skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The sweet spot of the current LLMs (not whatever the next gen might or might not improve on) for me is similar to suddenly having an army of idiots at my fingertips.

There are a lot of smallish tasks/problems people/systems needs to deal with, some of them even waste notable real engineering capacity, and a highschooler could do manually quite easily by hand.

Example: find out if a text contains an email address, including all kinds of shenanigans people do to mask it (may not be allowd, ... whatever). From a purely coding standpoint, this is a cats-and-mouse game of improving regex solutions in many cases to also find the more sophisticated patterns, but there will always be uncatched/new ways or simply errors that produce false positives. But a highschooler can be given a text and instantly spot the email address (or confirm none is in there).

In order to "solve" these types of small problems, LLMs are pretty much fantastic. It needs to only be reliable enough to produce a structured answer within a few attempts and cheap enough to not be a concern for finance/operations. Thats why for me it makes absolutely sense that the #1 priority for OpenAI since GPT4 has been building smaller/faster/cheaper models. Automators need exactly that, not genius-level AGI.

Also for me I think we're not even scratching the surface still about many tasks can be automated away within the current constraints/flaws of LLMs (hallucination, accuracy, ...). Everyone tries to hype up some super generic powerful future (that usually falls flat after a while), whereas the true value of LLMs is in the many small things where hardcoding solutions is expensive but an intern could do it right away.
> Is that really progress though? Honestly, more and more jobs can be done by machines. But what about the fact that human beings need to connect and feel at least that they are contributing somewhat to society?

But does "society" have to happen only "at work"?
> A "community" begins with one person doing the thing.

And a community thrives with many one-persons combining their effort and keep doing so.

I have made many libraries (gems), OpenSource. Some paid, many just for the benefit of this community; your implication that I lament but not put my work and effort up is frankly rather offending.

To continue on this lament: libraries in dynamic languages are rather hard to maintain, due to runtime constraints that progress/change over time. And the one thing I see is a dwindling usage. Less issues filed (good! ;), less downloads, less integrations, less praise, etc etc.

The more I pay attention, the more I see the Ruby community dwindling. I hope this is merely Rails dwindling - I frankly won't mind if Rails is replaced -, but I fear that Ruby = Rails in practicality. And that Ruby is on the way to the COBOL or Perl.

This, I lament, because I think Ruby is, in the niche of dynamic scripting languages, by far the nicest, cleanest and fun to work with. It's tooling and syntax far more consistent and sensible than Pythons. It's concepts far better thought out and much nicer executed than PHPs. And, sorry, everything can be better than JavaScript without much effort.

So, to me it makes no sense to make Ruby the next Python or PHP, because it's already much better, IMO. It's just not used as often. One extra person using it, doesn't change that.

And, it makes even less sense to make Ruby more like Go or Rust, because if I need Rust, I'd pick Rust instead of spending years of my life making Ruby more like Rust (i.e. invest in a type system, some compile stuff etc).

And when I need e.g. WASM runtime (in say serverless functions) or integration of some new fancy SAAS, or LangChain alike tooling, why would I poor months or years of effort into building tooling to compile to WASM, build gems around said SAAS, or help with tools like Transformers for Ruby, when I can pick Go or Rust to compile to wasm today, grab the Typescript package for the SAAS today, or learn, use (and dislike) Langchain in python today as well?
I think there's a vast ocean of different software engineers and the type of code they write on a daily basis, which is why you get such differing views on AI's effectiveness.
For me, AI has only ever been useful for very basic tasks and scripts:
If I need a quick helper script for something in Python, a language that isn't my daily drier, AI usually gets me there in a couple of prompts. Or maybe I am writing some powershell/bash and forgot the syntax for something and AI is quicker (or has more context) than a web search.

However, my main job is trying to come up with "elegant" architectures for complex business logic that interacts with an existing large code base. AI is just completely out of its depth in such cases due to lack of context but also lack of source material to draw from.
Even unit tests only work with the most basic of cases, most of the time the setup is so complex it just produces garbage.

I've also had very little luck getting it to write performant code. I almost have to feed it the techniques or algorithms before it attempts to write such code, and even then it's usually wrong or not as efficient as it could be.
Are you saying Fukushima had none or less than modest harmful effects? I don't know what the parent meant, but the whole Fukushima disaster management and clean up will take decades and people had to leave their homes.

To add, I agree about your point about hydro in general. It's a complicated comparison, though.
Put some wd-40 on your bike's brakes and see if you think it's not a lubricant.

Maybe you think it's not a _good_ lubricant? But a lot of its use is to extract stuck things which requires a thin lubricant
If Target's website is down for an hour, I'll just wait.

> sit out front and wait for them to open, or are you going to another store?

Many times I've wanted to get something from my preferred grocery store, but they're closed so I... just went a different time.

Most people aren't going to shop a bunch of random websites to buy "Callaway golf clubs". They're going to buy it from Dick's or Amazon. And if those websites are down the moment they check, they'll just wait an hour because it isn't urgent or figure it's a problem on their end.

Fuck, b&h photo takes their website down a whole day every week!

> I guess we can't really blame people for not understanding this - people rarely understand how their beef and carrots got to the grocery store either.

Thanks for the lesson, I learned how smart you like sounding.
Stock Firefox also allows setting Amazon and eBay as a default search engine, and I wonder if this is related to Amazon being a sponsored shortcut on the new tab page.
What a blast from the past. I used this around 2006 or so. From the screenshots it looks about the same as I remember (not a criticism).
It thinks BuzzFeed and Nature were last updated in 2022, your data doesn't seem accurate.
Nobody knows what intelligence actually is. But asking this philosophical question and your discussion opponent not having a clear answer is a very obvious discussion trap and a discussion shut-down and it does NOT immediately follow that your claim -- "we have AI / AGI" -- becomes automatically true. It does not.

And I am pretty sure my own intelligence goes much farther than regurgitating text that I have no clue about (like ChatGPT does not have symbol logic that links words with objects it can "feel" physically or otherwise).
Ask HN: Are any of the new AI-driven search engines your daily driver?
I've played around with Perplexity, Algolia and Exa recently. They're better than Google, Bing, Yandex and my curated Brave searching at finding blog articles and about as capable as Brave and Yandex at finding articles, metadata and files relating to old television shows (probably too niche for many here but relevant to me).
Has anybody here gotten any useful experiences out of them that you can tell me?
I use twitter and it seems to work but the big brands didn't like things like Musk tweeting 'exactly right' to some comment about 'the jews' pushing anti white racism and similar stuff. I'm not sure there are any large brands left see eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/1896e5u/what_major...

And I'm not sure the recent ploy of suing them for not advertising is going to work great.
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Would that not imply eating the cheapest food available would also be the healthiest?

Buying the cheapest car would be the most resource efficient and most reliable car?

The implication being that cheap is best, which it most certainly isn’t. In your case cheap = fewest resources used.

But cheap could also be achieved by tax breaks, financial trickery (shifting debt around shell companies), producing products in cheap labour countries and then shipping it around the world as opposed to producing locally with less resources required for transportation.
We've replaced our rule-based health engine with LLM
Does it matter if it's relative or absolute?
> If the stick enables you carve more complex things in a cheaper way than the previous tool, then yes, the stick is special

Yeah it does that, in 2-3 areas, those we need the least -- who cares it can replace artists? We need elder people care! We need automated logistics! And a tons of other things.

"It's just the beginning" yeah yeah, but it's not. It's actually the next AI plateau that the area will need a long time to move on from. Please do quote me on this, I am willing to apologize if I am wrong after 5-10 years.
> This work will allow FreeBSD to fully support greater than 256 cores with features such as CPU mapping and will also include bhyve integration.

This is the improvement the article talks about. So it's unrelated to the current AI/GPU hype.
Least costly, unless you're logged in
Work make me use Chrome, and I have recently converted hard to tab groups. I've found two main uses: one for a collection of reference tabs that I mostly want open or closed together (specific API references that are normally spread out over a few pages); the other is to organise groups of tabs for different projects I'm working on.

Both of these make context switching easier as I can quickly hide all of the tabs I'm not currently using, knowing they'll be just as easy to reopen later. In Chrome, tab groups can be saved too, so they give you a bit of the persistence of bookmarks.

I'm still a Firefox user where I have a choice, and I'm really excited to hear they're working on first-class tab groups
> Well, if a job can be done by a machine, it should be done by a machine - after all, if there is one thing common across humanity, it is the desire for progress.

Sure, but what is "progress"? Who gets to define it.

Are we sure "if a job can be done by a machine, it should be done by a machine" is universally true -- and even if it is, who and what says that that's necessarily equal to "progress"?
> What exactly floored your colleague at Microsoft?

Speaking of understand context… They floored him not other way round
There have been hypotheses that a significant number of trans women (i.e. biological men who identify as women) are actually on the autism spectrum. Considering natural tendency of autistic people to prefer isolated activities and puzzles, there may be a correlation between hackers and trans women.
In Ukraine alone, there have been two major instances of military destruction of hydroelectric dams (Dnieper Hydroelectric Station during WWII and Kakhovka Dam during the current war) with the number of casualties far greater than that of all nuclear power incidents in history combined. Somehow, nobody's using that as an argument against hydro power.

If anything, Germany's reliance on Russian gas did a lot more to put the country in danger of war.
...just wait til you see this about North American (US and Canada) firetrucks: https://youtu.be/j2dHFC31VtQ?t=21
Do you perhaps have some resources on how you use AI assistants for coding (I'm assuming Github Copilot). I've been trying it for the past months, and frankly, it's barely helping me at all. 95% of the time the suggestions are just noise. Maybe as a fast typer it's less useful, I just wonder why my experience is so different than what others are saying. So maybe it's because I'm not using it right?
~65,000 tons of copper, which would cost about $515 million dollars or maybe a billion after being turned into wires. These numbers are from ChatGPT which is good at figuring out amounts needed but useless at figuring out real industrial-scale prices.
You could return the saved User object, if `save` changes it in any way, to allow the caller to work with it functional style, ie. make it explicit that it is an updated object (or if it is immutable, although typical persistence frameworks expect mutable objects, "bean" style).

You could also go fancy and do it properly functional, so return something like an `Either<User, Error>` instead of throwing an Exception, but that's definitely not canonical Java...
> By the way, do you know what cost the most money on the HPC project? Loan interests, by a very large margin. Because of the risk of project failure given the lack of government guarantees, they had to borrow at a baffling 9% interest rate in a world if zero interest rate. This is the insanity that drove the cost to the sky, not the engineering side of things.

This is the first time I've heard of this, so I did a little digging.

> Lazard assumes investors want a return of 12% and bond holders will accept an interest payment of 8%. These are kept standard across all types of generation as the intention is not to assess the risk of the project but instead the competitiveness of the technology.

> If Hinkley was to pay these commercial rates, the project construction with interest would balloon out to close to $70b. But they didn’t and digging into EDF’s financial statements shows interest costs related to construction was only 1% of capitalised costs in 2017 and 4% in 2021.

https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/nuclear-economics-less...

The Finacial Times article from 2023 puts the cost increase elsewhere:

> The increase, caused by surges in material prices several billion above the most recent estimates, is nearly 80 per cent more than the cost of £18bn in 2016, when EDF first started work on the project.

https://www.ft.com/content/ae5fb399-08ce-4045-bb70-45a6531ac...

And directly from the horse's mouth, in the EDF's status update from 2024:

> The costs of completing the project are now estimated at between £31 billion and £34 billion in 2015 values. The cost of civil engineering and the longer duration of the electromechanical phase (and its impact on other work) are the two main reasons for this cost revision. If the risk of an additional delay of 12 months mentioned above in the final scenario does materialise it would result in an estimated additional cost of around £1 billion in 2015 values.

https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/journ...

----

The only reference to the 9% figure you mentioned comes from a BBC article from 2018

> However, Dieter Helm, professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford, told the BBC that the government shift made sense.

> "The sheer cost of building new nuclear power stations means it makes sense for the government to help finance projects like this," he said.

> "Governments can borrow much more cheaply that private companies and that lower cost of borrowing can drastically reduce the ultimate cost. Hinkley Point C would have been roughly half the cost if the government had been borrowing the money to build it at 2%, rather than EDF's cost of capital, which was 9%."

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44363366

I couldn't verify it anywhere else though. Can you point to a source from the EDF that confirms the loan interests cost the most money on the Hinkley Point C project?
It was 'easy' because Iran designed the attack to deplete the expensive iron dome stocks with ultra-cheap drones, not actually demolish any Israeli infrastructure.

The supersonic missiles that Iran intended to get through, got through. All else was theatre.

The point was very clearly made: iron dome can be defeated with cheap drones, leaving the path clear for the supersonic missiles to land on target. Which is precisely what happened.

It was precisely the same message delivered in Irans' response to the assassination of Soleimani.
Probably boolean. If you don't see the difference, welcome to Java :D
Notably Netflix video platform is both AMD and FreeBSD. I wouldn't be surprised if there were other similar big enough customers that throwing some spare change in FreeBSDs direction is worthwhile

> Serving Netflix Video Traffic at 800Gb/s and Beyond [pdf] (nabstreamingsummit.com)

> 590 points by ksec on Aug 19, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 394 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519881

While consoles are sizeable chunk for AMD, I don't think stuff like >256 core support or bhyve is exactly relevant for gaming.
I agree with that to some degree. But I do lean more into hiring on potential though, it has worked out for me.

Skills can be learned. Tools can be provided. But the employee’s personal values are very hard to change. These are core components of performance in some perf management theories.

I think context is important. If a company can hire on potential, I would say it will be a better hire in the long-term. But if employee turnover is high and tenures short, and you need work done now and not 6 months from now, I agree with you more.
> Japan (rightfully) has lost trust on nuclear and decided to reset their entire nuclear generation capacity.

bullshit. Japan is in the process of restarting all of their nuclear plants. Price of energy had doubled after the grid went off nuclear.
Do not trust people who speak in SEO
Because nuclear competency is a strategic asset that the long march has been very successful in degrading.
Yeah CHIP8 is a simple enough system that i even made two emulators (one in DOS and one in Windows) and an assembler back in 1999-2000 or so when i was in highschool and could barely put eight bits together to form a byte.

Also somehow for some reason i was convinced back then that mobile phones in the future will have a CHIP8 emulator to play games :-P. Sadly(?) they got Java instead.
Oh. I didn't know that. The page is pretty vague about what physical channels it uses so I just assumed it was on top of the internet. None of that stuff would have enough bandwidth for regular internet use, and clandestinely broadcasting on shortwave is going to cause you far more trouble with the authorities no matter what data you send!
Agree with the sentiment of your comment in isolation but when I went to the article to see the quoted line in context, the author isn't saying anything of the sort.

They're not taking a narrow definition of knowledge & extrapolating that once one has that specific knowledge it explains everything. Instead they're broadening the definition of "hacker" (& also invoking the idea of continuous interrogation) to describe an approach to always seeking & finding "how the world works" in any given context.
If you mean the ones that are just a painted strip on the ground, then OK, but for existing traffic lights controlled ones it doesn't seem unreasonable at all. Sensors to detect pedestrian and/or car presence are already extremely common. E.g. all modern [1] pedestrian crossings in the UK have similar sensors, which can extend the crossing time if it detects someone still in the road. And of course your local drive thru can detect your car pulling up, though usually by induction coil

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffin_crossing - standard since 2016
Trans folks may in general possess qualities that make them better hackers, but they certainly aren't the only ones, so I wouldn't call hacker culture inherently trans.

That would imply that non-trans people are somehow outsiders, which is contrary to the hacker philosophy, which respects merit and skill, regardless of the person's identity.
I wish there were an r/AngryUpvote thing here
Firefox is the only browser that freezes Ubuntu after some extensive internet use, especially with video watching. Since many years and still today.
Yep haha. It's been Rainlendar 2 for a few years now, but I don't think I could name anything that actually looks different in version 2.

One of those applications that would only be worse with more features, does everything it needs to and sits quietly on the desktop using minimal resources.

There's now a double-size skin option for high-DPI displays though!
Watch his videos and be the judge. He don't code, he hardly understands the hardware he is covering.
He constantly makes stupid "predictions".
I have no idea what type of law you're talking about here, but (given the context of the thread) I can guarantee you major firms working on M&As are most definitely not using underpaid interns to draft those documents. They are overpaid qualified solicitors.
DNA tagging spray to fight Aberdeen's nuisance joyriders
I started this thread on the w3c list almost 20 years ago - https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2005Dec/00...

Unfortunately, it is unlikely we will ever get something like a Semantic web. It seemed like a good idea in the beginning of 2000s but now there is honestly no need for it as it is quite cheap and easy to attach meaning to text due to the progress in LLMs and NLP.
Saving, when instant, does not need to notify the user. Not every action needs to notify the user.

As seen in the article, do we need a notification following a click to every checkbox? In most cases, the user should assume that the action is completed the moment it's taken. If not, you can add an inline loader and show a regular, maybe modal error if it happens.

"Save" actions, with the exceptions of large data, does not need further UI. Particularly the circle should be seen as a marker of the current state, not as a way to tell whether your action has completed successfully, so you shouldn't view it as a "10x more subtle notification"
What if another thing errors at the same time? If you put the error just where you clicked it, you may well miss it. If all things like that happen in the same place (e.g. bottom right) then you won't.

It's pointless pretending there's one perfect guiding philosophy and all others are obviously wrong.
> d it. If Russia were forced out of their position, they could adopt a scorched earth policy and destroy it, potentially irradiating the area.

thats not how nuclear power plants work. bombing them dont magically turn them into nuclear bombs or something.
I was looking at the PPP figures. By accident as it happens, I was looking at the first box in Wikipedia with "GDP" in it. But I think that is still fine in this context.

> You can't make those assumptions, if you don't want to be bullied. Singapore doesn't have that cable right now and we ain't in the stone age.

You aren't at war either as far as I know, and hopefully it stays that way. But if Singapore happens to be at war with someone who thinks cutting that cable is a good option then the stone age beckons. And not because of the cable.
> Plus the fairly unsolved waste storage problem.

I don't think it is unsolved, is it?

> Fukushima, 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl were existential for the nuclear industry. Like it or lump it, they made nuclear feel less safe.

I don't think Fukushima made nuclear feel less safe. The terrible reporting and existing mindsets might have, but how could a single death when a tsunami hits a reactor make people feel unsafe in and of itself?
My dentist tells me fluoride based mouthwashes.
Brigadier General Jack D Ripper says otherwise—sapping purity of essence and all.
The Origin and Harm of Federal Education Mandates