a lot of little +5% and +10% upgrades that add up over time.
by aabhay | 2025-11-15 09:20:20+00:00
They are, but the problem is that shifting an organization whose lifeblood is yearly hardware refreshes and chip innovation towards a ship-daily software culture is challenging. And software doesn’t “make money” the way hardware does so it can get deprioritized by executives. And vendors are lining up to write and even open source lots of software for your platform in exchange for pricing, preference, priority (great on paper but bad for long term quality). And your competitors will get ahead of you if you miss even a single hardware trend/innovation.
by survirtual | 2025-11-15 09:20:34+00:00
This is the key, with test driven dev sprinkled in.

You provide basic specs and can work with LLMs to create thorough test suites that cover the specs. Once specs are captured as tests, the LLM can no longer hallucinate.

I model this as "grounding". Just like you need to ground an electrical system, you need to ground the LLM to reality. The tests do this, so they are REQUIRED for all LLM coding.

Once a framework is established, you require tests for everything. No code is written without tests. These can also be perf tests. They need solid metrics in order to output quality.

The tests provide context and documentation for future LLM runs.

This is also the same way I'd handle foreign teams, that at no fault of their own, would often output subpar code. It was mainly because of a lack of cultural context, communication misunderstandings, and no solid metrics to measure against.

Our main job with LLMs now as software engineers is a strange sort of manager, with a mix of solutions architect, QA director, and patterns expertise. It is actually a lot of work and requires a lot of human people to manage, but the results are real.

I have been experimenting with how meta I can get with this, and the results have been exciting. At one point, I had well over 10 agents working on the same project in parallel, following several design patterns, and they worked so fast I could no longer follow the code. But with layers of tests, layers of agents auditing each other, and isolated domains with well defined interfaces (just as I would expect in a large scale project with multiple human teams), the results speak for themselves.

I write all this to encourage people to take a different approach. Treat the LLMs like they are junior devs or a foreign team speaking a different language. Remember all the design patterns used to get effective use out of people regardless of these barriers. Use them with the LLMs. It works.
by esseph | 2025-11-15 09:21:07+00:00
Oh it was certainly no Aeneid, and I'm open to hearing a better one.

In the tribal societies I'm familiar with, hunter isn't a position of honor or something, it's just a job. The hunter is a tool, like the basket weaver or the primitive doctor.

The part about "their kill" is not familiar to me in the tribal way because that's the tribe's kill. The tribes food. The elder(s) would decide to ration, not the hunter.

That aside, screw the analogy. If you have 40,000,000 people on food rations and decide to withhold said food rations because you think some of them are misappropriated, that's some very stupid thinking. Only an idiot thinks like that. The only other person that thinks like that is a sociopath, one that wishes harm on said group. Either way, they're clearly a danger as a decision maker.
by koliber | 2025-11-15 09:22:45+00:00
You can't code without specifications, period. Specifications can have various forms but in ultimately define how your program should work.

The problem with what people call "Waterfall" is that there is an assumption that at some point you have a complete and correct spec and you code off of that.

A spec is never complete. Any methodology applied in a way that does not allow you to go back to revise and/or clarify specs will cause trouble. This was possible with waterfall and is more explicitly encouraged with various agile processes. How much it actually happens in practice differs regardless of how you name the methodology that you use.
by Jensson | 2025-11-15 09:22:48+00:00
The difference between bonobos and chimps are genetics and not culture, you can't train chimps to live like bonobos and vice versa.

Us humans still has the genes that made us conquer and enslave the whole world, every single human culture that has ever existed enslave and murder animals, as we needed to do that to survive. You ain't gonna change those genes, so we just have to do the best we can with the genes we have and our genes are like Chimpanzees in that we want to murder and eat and exploit others, without that humans didn't get b12 and died out, so all our ancestors lived that way.
by prymitive | 2025-11-15 09:22:49+00:00
IMHO in a way the constant churn of Grafana made it easier to live with it. When they break your dashboards every major release you just learn to let go. And by break it’s not just making it error and not work, it’s the constant moving of things around, refactoring the UI, replacing one component with another, all accompanied by a number of glitches every time they rewrite things. You just accept and ignore it eventually.

What’s a bigger lock in for me is metrics and promql - you just can’t ever rename a poorly named metric or you face a world of pain. Or when Prometheus releases Native Histograms to replace the old ones, and suddenly everything from rules, alerts, ad-hoc queries and dashboards needs updating.

And PromQL is so opaque, it just never give you an error unless there is a syntax issue. We need tools like https://github.com/cloudflare/pint just to know if my alert description isn’t trying to render a label that’s just not gonna be there, etc
by galaxyLogic | 2025-11-15 09:23:52+00:00
I think the challenge is how to create a small but evolvable spec.

What LLMs bring to the picture is that "spec" is high-level coding. In normal coding you start by writing small functions then verify that they work. Similarly LLMs should perhaps be given small specs to start with, then add more functions/features to the spec incrementally. Would that work?
by johnisgood | 2025-11-15 09:26:05+00:00
I replied to "Can you try calculating 101 * 70 in your head?".

Yes, many people can successfully calculate it through learned tricks or no learned tricks.

That is all I am saying. And my question is: how is calculating it in your own head brute-force, especially if done without such tricks?

No need to complicate it, answers to my question would suffice.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-11-15 09:26:16+00:00
1. Choose set of code challenges (generate them, leetcode, AOC etc.)

2. LLM generates python solution and seperate python test (as in python test calls code as black box process so it can test non python code)

3. Agent using skills etc. tries to write new language let's call it Shark.

4. Run Shark code against test. If fails use agentic flows to correct until test passes.

5. Now have list of challenges, working code (maybe not beautiful) for training.

A bit of human spot checking may not go amiss!
by LunicLynx | 2025-11-15 09:26:49+00:00
Very valid. In the beginning all this was driven by developers. Then it was LinkedIn-ified and suddenly we had to deal with agile coaches. Essentially people with no tech qualifications play with developers as guineapigs without understanding the why.

Same is true for UX and DevOps, just create a bunch of positions based on some blog post, and congratulate your self on a job well done. Screwing over the developer (engineers) as usual. Even though they actually might be interested in those jobs.

This is the main problem with big tech informing industry decisions, they win because they make sure they understand what all of this means. For all other companies this just creates a mess and your mentioned frustration.
by Grimblewald | 2025-11-15 09:26:52+00:00
I dunno man, looks like goodharts law in action to me. That isnt to say the models wont be good at what is stated, but it does mean it might not signal a general improvement in competence but rather a targeted gain with more general deficits rising up in untested/ignored areas, some which may or may not be catastrophic. I guess we will see but for now Imma keep my hype in the box.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-15 09:27:07+00:00
We are yet to see a pure theoretical roadblock between LLMs and AGI. The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if an existing LLM architecture (whether fully transformer-based or one of the hybrids) can hit AGI with the right scale, training and some scaffolding.

On the other hand, extracting usable insights from neuroscience? Not at all easy. Human brain does not yield itself to instrumentation.

If an average human had 1.5 Neuralink implants in his skull, and raw neural data was cheap and easy to source? You bet someone would try to use that for AI tech. As is? We're in the "bitter lesson" regime. We can't extract usable insights out of neuroscience fast enough for it to matter much.
by zppln | 2025-11-15 09:27:34+00:00
Where I work we do (for high assurance software) systems specifications, systems design, software specifications and software design and ultimately source code.

That said, there is a bit of redundancy between software design and source code. We tend to rather get rid of the development of the latter than the former though, i.e. by having the source code be generated by some modelling tool.
by ArcHound | 2025-11-15 09:27:42+00:00
Neat! Most of the offensive scrapers I met try and exploit WordPress sites (hence the focus on PHP). They don't want to see php files, but their outputs.

What you have here is quite close to a honeypot, sadly I don't see an easy way to counter-abuse such bots. If the attack is not following their script, they move on.
by podgorniy | 2025-11-15 09:29:24+00:00
There is sense in your words. Especially in the context of the modern day vocabulary.

I though about the concept of this ort of methodology before "agent" (which I would define as "sideeffects with LLM integration") was marketed into community vocabulary. And I'm still rigidly sticking to what I consider "basics". Hope that does not impede understanding.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-15 09:29:27+00:00
As they well should have. Because they have more foresight than a pile of rocks.

They knew they had the beginnings of an incredibly capable technology at their hands, and they knew that intelligence is an extremely dangerous thing.

And so far? The capabilities of today's systems are already impressive, and keep improving. If you're thinking "what those systems are doing today isn't that bad", you shouldn't be. Concern yourself with the capabilities of a bleeding edge AI from year 2035.
by stavros | 2025-11-15 09:30:02+00:00
I was surprised at how cold "hot" water actually was. I thought it was 60-70, but apparently what feels "hot" is around 45-50. Especially for me, that finds anything beyond my shower's "middle" heat as uncomfortably hot, I must be showering with around 40 C water, which is basically "hot day" hot.
by Twisol | 2025-11-15 09:30:07+00:00
> This shows how moeb is a generalization of fix.

To be fair, loeb was already a generalization of fix. If `f` is the identity functor, then `loeb` has type `(a -> a) -> a`, and the `fmap` used in its definition resolves to `id`.

It's a shame there aren't any other example applications of moeb. The author mentions using `traverse` and `foldMap`, but those are also based fundamentally on `fmap` in some sense, and I wouldn't be too surprised if they also ended up being literally `fmap` for some specific choice of functor.
by phil21 | 2025-11-15 09:30:25+00:00
The best investment in my comfort and upgrading my home was two redundantly configured Navien continuous water heaters.

Never worry about running out of hot water ever again. If I’m gone on a trip for 2 weeks my hot water bill is zero. Due to having overcapacity, whenever I have guests staying with me no one ever has to worry about simultaneously using showers or any other hot water at all. I run out of water pressure before I do heating capacity.

If one breaks I just schedule a repair or replacement for weeks in advance and have to limit folks to 2 simultaneous showers at any given time. Hasn’t happened yet.

I will never go back to a tank based water heater unless outright forced into it. It’s one of those “TiVo like” upgrades to your lifestyle you never knew you needed until you have it.

Certainly not cheap, but also not prohibitively expensive if you can find a competent installer who doesn’t overcharge.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-11-15 09:31:20+00:00
From this writeup it does sound like the architecture of the AMD gpu makes it a bit harder to optimize. It also seems like long term, the AMD approach may scale better in the long run. 8 chiplets rather than 2 for the nvidia offering, along with all the associated cache and memory locality woes.

The future will probably see more chiplets rather than less, so I wonder if dealing with complexity here will pay more dividends in the long run
by netsharc | 2025-11-15 09:31:45+00:00
There's several layers of humor in TC videos, the cringe joke, the acknowledgement that "I'm making a cringe joke", the acknowledgement that the joke is still lame with the meta-joke, the "well I put it in the video anyway, aren't I funny?".

But the end result makes me cringe after all.

Edit: oh, you're talking about this product website...
by t43562 | 2025-11-15 09:32:27+00:00
The history of AI has been to reject human inspired forms and then be forced to adopt them.

OK that's a sweeping statement but I think it encapsulates the general attitude quite well for a single sentence. We fly in planes which are not like birds but they have wings and tails and flaps and slats and we're even getting into making the wings warp.

Sleep is needed for memory I think so there is a price to pay for continuous learning. It's important to be able to forget too. - to rotate the logfiles so to speak. AGI only interests me because it will be able to understand us - therefor it has to work like us and experience things like us.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-15 09:32:31+00:00
Yeah except I asked Claude:

> No. There's no indication that children are involved or that care is being provided. It's just two people meeting.

Part of its thinking:

> This is a very vague description with no context about:

> What happens during the meeting

> Whether children are present

> What the purpose of the meeting is

> Any other relevant details

Claude is not going to say childcare, and it is not saying it is childcare.

My prompt was: ""regular meeting between two women". Is it childcare or not?".
by CGamesPlay | 2025-11-15 09:33:12+00:00
> Evers’s veto is part of a dubious Wisconsin tradition. In 1975, Gov. Patrick Lucey struck the word “not” from the phrase “not less than,” reversing its meaning. In the 1980s, Govs. Tony Earl and Tommy Thompson crossed out individual letters to create entirely new words. And in 2005, Gov. Jim Doyle reappropriated over $400 million from its intended use by striking all but 20 words from a 752-word passage, creating a new sentence bearing no resemblance to the language approved by the legislature.
by Twisol | 2025-11-15 09:34:53+00:00
They probably can do deep/shallow packet inspection for that purpose (being one of the non-nefarious applications I alluded to), but that's not to say their correct functioning relies on it. Those routers also need to support at least UDP, and UDP provides almost no extra information at that level -- just the source and destination ports (so, perhaps QoS prioritization) and the inner payload's length and checksum (so, perhaps dropping bad packets quickly).

If middleware decides to do packet inspection, it better make sure that any behavioral differences (relative to not doing any inspection) is strictly an optimization and does not impact the correctness of the link.

Also, although I'm not a network operator by any stretch, my understanding is that TCP congestion control is primarily a function of the endpoints of the TCP link, not the IP routers along the way. As Wikipedia explains [0]:

> Per the end-to-end principle, congestion control is largely a function of internet hosts, not the network itself.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion_control
by podgorniy | 2025-11-15 09:35:02+00:00
I could not have said it better. We're on the same page with you.

I would add that to my opinion if previously code production/management was a limiting factor in software development, today it's not. The conceptualisation (onthology, methodology) of the framework (spec-centric devlopment) for the system production and maintenance (code, artifacts, running system) becomes a new limiting factor. But it's matter of time we'll figure out 2-3 methodologies (like it happened with the agile's scrum/kanban) which will become a new "baseline". We're at the early stages when new "laws of llm development" (as in "laws of physics") is still being figured out.