MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ineedasername | 2025-11-08 03:40:10+00:00
It looks like the actual crux was Altman's plea that the backtops be granted... Not to OpenAI? The document linkedfrom the article that had the actual ask, rather than cleanup over deliberate misatributions by others, was to... "Extend eligibility", for the AMIC money already carved out, to companies that are producers of things such as "grid components such as transformers and specialized steel".

So: Altman did not ask for OpenAI loans to be guaranteed, nor did the CFO. It was on behalf of others drawn into the needs of the industry the AMIC grant was supposed to support. Self interested by OpenAI? Sure! And also not about to make the top 10k leaderboard for "sleezy things companies do".
by marshray | 2025-11-08 03:40:27+00:00
Ouch.

From the article: "A letter on 3 October 1941 from the Lyon and Lyon attorney to Lamarr and Antheil says '...we rather doubted at the time that method claim 7 would be considered patentable, since the invention appears to reside more in a new apparatus than in a new method.' Thus, the attorney representing the applicants agreed with the patent examiner that the evidence was against Lamarr-Antheil’s definitive method claim to FHSS, which was claim 7."

This analysis makes it pretty clear that EFF's 1997 assertion that she and Antheil "developed and [...] patented the concept of 'frequency-hopping' that is now the basis for the spread spectrum radio systems" is flatly untrue.

This isn't to say that she wasn't an inventor or innovator, or didn't put together existing known techniques in a new way to address a relevant and interesting problem.
by jfabre | 2025-11-08 03:41:01+00:00
But what do you mean, give me a real example. You loaded too many active_records in memory and it's using a ton of ram? Did you try pluck, batches or even skipping active_record and using a raw query?

Unless you really need to scale for a ton of users, you don't have to go crazy to get decent performances out of rails/ruby. How many requests/sec are we even talking about here?
by behnamoh | 2025-11-08 03:41:12+00:00
If they don't quantize the model, how do they achieve these speeds? Groq also says they don't quantize models (and I want to believe them) but we literally have no way to prove they're right.

This is important because their premium $50 (as opposed to $20 on Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus) should be justified by the speed. GLM 4.6 is fine but I don't think it's still at the GPT-5/Claude Sonnet 4.5 level, so if I'm paying $50 for it on Cerebras it should be mainly because of speed.

What kind of workflow justifies this? I'm genuinely curious.
by octoberfranklin | 2025-11-08 03:42:07+00:00
This is the same kind of bullshit rationalization they used to say that the bank bailouts of 2009 weren't really bank bailouts.

They were bank bailouts.

Unsecured government loans are either bailouts, entitlements in disguise, or (usually misguided) attempts at broad economic stimulus. This definitely isn't either of the latter two.
by radishingr | 2025-11-08 03:42:35+00:00
ATC is hundreds of functions and dozens of responsibilities like checking that the runway is safe to land. "Clear to land" is not just a turn of phrase, it is a check and verify that an aircraft with hundreds of people is relying on.

Air traffic is not a deterministic system, it is squishy and significantly more complicated because it involves humans, complex mechanical systems, and weather floating on top of a sea of limited resources.
by int_19h | 2025-11-08 03:43:43+00:00
The funny thing is when you have that spill over to civilians who then take it to 11.

Case in point: firearms. The standard-issue M4A1 is actually pretty good on that front already, but for civilian ARs, there's a whole cottage industry around making improved components that can handle even more abuse.

Knives, as well. Your average military field knife is something like 80 years behind the curve on materials, especially steel. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing - it's "good enough" (given what they're realistically used for) and cheap at that. But civilians can and do drop 10x money for knives that you can baton wood with and still have a shave after, even though there's no practical use for that kind of thing.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-11-08 03:44:00+00:00
This is not a "standard." From their documentation[0]:

Browsers already know how to interpret certain rel values because of web standards. ... The monetization link type, however, isn’t a standard yet.

And nothing about the "Web Monetization" primary intent[1] is appealing as a standard worthy of being adopted:

Web Monetization gives publishers more revenue options ...

0 - https://webmonetization.org/developers/link-element-webpage/...

1 - https://webmonetization.org/
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-08 03:44:23+00:00
The "correct" way is highly context dependent with the added proviso that Zig assumes a low-level systems context.

In this context, adding data to an error may be expedient but 1) it has a non-trivial overhead on average and 2) may be inadvisable in some circumstances due to system state. I haven't written any systems in Zig yet but in low-level high-performance C++20 code bases we basically do the same thing when it comes to error handling. The conditional late binding of error context lets you choose when and where to do it when it makes sense and is likely to be safe.

A fundamental caveat of systems languages is that expediency takes a back seat to precision, performance, and determinism. That's the nature of the thing.
by tqi | 2025-11-08 03:45:39+00:00
> Elad was elusive but the angel who was most consistently influential and supportive during my entire five-year run at Akita. We had a fifteen-minute call almost every quarter, sometimes at an unpredictable time, but always full of great guidance.

How helpful can a person who spends less than 5 hours over 5 YEARS be? How much time are they even spending learning / thinking about the company?
by ajross | 2025-11-08 03:45:55+00:00
This seems kinda contrived. In practice that "ERROR DATA" tends not to exist. Unexpected errors almost never originate within the code in question. In basically all cases that "ERROR DATA" is just recapitulating the result of a system call, and the OS doesn't have any data to pass.

And even if it did, interpreting the error generally doesn't every work with a microscope over attached data. You got an error from a write. What does the data contain? The file descriptor? Not great, since you really want to know the path to the file. But even then, it turns out it doesn't really matter because what really happened was the storage filled up due to a misbehaving process somewhere else.

"Error data" is one of those conceits that sounds like a good idea but in practice is mostly just busy work. Architect your systems to fail gracefully, don't fool yourself into pretending you can "handle" errors in clever ways.
by misrasaurabh1 | 2025-11-08 03:46:09+00:00
I've been running into performance bottlenecks in the wild where `copy.deepcopy()` was the bottleneck. After digging into it, I discovered that deepcopy can actually be slower than even serializing and deserializing with pickle or json in many cases!

I wrote up my findings on why this happens and some practical alternatives that can give you significant performance improvements.

*TL;DR:* deepcopy's recursive approach and safety checks create memory overhead that often isn't worth it. The post covers when to use alternatives like shallow copy + manual handling, pickle round-trips, or restructuring your code to avoid copying altogether.

Has anyone else run into this? Curious to hear about other performance gotchas you've discovered in commonly-used Python functions.
by nradov | 2025-11-08 03:46:44+00:00
That's a nice strawman you're creating there. In some airspace classes and flight regimes an aircraft has more variables, especially when you account for possible failures. If an aircraft has a mechanical failure it can't just pull over and stop.

There are about 46000 aircraft registered in the USA, plus more that sometimes fly in from foreign countries. Many aircraft were manufactured decades ago by companies that no longer exist so major upgrades aren't economically practical.
by generativenoise | 2025-11-08 03:46:57+00:00
The problem is the draining by taxation, not the absolute number of productive people.

It is far from evident what size of real productive population is needed to sustain a society. With modern tools it does feel like it could be in the realm of sub 10% of the population. This will get even more wild if the techno-optimists are correct.

Depending on how close we are to biophysical bounds trying to increase the population to the historically required productive ratios is just going to make living conditions worse for the average person.
by gmueckl | 2025-11-08 03:47:15+00:00
What is going on here is that modeling a mesh and rendering it are very different things. There are algorithms to edit a model that work best on quad based topology (e.g. selecting edge loops and others). That's why quads are preferable for editable "source" versions of 3d models. The conversion from quads to triangles is also a very fast algorithm.

GPUs rasterize triangles because they are a primitive type with very convenient properties: rasterization requires only a few basic math operations per pixel and triangles can never overlap themselves in projections, which quads can.

It's generally tempting to assume the mesh data that is edited in a DCC tool (Maya etc.) as the same as what is rendered. This couldn't be further from the truth because they need to be in completely different representations. For example, vertices on UV map seams need to be duplicated for rendering, but that would make editing the mesh extremely unwieldy. So the datastructures are totally different.
by cschneid | 2025-11-08 03:49:51+00:00
so apparently they have custom hardware that is basically absolutely gigantic chips - across the scale of a whole wafer at a time. Presumably they keep the entire model right on chip, in effectively L3 cache or whatever. So the memory bandwidth is absurdly fast, allowing very fast inference.

It's more expensive to get the same raw compute as a cluster of nvidia chips, but they don't have the same peak throughput.

As far as price as a coder, I am giving a month of the $50 plan a shot. I haven't figured out how to adapt my workflow yet to faster speeds (also learning and setting up opencode).
by robocat | 2025-11-08 03:52:28+00:00
Yet I just found an article that said that MAU was 3.065 in 2023 and 2024 and 3.07 in 2025 (i.e. MAU is flat not decreasing). Did you drop a zero?

AFAIK there is no consensus that Facebook usage is declining - however that narritive gets told by people. Of course, it might depend on which country you look at.
by pinnochio | 2025-11-08 03:53:33+00:00
> LLMs are essentially impossible

> trying to prove to everyone that LLMs are not possible or at least that they're some kind of illusion

This is such poor phrasing I can't help but wonder if it was intentional. The argument is over whether LLMs are capable of AGI, not whether "LLMs are possible".

You also 100% do not have to buy into Chomsky's theory of the brain to believe LLMs won't achieve AGI.
by vacuity | 2025-11-08 03:53:41+00:00
You're exaggerating heavily, which undermines your claims. While Rust claims to allow fearless concurrency, there is plenty of official documentation to show that the limitations are acknowledged. Anyone telling you Rust prevents memory leaks and race conditions is lying, straight up, and this is trivial to verify. You shouldn't be repeating it. Your comments on Send/Sync and unsafe are similarly exaggerated. I have to say, you must be interacting with Rust zealots beyond what I've ever seen, if this is truly your belief.
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-11-08 03:53:42+00:00
After lots of hand-wringing and research and trying Kindle & Kobo, I decided to read on my iPad and iPhone. They have accessibility features like low light mode to make it easy on the eyes, I can always read on the go with my phone and they can handle large full color books and PDFs too. The iPad has basically all notifications disabled and no distractions installed so it feels like a reader.
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-08 03:55:03+00:00
I included ligatures as a logically separate concept that needs to be accounted for when counting the "displayed width" of a string and how you handle cursor position and selection logic.

However, ligatures are a part of grapheme clustering and it isn't entirely independent: Examples above and elsewhere include ligatures that have Unicode encodings (ex: ﬁ). Ligatures have been a part of character encodings and have affected grapheme clustering since EBCDIC (directly from which Unicode inherits a lot of its single codepoint Latin ligatures). There are way too many debates if normal forms should encode ligatures or always decompose them or some other strategy. The normal forms (NFC and NFD, NFKC and NFKD) themselves are embedded as a step of several of the standard grapheme clustering algorithms.

Some people think ligatures should be entirely left to fonts and Unicode ligatures a relic of the IBM bitmap font past. Some fonts think it would be nice if some ligatures were more directly encoded and normal forms could do a first pass for them. Unicode has had portions of the specification on both sides of that argument. It generally leans away from the backward compatibility ligatures and generally normalizes them to decomposition, especially in locales like "en-us" these days, but it doesn't always and in every locale. (All of that is before you start to consider languages that are almost nothing but long sequences of ligatures, including but not limited to Arabic.)

You can't do grapheme clustering and entirely ignore ligatures. You certainly can't count "display width" or "display position" without paying attention to ligatures, which was the point of bringing them up alongside mentions of grapheme clustering length and why it is insufficient for "display position" and "display width".
by ineedasername | 2025-11-08 03:56:02+00:00
Absolutely nothing. They don't, they didn't, it's a poorly stitched together attack job.

The 1.4 T amounts to a broad nearly decade long capex plan, not liabilities.

The loans and backstops etc were a request, not for OpenAI, but on behalf of manufacturers of grid equipment, manufacturers that OpenAI wouldike the government to consider as eligible for money already carved out by the AMIC national investment in chips and AI, and also probably more money as well-- it's a separate group of tangential industries that weren't initially considered, so why not ask? Sure it would help keep the wheels moving in OpenAI and the broad AI and US semiconductor industry, but it's far away from and ask by Altman for a bailout of his company.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-08 03:56:10+00:00
> Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead.

It's funny to read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated from people who obviously don't understand what ATC entails.

ATC isn't just planning and scheduling. There is a lot of quick thinking and communication with pilots. You might only be thinking of the everything-goes-perfectly-right case, but the real value of having trained ATC operators is handling all of the edge cases and making quick decisions under high pressure scenarios that may not have even been represented in the training set.

ATC is also partially a visual job. Did you ever notice that there's literally a tower at the airport for air traffic control people? The people in this tower will manage things like traffic on the ground and immediate airspace around the tower. Visual inputs and critical thinking skills are very necessary.
by tguvot | 2025-11-08 03:56:49+00:00
i don't pre-run hot water in the tap. my dishwasher meant to run pre-wash with "whatever" water (and is quoted in article, having hot water in prewash can actually stain things) and it washes everything perfectly. in fact all dishwashers i ever had washed everything fine (as long as they didn't have physical malfunction).

if dishwasher manufacturer thought that prewash needs hot water, it would have heated it to appropriate temperature like it does when it needs to.
by achierius | 2025-11-08 03:57:17+00:00
There's more than that. Not a huge amount more but still.

- multiple large companies contribute to each of the larger AoT compiler projects; think AMD's contributions to LLVM and GCC, and multiple have their own internal team for handling compiler work based on some OSS upstream (eg Apple clang)

- various companies have their own DSLs, eg meta's Hack, the python spinoff Goldman has going on, etc.

- DBs have query language engineers which are effectively compiler roles

- (most significantly) most hardware companies and accelerators need people to write toolchains; Triton, Pytorch, JAX, NVCC, etc. all have a lot of people working on them
by cyberax | 2025-11-08 03:58:55+00:00
The first Apple iPods only had FireWire which was exotic here, so they were not at all popular. I had a Rio (Nitrus, I think?) that was released within a year from iPod's release. When I first interacted with an iPod a couple of years later, I was not at all impressed.

I didn't have a NOMAD, but Slashdot's "no wireless, less space than a NOMAD, lame" tagline was pretty much on point. Its marketing was great, however.
by bruce511 | 2025-11-08 03:59:52+00:00
>> Small developers are not welcome at Meta

You took a long time to come to a conclusion that is common knowledge;

"Don't build things which are dependent on someone else's platform."

This is a valuable life lesson, and one which (unfortunately) has to be re-learned over and over again. (Ask the Farmville folks).

When you build on someone else's platform you are subject to their whims, their changes in direction, their API restrictions, changes, whatever.

Meta will do none of the things you suggest. Because (and this will shock you) none of these suggestions are new. Which makes sense - external developers are not their priority.

And if you think Twitter, LinkedIn, etc are any better I have a bridge to sell you...
by BigGreenJorts | 2025-11-08 04:00:42+00:00
> drop 10x money for knives that you can baton wood with and still have a shave after, even though there's no practical use for that kind of thing.

Excuse you, I just came back from a 6 month backpacking trip where I had to split my own kindling along the way AND shave regularly and I didn't have weight for a knife/axe AND razor blade /s
by pdonis | 2025-11-08 04:00:45+00:00
> Part of me suspects psychology is your domain, and you may be an academic

Neither of these are true.

> or at least have some graduate experience.

I do, but not in psychology. My degrees are in engineering.

> I would have really appreciated it if you had said something like "while I dont take issue with the claim that competence increases with time

But I do take issue with that claim, at least if it's made in the broad way you are making it here. I responded to that in another subthread with you.

> "I looked at those graphs and they don't match what the DK paper claims

The DK paper was already linked to by someone (I don't think it was you) elsewhere in this thread, and in any case it's easy to find online. I was taking for granted that you would be able to look for yourself to see what is in the paper, graphs or otherwise.
by ekidd | 2025-11-08 04:02:54+00:00
Yup, I have been a junior compiler engineer at three(!) different jobs early in my career, before moving on to other stuff.

It has never been a huge niche. It's fun work if you can get it. There were often MIT grads around, but I don't think it made you an automatic hire?

Once in a blue moon, for old times' sake, I send a bug fix PR for someone's optimizer, or build a small transpiler for something.
by amluto | 2025-11-08 04:03:57+00:00
Commercial air travel has a passenger fatality on something like one in ten million flights [0], and less than that on newer aircraft.

Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1]

So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that.

[0] https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm

[1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-11-08 04:04:13+00:00
I think it also helps that Docker started with an enormous amount of VC funding because their promise was to bring the “App Store” to Linux and enterprise servers.

Who couldn’t become famous with something like a $200M budget?

Feel like they spent it on marketing instead.

Podman is arguably technically superior yet people stay with Docker out of habit…
by Aurornis | 2025-11-08 04:06:14+00:00
You cited an article about people in 2025 talking about whether or not they might have kids in the future.

This census investigation is talking about people under the age of 18, meaning it includes people who were conceived almost two decades ago.

Several states on the list also have significantly above average housing affordability (home price to income ratios) like West Virginia or Pennsylvania.
by mobeigi | 2025-11-08 04:07:42+00:00
I've heard good things about Zig. I want to pick it up and experiment with it but at ~2% market share I find it hard to justify spending the time to learn and master it right now. It's usually much easier to find the time to learn a new language if there is a project (work or open source) that is also using it.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology
by wpm | 2025-11-08 04:09:29+00:00
Without a Jobs-esque foot, the bozos have nothing to fear. They flourish and spread, gain power by impressing other bozos, and push out anyone with half a brain.

MobileMe’s devs were brought into an auditorium for a dressing down that included the lines “you should all hate each other for letting each other down” and in response to “what is MobileMe supposed to do” got a “Why the fuck doesn’t it do that”

The smug dopes that are left over in the design department are probably clapping each other in the back over shipping liquid glass. Tim doesn’t give a shit about how ugly, troublesome, and problematic it is. Stock price go up, whatever!
by peterfirefly | 2025-11-08 04:10:52+00:00
> is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life

There's also the extremely important EPR paper from 1935, twenty years before his death. He certainly didn't stop producing useful science just because he felt it was a good idea to explore ideas that didn't work out.

What is truly embarrassing is stuff like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F