skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Because they were trained on internet arguments, and nobody on the internet has ever admitted they don't know something

Or people’s questions were left unanswered (because nobody knew), and there was nothing for the LLM to learn there.

So I guess LLMs can’t learn the absence of answers?
There is little evidence that AI is replacing engineers, but there is a whole lot of evidence that shareholders and execs really love the idea and are trying every angle to achieve it.
There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not.

It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something other than LLM's. It just doesn't feel right around the corner. Now completing small chunks of mundane code, explaining code, doing very small mundane changes. Very good at.
Show HN: Grindstone – a cure for tech interview madness
Hi HN,

I'm Luke, co-founder of Grindstone.
Grindstone is a job application tracker for tech roles.

Over the years, we’ve used tools like Notion, Excel, and even CRM platforms like HubSpot to stay organized while applying. They were great at a small scale, but nowadays, it takes more and more applications (50-200) to land an offer.

In addition, we found that job listings often get taken down right before interviews, leaving us scrambling to remember the details of a role.

So we got to work building Grindstone – a tool designed to keep your tech interviews a bit more organized.

How it helps:

Saves job listing info automatically
Paste a job URL, and we capture the title, company, and full description before it vanishes.

Automatically gets you company details
See what companies do, how big they are, and more—so you can answer the dreaded question: "Why are you interested in working at X company?" Or simply: "What does this company do again?"

Tracks your progress
Visualize where you are in the interview process for each role.

Keeps your notes
Store everything in one place—meeting links, prep materials, code snippets, and more. Keep notes on salary discussions, company research, and your behavioral question responses.

We’re just two self-funded builders, frustrated with how annoying the interview process can be. Grindstone is our first attempt to make it more manageable.

We launched our open beta last month. Thanks for taking a look!
We’d welcome your thoughts, feedback, or incoherent ramblings about your most hated ATS.
oftwaresay engineeryay
the human ear just isn't good enough at processing sound to need lossless codecs

a modern audio codec at 320kbps bitrate is more than good enough.

Lossless is useful for recompressing stuff when new codecs come out or for different purposes without introducing artefacts, not really for listening (in before angry audiophiles attack me)
so our "knowledge" is based on perception. I know something happened because I saw it with my own 2 eyes. everything else is less "knowable"
Well, it still feels like a form of hype to me. They are being very loudly told by ever AI cloud service, of which there are many, that worker-replacing AI agents are just around the corner so they should buy in with the inferior agents that are being offered today.
Another issue is that the article assumes companies will let go of all programmers. They will make sure to keep some in case the fire spreads. Simple as that.
That was pretty funny.
Bonus points if it was posted by an AI bot.
At least according to Corsair, there are no changes to the cable, only the PSU/GPU-side connectors:

> Cable: 12V-2x6 = 12VHPWR No difference!

> So what does this mean if you’ve already got hardware for 12VHPWR? Fortunately, existing 12VHPWR cables and adapters will work with the new 12V-2x6 connector as the new changes are only related to the GPU and some PSUs (Our new RMx PSUs for example). The cables you've got already will work fine, so don't worry.

https://www.corsair.com/uk/en/explorer/diy-builder/power-sup...
Third party cables were never an issue on sanely designed ports with power balancing.
Are we really going to do this? You going to grind people down making them demonstrate the sky is blue to your satisfaction? We can all point to multiple EOs in the last weeks that are clearly, or at least arguably, not under the authority of the POTUS. That is what the fuss is all about, no? If you can't agree to that then there is no point in going on because you are being dishonest. In any case, once a court is involved (case clear or not) you follow court procedures to conclusion. You know, the whole reason our POTUS isn't in jail right now.
> how do I...?

Even this is still a problem, because it's unlikely they know even what question to ask. Or if a sensible question is asked it may be an XY problem, where what is really intended is not what is asked.

Having thought about this for the last few minutes, it does seem inevitable that the software would have to start coaching the musician in the ways of the engineering and of "music software" people, so that the inputs become more accurate and aligned with the outcomes the software is capable of providing.

I think everyone would crave becoming more productive in the environment over time and not have to suffer the initial baby steps forever.

It's very difficult to imagine a DAW environment which exposes deeper functionality that is not already like a lot of the existing packages.

Edit: and one final thought - it's a hard environment to build by the nature of the work being done being a creative process with no correct answers and which needs to support a multitude of different approaches to creativity. It's pretty opposed to software being generally a machine with a fixed number of functions
Dial Calipers... From my point of view the PC and the microprocessor resulted in a giant economy that is pursuing technology production won't necessarily improve user satisfaction.

Using that perspective I think digital circuits which can be created in any controllable media is what I'm pursuing. I'm trying to make large circuits that represent the physical environment and the logic of the technical tasks that need to be done. My thinking is that next wave technology improvement will come from large environmental circuits that represent the human use of the physical environment.

I see the pursuit of smaller and smaller circuits as only one method of technology development best left to sophisticated global production. I think there will be cottage industry based on locally or "last mile" implementation of more esoteric but easy to understand systems.

The general purpose computer has resulted in overly complicated and inefficient for most regular people's actual computing needs.
> The decision by the mayor, elected in June, arrived a few days after activists from the Salviamo Firenze ("Save Florence") association affixed red stickers to the city's key boxes to symbolically make their use more difficult.

This feels like rewarding vandalism.
Apple Maps still refers to it as Gulf of Mexico.
But why do you need programmers to utilize the AI? The whole point of AI is that it doesn't need an "operator".

I'm not talking about GH Copilot or some autocomplete IDE feature, I'm talking about fully autonomous agents 2-3 years in the future. Just look at the insane rate of progress in the past 2 years. The next two years will be even faster if the past few months are anything to go by.
Ironically, the score of confidence is most likely hallucinated.
They are machines designed to produce a facsimile of knowledge. Or at least an approximation. If they refused to answer, that's a failure by the terms of what they product aims to do
How do you know that those confidence scores map to anything objective and weren't just created as part of the text generation?
Time to wake up and think in terms of 10-20 years ahead. Everyone around NVIDIA dies out... anyone with GPU compute ideas just cannot succeed... 3Dfx full of saboteurs that hinder their progress.

Open source takes away the livelihood of programmers and gives it to moneymen for free. They used open source to train AI models. Programmers got back a few stars and a pat in the back. And some recognition, but mostly nothing. All this while big corps use their work without compensation. There is zero compensation options for open source programmers on github. Somehow it's left out.

Same bullshit comes up again and again in different forms. Like your ideas worth nothing blablabla. Suuure, but moneymen usually have zero ideas and they like to expropriate others' ideas, FOR FREE. While naive people give away their ideas and work for free, the other side gives back nooothiiiing.

It's already too late.

So programmers and other areas that will be aiified in the coming decades will be slowly going extinct. AI is a skill appropriation device that in the long term will make people useless, so they don't need an artist, a musician etc. They will just need a capable AI to create whatever they want, without the hassle of the human element. It's the ultimate control tool to make people SLAVES.

Hope I'm wrong.
Code is a liability and dependencies/vendors/libraries are liabilities I have even less control over. I hate when an internal release has to be "about" upgrading dependencies. I get it, I do. But I hate the idea of "we're going to focus on a thing that doesn't actually yield any tangible advancement of our goals."

Not that I'm unappreciative of what projects like Postgres, Django, etc. have given me. Like a good physician, I appreciate you and everything you do, but we'd both be happier seeing each other as rarely as possible.
Canadian here, currently absolutely in shock of what's happening down south (and your president is constantly threatening to bring us in on this circus against our will -- if someone told me this would be happening a few short months ago, I would have laughed).

But honest question, since his approval rating is positive (!!!), I thought your whole founding ethos was a rebellion against complete powers of a king, yet a lot of your "freedom" people are cheering it on. How can this be explained? Is the cognitive dissonance just so massive??? Here in Canada, we HAVE a king, yet he doesn't rule us...
I would wager that TV viewers are also more likely to be premium subscribers too. Just a hunch though.
In the longer term various alternatives are conceivable if people put their minds to it. Politically, economically, technically this is very much like the energy transition: There is immense current dependency that cant be just switched off (and vested interests will resist for as long as possible, using every possible means), but there is sequence of low hanging fruit which in time can be expanded. The trick imho is to always apply the highest amount of pressure that wont burst the kettle.
I've bought cars that cost me less than a nVidia card (and they were running).
Was this heard on a Jobsite?
A lot of people build personal deep learning machines. The economics and convenience can definitely work out... I am confused however by "dummy GPU" - I searched for "dummy" for an explanation but didn't find one. Modern motherboards all include an integrated video card, so I'm not sure what this would be for?

My personal DL machine has a 24 core CPU, 128GB RAM and 2 x 3060 GPUs and 2 x 2TB NVMe drives in a RAID 1 array. I <3 it.
> this is one of those "your partner needs you to listen, not to solve the problem" case - here, she isn't looking for conflict resolution, but rather to vent frustration.

I hate to sound callous, but I don't like to normalize that the problem is "you just want to fix things" - it's a huge mental burden on the listener and not respectful to people who get a lot of stress hearing these things. "Fixing something" is how they deal with stress.

Everybody has to vent sometimes/infrequently and we should listen, but I've also been around a lot of people who want to "vent", but then march repeatedly right back into the same patterns and situations that cause the problems, and don't want to hear that they can often avoid this. I don't want people to feel better temporarily and end up prolonging their bad situation.
You shouldn't be having slow response issues with LLM/TTS/STT for HA on a mbp m3 max 128gb. I'd either limit the entities exposed or choose a smaller model.
How do you know it's not barnum-forer effect ?
The reality is that most artists need to engage with economic situations to survive and continue making art. I would say I think it's important to recognize "art" is wide and means lots of things to lots of people. For example I would put gfx in a "creative science" more than a "creative art" - for example. Never the less, the reality is that most artists need to engage with economic realities to survive and continue making art, if you blame the tool, you're not a very good artist. you raise a good point about supply and demand, it's something I've seen reshape creative fields multiple times over my career, I've consistently found that the artists who thrive are the ones who adapt their tools while maintaining their creative vision, rather than letting the tools define their art.
More important than cultural differences is timezone differences. Communication and collaboration is harder when you only have a couple hours of overlap between your working day and their working day. Much harder if you have no overlap at all. This isn't even a feature of outsourcing - it's a challenge for any globally distributed team.
14nm or so is kind of a sweet spot for general purpose chip design right now, because later nodes turn out to have higher overall per-transistor cost despite the improvement in density and area. Of course this may well change over time as even finer production nodes get developed and the existing nodes then move closer to the trailing edge.
Rio Grande / Rio Bravo
Can you elaborate? Outside of AI workloads, almost all computations on GPUs are single precision. Double precision is pretty rare, and smaller precision is mostly useless outside AI (and obviously irrelevant for trig precision)
we should have run LPMud (or MudOS). Those were clearly the superior technology.

which is quite ironic given that CircleMUD is based on DikuMUD which was created to be more stable than LPMUD.

Erlang is one of the languages i am still very curious about. hopefully some day i'll get an opportunity to work with it
"Nobody will pay $3 for a connector"

I would pay $10.
Here was my test at ChatGPT 3.5.[0] I made up a novel game, and it figured it out. The test is simple, but it made me doubt absolute arguments that LLMs are not able to reason, in some way.

There is a question at the end of that comment, would love to hear other options.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35442147
There's plenty of tacit knowledge in engineering.

Being good at debugging a system is based more on experience and gut feelings than following some kind of formal logic. LLMs are quite useful debugging assistants. Using an LLM to assist with such tasks takes tacit knowledge itself.

The internal statistical models generated during training are capable of applying higher-ordered pattern matching that while informal are still quite useful. Learning how to use these tools is a skill.
Yeah but as one of the replies points out the resulting tokens/second would be unusable in production environments
It doesn’t even present a problem.
RTX 5090 cable overheats to 150 degrees Celsius
I mean, it's what it says on the tin: linguists go into remote areas and take recordings of dying languages to preserve them. They'll sometimes prompt for specific words and sentences, other times just record people speaking naturally. Then they'll also write down the rules of the grammar and the vocabulary (another example of using a medium they may not themselves have).
CEO of a Diabetes Research Group on Costs Cuts: "impacts will be vast"
like this:

Effective Method for Clarity
Interpretation: Your statement suggests that providing a list of potential answers together with confidence scores helps clarify which response is most likely correct.
Confidence: 95%

Acknowledgment of Near-Perfect Results
Interpretation: You imply that this approach nearly captures all nuances of the answer, even if it isn’t flawless.
Confidence: 90%

Recommendation of a Best-Practice Technique
Interpretation: The comment may be read as endorsing the strategy of listing multiple candidate answers with confidence metrics as a useful method for decision making.
Confidence: 85%

Room for Improvement in Answer Selection
Interpretation: It could also be seen as a subtle hint that while the method is close to ideal, there is still some potential for fine-tuning the process.
Confidence: 80%
No, not for a connector for 500W, on a $2000 GPU from one of the worlds biggest companies. They can do better.
That's not a full explanation either. We don't know the nature of the conflict. This could be e.g. about jealousy or overall mindset of the poster, but then again, could be (or also be) the friends - one's friends aren't independent random variables. In particular, in a tight clique of friends, people tend to have rather well-correlated mindsets.

(It's an interesting question whether that's by selection or just an effect the group projects onto each member; the distinction being, whether the character similarities would persist after the group dissolves and everyone goes on with their lives. There's likely plenty of studies done about this; if anyone knows of some reliable work there, I'd be interested to read it.)
Show HN: I've built personal site in plain HTML/CSS, withouth React/Next.js BS
"Telecom Giant BT Will Cut 55,000 Jobs By 2030—And Replace Thousands Of Roles With AI"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/05/18/telecom...
"What's the least it gonna cost me to maybe die, horribly?"
Us nervous people fly, too.
Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
> Digging into use cases you’d fine that for a particular question you needed to not just get all the rows from a column, you needed to do some obscure JOIN ON operation. This fact was only known by 2 data scientists in charge of writing the report. This flavor or problem - data being messy, with the messiness only documented in a few people’s brains, repeated over and over.

This reminds me of one of the key plot points in "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell. Small spoiler ahead so if you haven't read it and want to be surprised, stop reading.

...

...

Basically, one of the characters works as an AI implementer, replacing humans in their jobs by learning deeply about how they do their work and coding up an AI replacement. She run across a SETI researcher and works on replacing him, but he has a human intuition when matching signals that she would never have discovered because it was so random.

Great book if you haven't read it.
Counterbalance that with the (almost) equally annoying coworker who says "I don't know" as the immediate answer to any question! If there is any possibility of ambiguity or uncertainty, he will refuse to speculate or cite best practices.

I think your coworker would probably be more annoying, but only because I can ask an additional question of my coworker to dig into the response. I wish he would say something like, "I don't know, but [best practice/past experience]" without me having to then ask for the last part.
This sounds like a labour law horror story. I'm so happy now that I stayed on ordinary 40h/week work contract (no overtime) in the beginning of my career. Otherwise I'd end up with burnout and/or health issues pretty soon.
This looks neat but I don’t think it meets the standard for “reasoning only.” (Still not sure how you would prove that one) furthermore this looks to be fairly generalizable in pattern+form to other grid problems so i don’t think it also meets the bar for “not being in the training data.” We known these models can generalize somewhat based upon their training but not consistently and certainly not consistently well. Again I’m not making the claim that responding to a novel prompt is a sign of reasoning as other have pointed out a calculator can do that too.

Your quote:
“This is a unique problem I came up with. It’s a variation on counting islands.”
You then say:
“ as I came up with it so no variation of it really exists anywhere else.”

So not sure what to take away from your text but I do think this is a variation of a well-known problem type so I would be pretty amazed if there was something very close to this in the training data. Given it’s an interview question and those are written about ad-nauseum I’m not surprised then that it was able to generalize to the provided case.
The COT researchers did see the ability to generalize in some cases just not necessarily actually use the COT tokens to reason and/or failed on generalizing on variations which they thought it should have given its ability to generalize in others and the postulation that it was using reasoning and not just a larger corpus to pattern match with.
Those GPUs aren’t particularly cheap, even a $100 connector and cable wouldn’t be a huge deal breaker for a $2000-3000 device if it means it’s reliable and won’t start a fire (that’ll cost way more than $3100)
I don't think it's overly philosophical to point out that these are large language models, not truth engines or AGI or knowledge directories. They're not using logic to reason their way to an answer. They're just predicting the next word that would sound like part of a human answer.
Where are you getting the 60-80 figure from? In more recent past we have indeed worked more (at least in developed countries), e.g. the Industrial Revolution, but just a little earlier, like the Middle Ages, we were working far less. People like to joke about peasant life, but they were mostly not working much during winter and fall, or after noon in the warmer months
Pay attention to IO bandwidth if you’re building a machine with multiple GPUs like this!

In this setup the model is sharded between cards so data must be shuffled through a PCIe 3.0 x16 link which is limited to ~16 GB/s max. For reference that’s an order of magnitude lower than the ~350 GB/s memory bandwidth of the Tesla P40 cards being used.

Author didn’t mention NVLink so I’m presuming it wasn’t used, but I believe these cards would support it.

Building on a budget is really hard. In my experience 5-15 tok/s is a bit too slow for use cases like coding, but I admit once you’ve had a taste of 150 tok/s it’s hard to go back (I’ve been spoiled by RTX 4090 with vLLM).
completing the absurdity of this:

an AI assistant that tells you what is in the picture as voice, so you can rest your eyes....

...hold on, that may actually be pretty useful for blind people
the thing is aren't hallucinations and creativity the two sides of the same coin?
Hide a message in an emoji
I would only add "stable" to what "boring" tech is. Notably, though, not "stable" as in "doesn't crash." But more as in "doesn't change."

I think you typically see this with older, established, things. But there is nothing guaranteeing it. And, indeed, it is often the result of specific action on the stewards of a technology.

This can often be couched in terms of backwards compatibility. Which is a clear action one can pursue to get stability. However, it can also be seen in greatly limiting scope. As an example, we love talking about scale, but that doesn't mean you have to design and build for scale you will never see.