HackerX

By year

2024

Ideas that Hacker News readers were still recommending in 2024.

50 posts cited146 citations

Counts show how many picks Hacker News readers cited in each year, not when the post was written.

@mxcl

Career

@mxcl

View on X
Recommended by 42 HN users
From the Hacker News threadleetcode seems to agree with your definition [0]. the meme isn't to say that inverting a binary tree is particularly difficult - anyone familiar with coding challenges and trees could trivially produce a solution. the meme is more pointing out how ludicrous it is that senior/staff/principal interviews can hinge on these types of problems, despite the engineer proving their proficiency by doing something like running DOOM in typescript types or writing homebrew [1]. [0] leetcode.com/problems/invert-binary-tre…... [1] x.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768@LiquixTypeScript types can run DOOM [video]2025
117

@yishan

Internet

@yishan

View on X
Recommended by 7 HN users
From the Hacker News threadVery nice thread by the former CEO of Reddit about online behavior, moderation, etc: x.com/yishan/status/1586955288061452289 Per the thread, it’s possible this problem could’ve been solved by burying the site in affiliate links…@msteffenGot kicked out of uni and had the cops called for a social media website I made2026
18

@levelsio

Startups

@levelsio

View on X
Recommended by 6 HN users
From the Hacker News threadships like a machine yes his products being genai wrappers, some are partly yes. in his interview with lex fridman he explains how he built his recent photo ai one, yes most of it is wrapper on some ai service, but his team goes the extra mile of training models on their own so it looks more photorealistic than the generally available ones he built products before ai like nomadlist and remoteok. his hit and miss rates are as real as it gets x.com/levelsio/status/14573152744665948…@inquisitor26234Does “building in public” work?2024
7

@ID_AA_Carmack

Career

@ID_AA_Carmack

View on X
Recommended by 6 HN users
From the Hacker News threadI remember John Carmack talking about this last year. Seems like it's still pretty good advice more than a year later: "From a DM, just in case anyone else needs to hear this." x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/163708721959…@indigoabstractAsk HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?2024
7

@CRTpixels

Hardware

@CRTpixels

View on X
Recommended by 5 HN users
From the Hacker News threadI get your point, but also on the other hand, art is subjective, and people subjectively appreciate older / imperfect versions of things. Consider film grain - it's an artifact, an unintentional or unwanted side-effect of how films used to be made. But because it was a part of a production, people wanted it back - it gets added artificially to modern films, added as filters to video games, and video encoding has special features to support it without affecting compression negatively too much. Or take video games, particularly 2d / pixelart ones - they were built for CRT displays and relatively low resolutions. They can remake them now with multiples of the original resolution and fidelity, but for many people it loses some of it. Some art doesn't translate at all - take this digitized artwork from Castlevania, which was digitized specifically for display on CRT displays but which loses all charm (e.g. the eyes reduced to a single pixel) when rendered somewhere else: x.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616… But this probably applies to film as well; if a film was made for a 35mm projector from the 70's, it won't look good or anywhere near that "experience" on a modern day 4K OLED display without editing. At the end of the day I think the viewer should be given options and choices. And for a good while it looked like they would - with DVD and blu-ray offering options like different audio tracks, camera angles, and different versions of the same film in one package. But that never materialized because I suppose it's only a wish from purists. And at that point they're competing with piracy and internet hobbyists like the article.@Cthulhu_Pirating the Pirates2026
9

@jaschasd

AI

@jaschasd

View on X
Recommended by 4 HN users
From the Hacker News threadTwitter: twitter.com/jaschasd/status/17569302429… ArXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2402.06184 Abstract: "Some fractals -- for instance those associated with the Mandelbrot and quadratic Julia sets -- are computed by iterating a function, and identifying the boundary between hyperparameters for which the resulting series diverges or remains bounded. Neural network training similarly involves iterating an update function (e.g. repeated steps of gradient descent), can result in convergent or divergent behavior, and can be extremely sensitive to small changes in hyperparameters. Motivated by these similarities, we experimentally examine the boundary between neural network hyperparameters that lead to stable and divergent training. We find that this boundary is fractal over more than ten decades of scale in all tested configurations." Contains several cool animations zooming in to show the fractal boundary between convergent and divergent training, just like the classic Mandelbrot and Julia set animations.@telotortiumNeural network training makes beautiful fractals2024
5

@jmmv

Hardware

@jmmv

View on X
Recommended by 3 HN users
From the Hacker News threadThere's a problem when people who aren't very sensitive to latency and try and track it, and that is that their perception of what "instant" actually means is wrong. For them, instant is like, one second. For someone who cares about latency, instant is less than 10 milliseconds, or whatever threshold makes the difference between input and result imperceptible. People have the same problem judging video game framerates because they don't compare them back to back very often (there are perceptual differences between framerates of 30, 60, 120, 300, and 500, at the minimum, even on displays incapable of refreshing at these higher speeds), but you'll often hear people say that 60 fps is "silky smooth," which is not true whatsoever lol. If you haven't compared high and low latency directly next to each other then there are good odds that you don't know what it looks like. There was a twitter video from awhile ago that did a good job showing it off that's one of the replies to the OP. It's here: x.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960 Sorry if I'm too presumptuous, however; you might be completely correct and instant is instant in your case.@KapKap66The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority2025
9

@tuomassalo

Design

@tuomassalo

View on X
Recommended by 3 HN users
From the Hacker News thread> There is a huge blindspot, I've noticed, where people mistake familiarity for ease of use (and other qualities too). The "legacy" Windows design isn't just so beloved because of familiarity, but because it actually provides visual cues to users [1], and the backstory on how it was designed is also interesting [2]. I know that there was an even more detailed article floating around here on HN but I can't find it offhand. [1] twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292… [2] socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/design…...@mschuster91Linux hits nearly 4% desktop user share on Statcounter2024
6

@patrickwardle

Security

@patrickwardle

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Recommended by 3 HN users
From the Hacker News threadOne thing I learned from using Little Snitch is that a lot of Apple apps are seemingly immune from these types of firewalls, due to Apple shenanigans around k-ext signing etc [0]. Ref also [1]: > In Big Sur Apple decided to exempt many of its apps from being routed thru the frameworks they now require 3rd-party firewalls to use (LuLu, Little Snitch, etc.) > Q: Could this be (ab)used by malware to also bypass such firewalls? > A: Apparently yes, and trivially so [0] x.com/patrickwardle/status/131843792949… [1] x.com/patrickwardle/status/132772649620…@plausibilityUpdating from macOS Ventura to Sonoma Silently Enables iCloud Keychain2024
5

@AuthorJMac

AI

@AuthorJMac

View on X
Recommended by 3 HN users
From the Hacker News threadI want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes. From: x.com/AuthorJMac/status/177367919763170… As a species, we need to evaluate our attitudes to work. The quote above resonates at some level, but maybe there are some people who enjoy doing dishes and laundry, who knows. Most people are just surviving. It is a constant battle between slaving away in jobs (and have healthcare tied to our jobs) we don't like and rest of our lives, including relationships, hobbies, even health. Most people do not have the time or energy to think about anything else other than just getting through the day.@akudhaIn Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants2026
4

@elonmusk

Business

@elonmusk

View on X
Recommended by 2 HN users
From the Hacker News threadThe reorg of GM by the Obama administration does not tick all the boxes [1], but is the most recent example that would come to mind of government support via BK management and recapitalization. The administration did this to save jobs and the manufacturing supply chain [2]. Capital is made up, management is fungible, manufacturing supply chains and systems are the hard part (which is why, after incredibly aggressive financialization, Boeing is having to acquire Spirit AeroSystems, which had previously been spun out for cost savings...which went to management comp and shareholders). If you are optimizing for a specific outcome, it is important to understand the malleability and limits of the components that make the whole. Even Elon recognized this during Model 3 production hell [3]. I suppose we must always learn the hard way for the lesson to be of value. If management is the problem (and it is very clear Boeing management is the problem), it must be replaced so that the people who do the actual building can build. This is no different than the tech culture of "employ great people and get out of their way." [1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Ch…... [2] obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/economy/jo…... [3] x.com/elonmusk/status/984882630947753984 ("Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.")@toomuchtodoBoeing, Union reach wage deal to end strike2024
6

@karpathy

AI

@karpathy

View on X
Recommended by 2 HN users
From the Hacker News threadAt this point, anyone claiming that LLMs are "just" language models aren't arguing in good faith. LLMs are a general purpose computing paradigm. LLMs are circuit builders, the converged parameters define pathways through the architecture that pick out specific programs. Or as Karpathy puts it, LLMs are a differentiable computer[1]. Training LLMs discovers programs that well reproduce the input sequence. Tokens can represent anything, not just words. Roughly the same architecture can generate passable images, music, or even video. [1] x.com/karpathy/status/15828073679886540…@hackinthebochsExperts Have World Models. LLMs Have Word Models2026
8

@npew

AI

@npew

View on X
Recommended by 2 HN users
From the Hacker News threadChatGPT is specifically bad at these kinds of tasks because of tokenization. If you plug your query into platform.openai.com/tokenizer, you can see that"egregious" is a single token, so the LLM doesn't actually see any "e" characters -- to answer your question it would have had to learn a fact about how the word was spelled from it's training data, and I imagine texts explicitly talking about how words are spelled are not very common. Good explanation here if this still doesn't make sense: twitter.com/npew/status/152590084988886…, or check out Andrej Karpathy's latest video if you have 2 hours for a deep dive: youtube.com/watch?v=zduSFxRajkE IMO questions about spelling or number sense are pretty tired as gotchas, because they are all basically just artifacts of this implementation detail. There are other language models available that don't have this issue. BTW this is also the reason DALL-E etc suck at generating text in images.@moozillaAsk HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?2024
3

@cmuratori

Programming

@cmuratori

View on X
Recommended by 2 HN users
From the Hacker News threadBecause Teams (and Slack) are glorified IRC for the text portions and yet we have experiences like Teams[1]. You're seeing pent-up frustration about poor performance that we all deal with every single day, on most applications and almost all websites other than those that keep things simple (like HN). [1] twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1640827575…@EspressosaurusModern software performance is firmly in its “beyond parody” stage2023
4

@FFmpeg

Programming

@FFmpeg

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Recommended by 2 HN users
From the Hacker News threadFFmpeg developers aren't stupid and aren't doing things because of historical accident. If you don't mind writing platform specific code, it simply works better this way. Here's clang messing up x86 intrinsics code. x.com/ffmpeg/status/1852913590258618852 The other reason to do it is that, since x86 intrinsics are named in Hungarian notation, they're so hard to read that the asm is actually more maintainable.@astrangeA 94x speed improvement demonstrated using handwritten assembly2024
2

@karpathy

Learning

@karpathy

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Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadSomething from Andrej Karpathy on learning that stuck with me [0]: > Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn. [0] x.com/karpathy/status/17563800665804555…@setgreeLearning to Learn2024
3

@karpathy

AI

@karpathy

View on X
Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadInterestingly this point was indicated by Karpathy last summer that RLHF is barely RL. He said it would be very difficult to apply pure reinforcement learning on open-domains. This is why RLHF are a shortcut to fill this gap but still because the reward model is trained on human vibes checks the LLM could easily game the RM by giving out misleading responses or gaming the system. Importantly the barrier is that open domains are too complex and too undefined to have a clear reward function. But if someone cracks that — meaning they create a way for AI to self-optimize in these messy, subjective spaces — it'll completely revolutionize LLMs through pure RL. Here's the link of the tweet: x.com/karpathy/status/18212772649963522…@aimanbenbahaDeepSeek-R12025
5

@AmandaAskell

AI

@AmandaAskell

View on X
Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadYou should look at the consumer app system prompt: twitter.com/amandaaskell/status/1765207… I've had way more success taking it and forming it to my tasks than stuffing in a bunch of tokens about how to do things. In one case I was able to go from ~6k in input tokens to ~3k because I no longer had to provide a mountain of examples and instructions for corner cases@BoorishBearsColab notebook to create Magic cards from image with Claude2024
5

@ID_AA_Carmack

AI

@ID_AA_Carmack

View on X
Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadYeah, although it is weird that it doesn’t insert white people into results like this by accident? x.com/imao_/status/1760159905682509927… I’ve also seen numerous examples where it outright refuses to draw white people but will draw black people: x.com/iamyesyouareno/status/17603509035… That doesn’t explainable by system prompt@kaesar14AI behavior guardrails should be public2024
6

@sama

AI

@sama

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Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadI am afraid that this will just lead down the path to what twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/17186541… was mocking. We're dictating solutions to today's threats, leaving tomorrow to its own devices. But what will tomorrow bring? As Sam Altman warns in twitter.com/sama/status/171697281596096…, superhuman persuasion is likely to be next. What does that mean? We've already had the problem of social media echo chambers leading to extremism, and online influencers creating cult-like followings. jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-hea…... is a sober warning about the dangers to mental health from this. These are connected humans accidentally persuading each other. Now imagine AI being able to drive that intentionally to a particular political end. Then remember that China controls TikTok. Will Biden's order keep China from developing that capability? Will we develop tools to identify how that might be being actively used against us? I doubt both. Instead, we'll almost certainly get security theater leading to a regulatory moat. Which is almost certain to help profit margins at established AI companies. But is unlikely to address the likely future problems that haven't materialized yet.@RationalDinoExecutive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence2023
4

@GregKamradt

AI

@GregKamradt

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Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadImportant to note though, that even if they say it has 200k context, there's a good chance it won't be able to use all of it. For example, here is an experiment on long context recall for Claude and GPT4: twitter.com/GregKamradt/status/17270181… twitter.com/GregKamradt/status/17223867… Even though claude claims 200k tokens context, perfect memory stops at about 19k tokens. I'd personally expect the Yi-34b models to perform even worse at the task, though I have not tested it.@Jackson__Yi-34B-Chat2023
2

@karpathy

AI

@karpathy

View on X
Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadThe idea that LLMs are "running out of training data" is pretty widespread, but does it actually hold up? Has anyone seen representatives of the cutting-edge AI labs - OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Mistral etc - express concern about this? The impression I've been getting is that quality turns out to be much more important than quality. This tweet from Andrej Karpathy for example: twitter.com/karpathy/status/17973131734… > Turns out that LLMs learn a lot better and faster from educational content as well. This is partly because the average Common Crawl article (internet pages) is not of very high value and distracts the training, packing in too much irrelevant information. The average webpage on the internet is so random and terrible it's not even clear how prior LLMs learn anything at all. You'd think it's random articles but it's not, it's weird data dumps, ad spam and SEO, terabytes of stock ticker updates, etc. And then there are diamonds mixed in there, the challenge is pick them out.@simonwAI Appears to Rapidly Be Approaching Brick Wall Where It Can't Get Smarter2024
7

@graycrawford

Design

@graycrawford

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Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadFor me the most surprising observation from this thread is this tweet [1] showing that the knight's moves are exactly the squares that the queen can't get to within a 2 square manhattan distance. I.e. the knight is an anti-queen. [1]: twitter.com/skidbladnirr_/status/175028…@infogulchI realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions2024
4

@ylecun

AI

@ylecun

View on X
Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News thread> But the other side doesn't see it that way, specifically not the "something more" part. It's "just math" all the way down, in our brains as well. The "emergent phenomena" are not undefined in this sense - they're (obviously in LLMs) also math, it's just that we don't understand it yet due to the sheer complexity of the resulting system. But that's not at all unusual - humans build useful things that we don't fully understand all the time (just look at physics of various processes). You might not, but you don't have to look far in these very comments to be met with woo and mysticism on the emergent phenomena side, either. > The obvious explanation is that, between the limited amount of information that can be extracted from 2D photos that the NN is trained on, and the limit on the complexity of world modeling that NN of a particular size can fit, its model of the world is just not particularly accurate. I think the more obvious solution is that it's not modelling the world, because... why would it be? It seems obvious to me that this is a significantly more complex way to handle their given task than every other explanation that does not require them create a model of the world. > Pragmatically, at some point, you have to pick the most likely (usually this means the simplest) explanation to move forward. I agree completely with this, which is why the idea that this is modelling the world is absolutely bizarre to me, particularly when our understanding of their training is that it's all weighting for pixel nearest neighbors via ranking how well it does at denoising 2D images. It's not like de-rendering is something new, either. ShaderMap has existed since the mid 2000s and could get similar results from 2D images without any AI/ML, and we have other models that can generate it without anyone suggesting they model the world, e.g. arxiv.org/abs/2201.02279 People like LeCun don't think that even models where the stated goal is world simulation are able to do it, e.g. sora, either - twitter.com/ylecun/status/1758740106955… - so it seems even more unlikely when that isn't the goal that this has happened due to some emergent phenomenon.@cthalupaGenerative Models: What do they know? Do they know things? Let's find out2024
2

@paulg

AI

@paulg

View on X
Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadI said that there twitter.com/arjie/status/16356939270713… some hour and a half after his post which is about when I saw it. I didn't realize others also did. They felt isomorphic to me. If the AI generated content is regurgitation of previous content, novel human-generated content will stand out and human-generated content will become valuable. i.e. the balancing mechanism is that novelty will beat dumb replication in the same way that an active manager who has true alpha can beat a passive fund. Now, personally, I think that multimodal LLM-groups plus feedback plus many more sensors is not far from where we are, so I mentioned that if AIs do become creative it's not a problem - they will be us or better! I, personally, believe that's where we'll go. Anyway, I'm not too inclined to discuss in this forum (though we can chat if you're in SF) since it's easy to misunderstand and jump into argument spirals, but I just wanted to make it clear that it's not a "gotcha" or a dunk or anything like that. Nothing is being disparaged. It's just a conversation like a normal conversation where you bring up what you think and mention ideas you have that others might find interesting. If many others have brought it up, about the best I can say is that in this respect it appears I am not particularly inventive - perhaps the best evidence that LLMs are already human-like ;)@arjieWe can't all use AI. Someone has to generate the training data2023
2

@DrJimFan

AI

@DrJimFan

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Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadMany might miss the key paragraph at the end: "Sora serves as a foundation for models that can understand and simulate the real world, a capability we believe will be an important milestone for achieving AGI." This also helps explain why the model is so good since it is trained to simulate the real world, as opposed to imitate the pixels. More importantly, its capabilities suggest AGI and general robotics could be closer than many think (even though some key weaknesses remain and further improvements are necessary before the goal is reached.) EDIT: I just saw this relevant comment by an expert at Nvidia: “If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths. I won't be surprised if Sora is trained on lots of synthetic data using Unreal Engine 5. It has to be! Let's breakdown the following video. Prompt: "Photorealistic closeup video of two pirate ships battling each other as they sail inside a cup of coffee." ….” twitter.com/DrJimFan/status/17582102457…@nopinsightSora: Creating video from text2024
2

@ylecun

AI

@ylecun

View on X
Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News thread> The tricky part is coming up with a reasonable set of "add noise" transformations. Yes, as well as dealing with a variable-length window. When generating images with diffusion, one specifies the image ahead-of-time. When generating text with diffusion, it's a bit more open-ended. How long do we want this paragraph to go? Well, that depends on what goes into it -- so how do we adjust for that? Do we use a hierarchical tree-structure approach? Chunk it and do a chain of overlapping segments that are all of fixed-length (could possibly be combined with a transformer model)? Hard to say what would finally work in the end, but I think this is the sort of thing that YLC is talking about when he encourages students to look beyond LLMs. [1] * [1] x.com/ylecun/status/1793326904692428907@HanClintoTesting Generative AI for Circuit Board Design2024
2

@paulg

Philosophy

@paulg

View on X
Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadExTwitter: 1. Reduced the effectiveness of the blocking other users 2. Changed Terms of Service to let them use or sell your content for machine learning/AI purposes 3. Has seen some in depth coverage about how widespreadly & effective foreign & right wing disinformation networks have been operating. Site looks like it's brand of democracy is anything goes & that includes psyop campaigns against Americans. 4. Has changed the Terms of Service to further disallow academics, researchers, and civic interests from watching the site & doing research. Claiming damages of 1.5 cents per post if you access over 1 mil posts a day. Initiated lawsuits against some groups of disinformation researchers. (Musk's reaction to disinformation is to suppress anyone finding out or safeguarding us? Speech so free we won't be allowed to find out whose even saying it!) 5. Stiffing vendors on the IT bill, to the tune of $60m. 6. Changed the Terms of Service to court shop, using an North Texas court strongly favorable to right wing agenda & Musk's companies. rollingstone.com/culture/culture-featur…... 7. Elon's PAC is setting up fake Harris campaign sites. Sites targeting Arabs and Israelis saying diametrically opposed things about Harris. He's also running a raffle if you sign his political pledge in Pennsylvania? And spreading disproven voting machine disinformation at Trump rallies. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/elon-musks…... 8. General existing annoyance that terrible incredibly low quality paid-for accounts drown out interesting conversation. And a new paid creator model focused on paying for engagement that will probably only intensify the shititness & have people responding to crap bluecheck nonsense just to get paid. Incredibly toxic week or two with rapid-fire massive red flag after red flag, that should really really make people reconsider staying. Even if you "just want to talk tech," the site directionally has been going badly already & that seems slated to intensify. And as per per @paulg: character matters (twitter.com/paulg/status/18472255452992… news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894566). The problems here are reprehensible. And specifically: living on/contributing to a social network where researchers aren't even allowed to study disinformation is completely unacceptable & recklessly endangers western democratic society, and you should leave at once. Bluesky laughs about there being an Elon Musk Event driving adoption. But it's been a dazzling multifaceted barrage of truly vile behavior these recent days, and has flipped from being shitty and dumb antics, to actively endangering & giving quarter to enemies of open society.@jauntywundrkindBluesky grew by 10% in just two days this week, passing 12M accounts in total2024
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