skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
reality is infinite.

a corpus of training data from the internet is finite.

any finite number divided by infinity ends up tending towards zero.

so, mathematically at least, the training data is not a sufficient sample of reality because the proportion of reality being sampled is basically always zero!

fun with maths ;)

> What exactly do you think those math pipelines represent?

probability distributions of human language, in the case of text only LLMs.

which is a very small subset of stuff in reality.

-

also, training data scraped from the public internet is a woeful representation of “reality” if you ask me.

that’s why LLMs i think are bullshit machines. the systems are built on other people’s bullshit posted on the public internet. we get bullshit out because we made a bunch of bullshit. it’s just a feedback loop.

(some of the training data is not bullshit. but there is a lot of bullshit in there).
The mutability is a red herring here. It depends on what methods your object has and where the generic type resides within the signature. It just so happens that an immutable array has only one relevant "method":

get :: Int -> T

Here, T is on the right/return side, therefore an immutable array type would be covariant. But a mutable array also has a

set :: Int, T -> void

which has T on the left/parameter side and therefore requires contravariance (and you cannot have both, therefore you get invariance).
But the issue is not with mutability, since you could just as well have something like

setImmutable :: Int, T -> Array(T)

and you still wouldn't be able to make Array(T) covariant.

And for the record, it is only raw arrays in Java that have this issue, generic types like List<T> are invariant (of course you can explicitly ask for a List<? super T> if you want to only call "setter" type methods on it, or List<? extends T> for getters, aka methods where T appears only on return side).
Thought this was cool and might bring someone a lazy sunday diversion for a few hours.

Creative commit messages too!
I wonder what the conservation law is connected to the 'analysis invariance', i.e. the fact that no matter how well you've thought through everything beforehand, there will still be some recalcitrant pocket of the experiment that behaves confusingly. Maybe that's the 'conservation of surprise'.
"lemme just fire up a dbt workflow to analyse this CSV file"
The price will go down, but LLMs reaching 100% accuracy and reliability is another story. We are nowhere close right now.
At this point I think it is because of a type of religious sentimentality about the sanctity of human reasoning.

To take your analogy even further, it is like asking when is the plane going to improve enough that it can really fly by flapping it's wings.
Last one took about an hour. I have an actual stopwatch running now.
Right, especially bad since this is Google. Their brand should mean more than this.

I've been writing about how the greatest weakness of LLMs is their gullibility for ages. This right here is a great example - see also the Encanto 2 thing from a few weeks ago: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/29/
This ETL is nice, but ours is 100k LOC, and spans multiple departments and employments, and I haven’t yet been able to make an LLM write a convincing test that wasn’t already solved by strict typing.

I’m not trying to move the goal post here, but LLMs haven’t replaced a single headcount. In fact, it’s only been helping our business so far.
stunning! though curious about the sewage situation.
Somebody made a website to express their opinion - wherein their opinion can be surmised by reading the domain name.

Text is scaled to 300% to indicate just how important and authoritative they think their opinion is.

And it talks down to you in a "here comes the expert" style, with an atrocious aimed-at-preschoolers presentation.

No thank you.
My comparison is always with good ol' Vim Wiki[1], which still works great with NeoVim. I'd add that to the list for comparison too.

1. https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki
My company contracted one of these LLMs to give us a bespoke chatbot. Works great for translation, and that's what I've been using it for. I popped in the line "Table 1 (etc, etc)"

It perfectly translated the line, but doesn't it also give me a completely made up 2-column 10-row data table! I asked it why, and the response was along the lines of "I am designed to make your life easier, and I thought providing this table would reduce your workload"
> you'd want to start with 109,738,365 for the gcd as it's a valid possible row

Nitpick: that has two threes.

Also, what’s wrong with 109,738,654 from that argument’s view?
I despise Blow but this is a critique that borders on the incoherent. You could just as well say that when you figure out how to hurt enemies without taking damage, you're done with action games.
He got me interested into men's clothing. Another source I follow is https://www.permanentstyle.com
I think they meant that in any widely used Unix system today, there are a loooot of things which are not files, so the design is not honest.

The most common example of soemthing almost all programs interact with universally is BSD sockets. In Plan9, which goes out of its way to follow this everything is a file philosophy, TCP/UDP connections are actually represented as files. You open a file and write something to it to create the connection, and then you read or write to other files to read the streams, and you write again to the control file to close the connection. On the server side, you similarly write to a control file to start accepting packets, and monitor a directory to check for new connections, and so on.

Note that "file" here has a pretty clear definition: anything that can be interacted with using strictly the C FILE api - open()/read()/write()/close().
same reason I would like this feature
That's too harsh.

Some people do like big bullet list of points.

Some people need to be spoon fed.

Don't blame the spoon for being a spoon.
Too little is made of the distinction between silicon substrate, fixed threshold, voltage moderated brittle networks of solid-state switches and protein substrate, variable threshold, chemically moderated plastic networks of biological switches.

To be clear, neither possesses any magical "woo" outside of physics that gives one or the other some secret magical properties - but these are not arbitrary meaningless distinctions in the way they are often discussed.
I'm not dismissing the craftsmanship that went into
making The Witness. All I'm saying is that it's cringe to be so critical of other developers when in essence he spends an extraordinary amount of time on his projects, and hasn't shipped anything cutting edge or anything other developers can even use.
Human: *remembers "Go forth and multiply!"*

Human: *stares back at God*
I am not an expert in any way, shape or form but I wonder how this squares with this other journal article in Nature: Molecular Psychiatry which came out in 2024? "11C-UCB-J PET imaging is consistent with lower synaptic density in autistic adults" https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02776-2

Edited to add title of the article
Don't blame some website on the fact no one fact checked it
I took it as a reference to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
I like this description a lot, but I think it needs a caveat or two. Most people writing code today are not computer scientists and don’t understand many of the mathematical fundamentals.

I’ve always thought of programming as 1 part science, 1 part craft, and 1 part art. The percentages of those parts vary depending on the job. There may be 0% science in some roles (outside of writing functions). I think the vast majority of programmers are firmly in the craft camp.
„ If we forget low level stuff, civilization will fall apart since we won't be able to keep vital software running.“

I argue the other way around. There is too mich complexity involved with using low level systems to model high level processes. We use the wrong tools and often model our system in a way which mimics the initial dataflow instead of discovering our domain and have a higher level understanding.

Complexity kills. And we must do everything in our power ti keep complexity to its minimum and avoid accidental complexity.
More often, people create a spreadsheet with one row per bug once they encounter situations like that.

It's a tool failure because these activities are of course core bug tracking tasks, yet bug tracking tools tend to be a poor fit for tracking unplanned side activities. These side activities do not match the regular state progression of bugs, so in-tool tracking requires that someone creates custom logic for the emerging separate process. Usually, there aren't resources for that. (It's also hard to get rid of the excess state and logic once the side project is done.) If you have to use free-form text fields or labels anyway, the spreadsheet option isn't so bad, despite its obvious flaws.
No, they're saying that Google searching in general is often useless.
Just making it easier for his sponsors to keep tabs on him.
And then rule 7. is debatable.

If you design for an ephemeral state, it doesn't make sense to be long lasting.

3D printing a door handle that perfectly fits my hand, my door, the space it moves in and only lasts until I move to another house can be the ultimate perfect design _for me_.

I'd see the same for prosthetic limbs that could evolve as the wearer evolves (e.g. growth up or ages) or what they expect from it changes.
The best we've got is "produce some speech that may contain the answer, BUT craft the question in a way that is more likely to generate an answer".
When Bonobos Know What You Don't, They'll Tell You
We are destroying software by letting business pit devs against each other.
> When I look at modern 64 bit architecture books that get suggested for me to teach with I just laugh

Why I recommend Bryant/O'Hallaron's Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective (for comparch) to newbies, as coding is what most folks are likely to be doing early on.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Computer_Systems.html?i...
87% of the Internet is bullshit.
Re tuples, I guess you mean the multiple return values, and this assignment form: https://go.dev/play/p/vxm6lV7JS4z

However how would real first class tuples be an improvement in Go? Alef had them, and allowed various manipulations, as well as returning them, and passing them to functions.

I note that they are present in Hare, but not present in Odin. Where the latter has the Go inspired multiple return values, but (AFAICS) no tuples, but does add tagged unions.

Generally I'd not want to store a tuple, preferring a struct with named fields.

So the only uses I can think of are those temporary ones for multiple return values and assignments, which are already covered.
Two university professors in data science and computational biology are not just “somebody”.
I meant avionics/skyscrapers -- edited to disambiguate.

The idea that most software developers are working in low-skill positions (i.e. distributing the output of an LLM over their Jira queue) is probably not as wrong as I wish it was, but those kind of developers aren't interested in software development as a craft to begin with, so I think (hope?) they aren't anywhere close to comprising most of the HN readership.

Also those positions don't pay as well; HN cares more about the $600k/yr jobs than the $60k/yr ones, and nobody pays $600k/yr for someone to copy-paste NPM invocations from Stack Overflow.
Because they were invented at some point in the previous 100 years.
Wow, there goes 20 minutes. Really enjoyed it, thanks.
> (1) that delta will decrease quickly

Is your data pipeline o(n^3) in the number of tokens? If not, then no, it won't.
This is a better link - it makes it clear that the full text shown in the ad came from existing web page, not just that incorrect statistic: https://www.theverge.com/news/608188/google-fake-gemini-ai-o...
Yes, LLMs are not always the best option, they are an option. Sometimes requirements of the project are such that they are also the best option.

There is one browser that uses price matching example that is impossible to do without a full-blown data science team right now: https://github.com/Pravko-Solutions/FlashLearn/tree/main/exa...
In fact I'd argue it's the _exact_ opposite. I've seen countless engineers architect big complicated systems that are completely unnecessary. If anyone was measuring, they'd realize the impact of that system was: no incremental users, no incremental revenue, increased operational overhead, higher headcount, and more burden in further development. Is that what the user needs? You tell me.
Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance: Corona Satellite (2013) [pdf]
You're really missing the point and getting lost in definitions. The entire point of human language is to model reality. Just because it is limited, inexact, and imperfect does not disqualify it as a model of reality.

Since LLMs are directly based on that language, they are definitely based on and are a model of reality. Are they perfect? No. Are they limited? Yes. Are they "bullshit"? Only to someone who is judging emotionally.
Anyone else read Mathematica by David Bessis?

Snagged this one recently and his hypothesis seems to jive with these findings.

He suggests that really doing vs math is a largely intuitive process that is then fact checked by logic later on. School, in his view, tends to do the logic side and ignores the intuitive which leads a lot of people to think they’re bad at math especially since they don’t get to practice the intuitive side that many people feel is reserved for those who are just good at math.

Real great read tho. I’ve been working my on intuitive math since then and have found it to be a great experience.
As far as I can tell, those charts are merely describing the price per token that LLM hosting companies are charging, not what running the model actually costs. The distinction is important for two reasons:

1. These companies are heavily subsidized by huge amounts of venture investment

2. If I'm integrating this technology into my web product there's absolutely no way I'll be adding a 3rd party company as a dependency. This is all way too new and bubbly to trust any of the current offerings will still exist in O(years).

Are there any similar studies showing not sticker price but actual compute/performance decrease?
Seems interesting but also dead for 10 years?
The Growing Body of Proprietary Infrastructure for FOSS Development [video]
Isn't part of the problem assuming that there is a single global optimum?

It seems there are at least two, such as in the case of utilities: best services or best profits for the shareholders. Again in the case of utilities we see time and again that these are mutually exclusive optimums as a privatized utility makes cuts to investment, build out, maintenance, customer service, or other aspects of the business in the goals of increasing profits, to the detriment of the quality of their service.
People don’t elect presidents, states do, and states elected Trump with a 312 to 226 electoral vote margin — so the states overwhelmingly voted for Trump. The purpose of the United States federal government is very strictly spelled out — and the 10th amendment makes it very clear that powers not expressly mentioned in the Constitution are reserved for the states. The U.S. is a republic, not a democracy.
So why are they SOTA translators? Would you consider old translation software bullshit generators? Because LLMs can do their job, and more.
Thanks Inigo !

The second wrong thing with the supposedly optimizer version is that it actually runs much slower than the original version. The reason is that the step() function is actually implemented like this:

float step( float x, float y )
{
return x < y ? 1.0 : 0.0;
}

How are we supposed to know what OpenGL functions are emulated rather than calling GPU primitives ?
Altough taking pointers to member functions is much more common, pointers to member variables certainly have their use cases. Here's on example: binding C++ member variables to a scripting language.

// read and write variable
player_type["speed"] = &player::speed;

https://sol2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial/cxx-in-lua.ht...
I agree that there's a barrier, but it's not huge. Mastodon really could use some people versed in marketing and onboarding. People use email without realizing that it's decentralized, I tried to draw parallels between that and Mastodon to my friend, but I failed.
> Unless something changes, the hiring pool is going to continue to decrease in size.

Or, we'll see the return of "trainees"?
It will be useful.

Also Russian, because all cybercriminals speak Russian.
You could never believe everything you read online, but with enough time and effort, you could chase any claim back to its original source.

For example, you could read something on Statista.com, you could see the credits of that dataset, and visit the source to verify. Or you randomly encounter some quote and then visit your favourite Snopes-like website to verify that the person actually said that.

That's what's under attack. The "middleware" will still be there, but the source is going to be out of your reach. Hallucinations are not a bug, but a feature.
312 to 226 isn’t a “small margin.”

You don’t measure a baseball game by number of hits or strike outs, but by the number of runs scored. The popular vote is literally irrelevant.
Inappropriate tools are always an option? I can cut a cake with a jackhammer, but....

Anyway, like I said, there are certainly good applications of LLMs, and this is probably one? I wouldn't describe "do market research on prices" as a traditional "data pipeline", but that's just me, I guess.
No, the lesson or the quote is not anthropomorphizing LLMs. It is not the LLM that "intends", it is the people who design the systems and those who make/provide the training data. In the LLM systems used today the RLHF process especially is used to steer towards plausible, confident and authorative sounding output - with no to little priority for correctness/truth.
This used to be simply called "Image Filters" though :-)
The point is, people didn’t check and AI didn’t hallucinate.
Reasons why nobody worthy of the title engineer should take this definition seriously:

1. It is recursive

2. It equates training and education with competence

3. It was written by a bureaucracy
Betz's Law
Imo wool trousers are more comfortable than jeans. It's like wearing pyjamas.
Show HN: My first side project, streamlined book clubs on Slack
> And we must do everything in our power to keep complexity to its minimum and avoid accidental complexity.

We aren't avoiding nor minimising complexity (by being at higher levels) but merely being ignorant of it, which is okay, too; until the abstractions leak: For example, folks working in hpc / cybersecurity have no such luxury.
Nanoscale imaging and control of altermagnetism in MnTe [pdf]
I don’t know enough about these implementations to know if this can be interpreted as a blanket ‘conditionals are fine’ or, rather, ‘ternary operations which select between two themselves non-branching expressions are fine’.

Like does this apply if one of the two branches of a conditional is computationally much more expensive? My (very shallow) understanding was that having, eg, a return statement on one branch and a bunch of work on the other would hamstring the GPU’s ability to optimize execution.
Hey people!

After years and years of wanting to start something and build a product, I’m taking a jab at it!

So basically, me and a few of my coworkers wanted to create a virtual book club since we are all working remotely and decided why not automate it.

I’ve been working on booktalk, a Slack app that makes book clubs easier to run. For now it will allow the team to get details and suggestions about books, vote on books that they want to read, set a timeframe for their reading cycle, and when the cycle ends, it reaches out with a few relevant questions about the book!

Has any of you organized or participated in a virtual book club before? What was your experience, any challenges that you faced or features that were missing?

Fire away!

PS: Let me know if you have any feedback about the website too, it was my first time creating a landing page!
Common mistakes in architecture diagrams (2020)
get it tailored and report back :)
Thanks. I had not seen the wait paper yet. That is crazy.

s1: Simple test-time scaling
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19393
> "I think people who write C should stop unless it's to fix security bugs and should do something else"

That's pretty harsh. C has provided so much value to the world and security isn't the most important thing in the world - functionality is. Not saying security isn't important overall though.

And also, imagine another Rust competitor comes up in 5 years called "Moose" and M4L comes up, competing with R4L?
Why do you want the government to regulate what people are allowed to call themselves when there's no public benefit?

What harm is being caused by software developers calling themselves software engineers?

It's seems like authoritarian power-tripping to want to regulate this.
oh no. At this point, we just need something that doesn't use the stupid combo of two languages(one markup and one style sheet) for UI and one(totally single threaded) for UX that allows people to share and view simple text and media to one another. Maybe then we can rid ourselves from constraints like having to stick to JS or a Virtual Machine like V8 while settling on poor implementations like WebGL and Canvas. WebGPU is still not a thing and it probably won't be anytime soon.

A new web browser or another JS runtime won't be the solution to the current mayhem. What could actually be helpful is an alternative to the "web browser" that operates on an entirely different stack than the currently JIT overdosed JS engines. But since everybody is well accustomed to and excited about improvements within the current madness(like this comment), adaptation of any alternative web browser like software will be highly unlikely even if it were several folds better at transferring media and rendering graphics with a much simpler approach and high performance. We are officially fo*ked.
It's doing a search operation, which AI is fantastic at. The operator can then verify the output.
Google DeepMind Conquered Stratego and Why No One Knows How It Did It [video]
This seems more suits-as-fashion than suits-as-uniform.
Tbh I find it hard to read that sentence as meaning "50-60% of the world's Dutch cheese consumption".

The sentence isn't poorly written or nuanced, it's simply false.
Reality TV is perhaps a grey area, but I think there hasn't been an actor and villain in the White house since Reagan, so as usual, they get by on a technicality.
Really interesting read as an outsider. A lot of inside baseball, but my impression is that a ton of the indirect costs do fund the institution building that has happened at universities. This creates a cycle of more = more as indirect costs ratchet up and up. Surely there should be scale in indirect costs (e.g., the more money you get, the lower your indirect costs as a percentage?) In fact, I think we see the opposite in the data?

This tells me something is fishy.
My comment was addressing the idea that Odin is a "beta language" in comparison to C and my assertion was that the issues we have with using Odin are the same ones you'd have with C. So assuming that you have accepted C-style issues, then Odin really does not present many or common additional roadblocks despite being relatively young.

Also, I know this may shock a lot of people who don't regularly use sharp tools: The possibility (and even occurrence) of memory safety issues and memory corruption doesn't tank a project, or make it more costly than if you'd used a GC, or Rust. Memory bugs range from very easily avoided and solved to surprising and very, very hard to solve.
Unrelated, but somehow similar: I really hate it that it's not possible to force gcc to transform things like this into a conditional move:

x > c ? y : 0.;

It annoyed me many times and it still does.