MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MattGrommes | 2025-04-04 20:21:48+00:00
> No one can legally stop you from writing your own story about a boy wizard who goes to school

This is doing exactly that, except for an image. They didn't ask for a picture of Harry Potter, they asked for an image of a boy wizard and were prevented. The actual IP holder probably didn't implement these specific restrictions but it falls into the category I'm talking about, the idea that they own everything. It shouldn't be up to the image generator to say I can't get a picture of Harry Potter, it should be up to me whether or not I try to sell that image and risk getting busted for it. That's where copyright comes into play, as far I understand.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-04 20:21:55+00:00
I had a vaguely similar notion of a global proof database. Picture something like a blockchain (actually a "blockgraph") of Lean theorems built up from other theorems and axioms also on the same distributed global data structure.

A use-case could be optimising compilers. These need to search for alternative (faster) series of statements that are provably equivalent to the original given some axioms about the behaviour of the underlying machine code and basic boolean algebra and integer mathematics.

This could be monetised: Theorems along the shortest path from a desired proof to the axioms are rewarded. New theorems can be added by anyone at any time, but would generate zero income unless they improve the state-of-the-art. Shortest-path searches through the data structure would remain efficient because of this incentive.

Client tools such as compilers could come with monthly subscriptions and/or some other mechanism for payments, possibly reusing some existing crypto coin. These tools advertise desired proofs -- just like how blockchain clients advertise transactions they like to complete along with a fee -- and then the community can find new theorems to reach those proofs, hoping not just for the one-time payment, but the ongoing reward if the theorems are general and reusable for other purposes.

Imagine you're a FAANG and there's some core algorithm that uses 1% of your global compute. You could advertise a desire to improve the algorithm or the assembly code to be twice as efficient for $1M. Almost certainly, this is worth it. If no proof turns up, there's no payment. If a proof does turn up, a smart contract debits the FAANG's crypto account and they receive the chain of theorems proving that there's a more efficient algorithm, which will save them millions of USD in infrastructure costs. Maths geeks, AI bots, and whomever else contributed to the proof get their share of the $1M prize.

It's like... Uber for Fields medals, used for industrial computing.

Fully automated gig work for computer scientists and mathematicians.
by huevosabio | 2025-04-04 20:22:07+00:00
Mega-tangent: As a host, I feel compelled to rant about Airbnb whenever they come up in a discussion.

The last 2 years they have _really_ moved to squeeze the hosts. The customer service has been demolished and they seem to have taken a stance of "the guest is always right". I've spent countless hours going through their customer service as a super host, so I know I have a decent amount of anecdata.

My suspicion is that they found themselves with more supply than demand, so they are "improving the guest experience" at the expense of the hosts. Since they are a quasi-monopoly (depends on the market) it makes sense for them to prune supply in exchange for better guest experience, a full market approach makes less sense since they make money in proportion to the total amount of money transacted (which as a monopoly it can optimize for in the way a free market can't).

But I think this will blowback sooner or later. The biggest value for an Airbnb guest is the review system that allows you to have some degree of certainty of what you are getting. The biggest value for a host is the massive global audience. But guests and hosts, pay a steep fee (17%!) for this. For well-reviewed, long-living stays (like mine :)), paying 17% is way too much to access this audience: the listing already has an online record that provides that quality assurance for the guest, and the host could spend that money on advertising.

So that's what many of us are doing, moving to PMS + paid advertising / SEO to diversify on distribution channels. I think there's an opportunity for capturing that semi-pro host market and bundling them in a similar offering that 1) doesn't squeeze them, 2) offers a proper PMS software, and 3) charges a flat fee instead of a variable rate.
by curun1r | 2025-04-04 20:22:52+00:00
All three of those tools immediately felt, to me, like the wrong approach the moment I first experienced Docker. The notion that production infrastructure should be mutable and we use automation to make changes to it just introduces so much more state than is necessary. Immutable infrastructure eliminates so many sources issues.

And I think that's where the comment you're responding to is coming from. Once you've experienced Docker/K8s and, to a lesser extent, IaC tools like Terraform, it's hard to see yourself ever going back to tools like Chef in the same way that tools like Chef made it hard to see going back to a world where we configured servers manually.
by andy99 | 2025-04-04 20:22:58+00:00
Is this a "model" as in a set of transformer weights that inherently does security work or is it a system that has data lookup and or other tools along with an LLM to do the question interpretation, synthesis, and output presentation?

From the description re data integrations it sounds like the latter, unless the data mentioned is in fact used for training.

The distinction is important because a security-tuned model will have different limitations and uses than an actual pre-build security LLM app. Being an app also makes benchmarking against other "models" less straightforward.
by Animats | 2025-04-04 20:23:27+00:00
I read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and wasn't impressed by either. The author never got the "show, not tell" memo. Long, long speeches.

(In the movie version of The Fountainhead, Howard Roarke's architecture is terrible. His buildings resemble 1960s US housing projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. There's good minimalism, but that's not it.)
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-04-04 20:24:37+00:00
It's pretty easy to say "Oh yes, genre _____ died, therefore it was doomed to die" rather than evaluating whether it died because it failed to meaningfully evolve.

I remember in the early aughts people deemed the beat-em-up genre "dead" because there were a high-profile string of early attempts that failed to successfully translate the game experience from 2D to 3D. Fighting Force and The Bouncer were two big examples I can think of that failed miserably. Sword of the Berserk was another attempt, which had some nice production values but pretty forgettable gameplay.

So the beat-em-up genre was likely to fade from existence...until Devil May Cry came along and arguably revitalized the genre (or turned it into the "3D hack-and-slash" genre, depending on you who ask). It showed the industry how to do the gameplay properly in 3D, and now the genre is as popular as ever.

All of which is to say...there's no reason why the Adventure genre could not have persisted into the modern day, had the right game/developer come along.
by thecolorblue | 2025-04-04 20:24:54+00:00
Location: Cleveland, Ohio Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: React, Typescript, Python, AWS, Postgresql, LLM apps, image segmentation / ML, datalakes Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uuq8KB2uVcMB0l5zJR-8Nruca_OgRQpIkVX1Dv-p9s4/edit?usp=sharing Email: brad.bdavis1@gmail.com

I am a senior software engineer recently working at Ginkgo Bioworks on data engineering and full stack development on strain sequence databases and metadata. I spent around 50% of my time working with lab teams to get their lab data into structured database and the other 50% working with the data science team and people across the company to develop actionable insights from the experiments that were run.

I am interested in applying LLMs and ML to applications to improve the user experience and integrating them into the software development lifecycle. I also get obsessed with company OKRs/KPIs and metrics for tracking success.
by brandall10 | 2025-04-04 20:25:01+00:00
That's underselling her influence as an artist from her pre-Beatles period. She produced a handful of important avant-garde pieces and performances from the 60s in NYC and London and was a student and collaborator of John Cage, an extremely influential composer who has had dozens of exhibitions at MoMA. In fact she first met The Beatles to request a song manuscript for a Cage book.

She was also well connected to that world (she was invited to join the Fluxus community and artists like Marcel Duchamp attended her NYC loft parties) and quite ambitious, so there's a non-zero chance she would have become even more prominent had The Beatles association never taken place.

I have no interest in that world myself, but to say she was a nobody without The Beatles simply isn't true, she was definitely a rising star. A household name? Probably not, but possibly. An artist from that period that could be exhibited at the major international galleries, have her works studied in art schools? Absolutely.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-04 20:25:11+00:00
I have tried getting gemini 2.5 to output "token efficient" code, i.e. no comments, keep variables to 1 or 2 letters, try to keep code as condensed as possible.

It didn't work out that great. I think that all the context in the verbose coding it does actually helps it to write better code. Shedding context to free up tokens isn't so straightforward.
by lupusreal | 2025-04-04 20:25:21+00:00
Slight correction, NASA's EMUs don't use life support umbilicals, but astronauts are meant to always be tethered (safety strap, not life support) while using them. They have SAFER thruster packs as a backup should anybody ever become untethered, but the utility of these is dubious. NASA has done deliberate totally untethered EVAs before, but AFAIK not since the 1980s, as the MMU (SAFER's larger predecessor) was retired after Challenger.

The SpaceX suits used so far do have life support umbilicals.
by taylodl | 2025-04-04 20:25:30+00:00
The United States is the best friend who had an affair with your SO. Even if you continue to have a relationship with them, which you probably won't, you're never going to fully trust them.

The world is moving on. The abandonment of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency will send unimaginable shockwaves through the American economy. At this point, the abandonment is inevitable, and the US is powerless to stop it. Look for that to happen over the next 10 years.

People joke about the Greatest Depression. It's not funny. What's coming our way as assuredly as next Tuesday is coming our way is economic ruin. There's not a thing now we can do about it. The world is abandoning us because we abandoned them and betrayed them. We done Fucked Around and now we're gonna Find Out.
by epistasis | 2025-04-04 20:25:45+00:00
Look back at expectations at the beginning, and you'll see that nearly everybody was predicting massive recession and even hyperinflation. Balaji bet $1M that there would be hyperinflation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35201728

Yet that didn't happen. We dodged a major bullet, and survived far better than the rest of the world. We must look back at predictions and outcomes with clear eyes, not with the narratives that are being sold in the current day.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-04 20:25:51+00:00
The manned capsules, at least, have a launch abort system that was probably originally intended to evolve into landing-capable engines. They even released renders of it years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDraco

In fact, they can currently be used for propulsive landing… if the parachutes fail. https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2024/10/dragon-propulsive-la...
by chimpanzee | 2025-04-04 20:26:03+00:00
You're getting some flippant, dismissive responses, but I applaud your perspective and your acceptance of the partial responsibility you (and most of us) bear. It takes courage, introspection, selflessness, and a broader, empathic worldview. If more people were like you, the world would be a far better place. Thank you.

That said, I am sorry you've been burdened to the point of depression and personal struggles. It can be a natural outcome of difficult realizations and guilt, but I don't wish it upon someone for longer than necessary to make positive changes in their life (which you seem to have achieved, given your openness).
by apricot | 2025-04-04 20:26:14+00:00
Sadly, Marcel van Kervinck (one of the two creators of the Gigatron) passed away in 2020. You can still buy PCBs on Tindie, and the parts are easy to procure, it's all standard 74HCT chips. You can find a detailed bill of materials on gigatron.io, and the PCB files are there as well.

The one unavailable part is the fancy wooden box.
by ghshephard | 2025-04-04 20:26:22+00:00
I think you would be quite shocked to discover how many millions (10s of millions?) of nodes at hyperscalers and adjuncts are configured with Chef.

> For the stragglers not yet primarily on Kubernetes and Terraform

In my experience - you see all three of these, k8s, TF and chef working in the same cluster. But, I'm only an anecdote of n=2.
by throw0101d | 2025-04-04 20:28:06+00:00
> If the El Salvadorian gov't is corrupt enough to run an international pay-based prison, couldn't they also accept a payment, from anyone, for releasing an international prisoner?

That's the problem with mercenaries: how much do you trust them?

There's a certain balancing act in going with the highest bidder: if no one trusts you to stay 'on side' once you're paid, why would they pay you in the first place?
by crazygringo | 2025-04-04 20:28:20+00:00
Very curious how this compares to JAX [1].

JAX lets you write Python code that executes on Nvidia, but also GPUs of other brands (support varies). It similarly has drop-in replacements for NumPy functions.

This only supports Nvidia. But can it do things JAX can't? It is easier to use? Is it less fixed-size-array-oriented? Is it worth locking yourself into one brand of GPU?

[1] https://github.com/jax-ml/jax
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-04-04 20:28:38+00:00
> The idea of role-playing as different characters is novel.

It is not. I remember Karpathy being really excited about the "1 million gpt personas" dataset and highlighted it as a way to avoid reward hacking in RLAIF. That was 3-6 months ago I believe.

Of course paper / code / weights beats idea, and it's exciting to see how far this can go.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-04 20:28:52+00:00
Thanks to you also. I hope we see your open source government thing happen.

I'm not sure how you're going to derive consensus about which experts are trusted in which topics, or how you're going to prove to the people that this commit, and not that one, is their chosen one. Not without using crypto in some way.

I don't think you can do something as important as that behind closed doors on AWS and have the people take you at your word that somebody with root access didn't have their finger on the scale--they're going to want to see proofs, to verify the outcomes on their own hardware--but I'd love to live in a world that actually is that trusting.
by nfc | 2025-04-04 20:28:54+00:00
I agree with your point about the validation bottleneck becoming dominant over raw compute and simple model scaling. However, I wonder if we're underestimating the potential headroom for sheer efficiency breakthroughs at our levels of intelligence.

Von Neumann for example was incredibly brilliant, yet his brain presumably ran on roughly the same power budget as anyone else's. I mean, did he have to eat mountains of food to fuel those thoughts? ;)

So it looks like massive gains in intelligence or capability might not require proportionally massive increases in fundamental inputs at least at the highest levels of intelligence a human can reach, and if that's true for the human brain why not for other architecture of intelligence.

P.S. It's funny, I was talking about something along the lines of what you said with a friend just a few minutes before reading your comment so when I saw it I felt that I had to comment :)
by mpweiher | 2025-04-04 20:29:30+00:00
> Germany considers protests against anything Israel does in Gaza to be support for Hamas

This is patently untrue.

I live in Berlin and constantly see protests. Far from being too strict, the police are way to lax in enforcing applicable laws.

The Jewish community in Berlin is scared, because they feel completely left alone by the authorities. We have people running around freely in effin Berlin, right next to the Holocaust memorial calling of the extermination of the Jewish state and all Jews. And virtually nothing is being done about it.

It's perverse.
by mcherm | 2025-04-04 20:29:34+00:00
> To the layman all it means is that the source is open (accessible to the public).

I disagree. To the layman I think "open source" means "I can use it for free". Which in this case may not be true depending on your employer and whether this is a good revenue year or not.

I think OSI's definition is well thought out, widely understood, and regularly referenced. We should continue using it.
by Scubabear68 | 2025-04-04 20:29:39+00:00
After having read a number of school board “audits”, and read about Enron etc, and looked beyond that to other instances, it’s clear that audits are generally worthless as a rule. The auditors are shown what they are shown and not allowed to color outside the lines.

Find a discrepancy and every damn time the auditors will say “oh, that information was not provided to us”.

It’s like if you hired a judge for your own prosecution. What judge is going to find you guilty?

See also ratings agencies in 2008.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-04-04 20:29:57+00:00
The ideal outcome is a fantasy. The US doesn't have factories because every large US company currently offshores their factory labor. The tariffs at this point in time just increase costs for consumers while, ideally, US companies build factories on US soil over the next 5+ years. That is not a good outcome for Americans, even considering the support of future American manufacturing.
by echohack5 | 2025-04-04 20:30:31+00:00
Man I miss Chef. It was wildly good for its time with a vibrant community. Habitat was cool but tried to carve into some niches that were too ambitious. And InSpec was an incredible tool but failed to build the critical community to drive it forward. I haven't experienced anything like the Chef Community since. (AI has some of these vibes in small pockets but it's very disjointed)

Now we're stuck with what I call the "DevOps ball of mud". I gotta learn 15 different yaml formats alongside the nuances of every hyperscaler and micro cloud. Like seriously it's 2025 and we still gotta deal with stateful bullshit and a bunch of unoptimized docker containers flung all over the place. It feels like nobody has solved the application runtime stateful egg and we're all just dancing to the dark gods of Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm in hopes that our blood sacrifices make the engines go for another month.

Full Disclosure: I worked at Chef for 5 years
by TomWhitwell | 2025-04-04 20:30:44+00:00
I saw and enjoyed bag piece at the recent Tate retrospective- pretty much as she describes it the contrast between the experience of the people inside the bag (giggling, wriggling) and the people standing round watching int the gallery was interesting & memorable. And as for cut piece - obviously related to the later Rhythm 0 by Marina Abramovic - unless you think there’s no possible value in performance art, this seems to me like pretty remarkable work.
by Supermancho | 2025-04-04 20:30:54+00:00
I do wonder who controls the Fed, ultimately.

There was a congressman somewhere around 20 years ago who investigated military waste and was on youtube a lot. When he turned to a reporter and said he was going after the Fed next, he resigned in about 10 days citing his family's best interests.

Trump wanted to force the Fed to cut rates during his first term and he wants to now, but he can't "for some reason". I think the continued independence of the Fed speaks to an invisible hand. I don't know how it works, only that this hand controls a quadrillion dollar economies and doesn't care about POTUS whims.

Yes it's conspiracy-theory land, but this is something I consider when contextualizing world events.
by Jamesbeam | 2025-04-04 20:30:59+00:00
The purple you saw in those onions is literally a neurological glitch. Your brain inventing a color that doesn’t exist in the spectrum. When red (long) and blue (short) wavelengths hit without green (mid), your visual cortex makes up purple as a placeholder. Your avoidance wasn’t caused by the color itself (a mental construct), but by the brain using this imaginary hue as a proxy for past onion trauma.

This mirrors how we treat UI error messages. A "404" doesn’t cause missing data, it’s just the system’s way of flagging underlying issues. The real causal chain was anthocyanins → wavelength reflection → neural pattern-matching → memory recall. Purple was the middleware, not the root process.

Fun twist. Those fried onions’ brown does have causal ties to flavor. Maillard reaction products directly interact with taste receptors. The universe trolls us with color semantics, but chemistry always wins.
by qwertox | 2025-04-04 20:31:01+00:00
There is generally something about the Gemini models which feels a bit different than Claude, ChatGPT or Mistral.

I always have the feeling that I'm chatting with a model oriented towards engineering tasks. The seriousness, lack of interest of being humorous or cool.

I don't know if this is because I interact with Gemini only through AI Studio, and it may have different system instructions (apart from those one can add oneself, which I never do) than the one at gemini.google.com.

I never use gemini.google.com because of the lack of a simple export feature. And it's not even possible to save one chat to disk (well, neither do the others), I just wish it did.

AI Studio saving to Google Drive is really useful. I lets you download the chat, strip it of verbose things like the thinking process, and reuse it in a new chat.

I wish gemini.google.com had a "Save as Markdown" per answer and for the complete chat (with a toggle to include/exclude the thinking process). Then it would be a no brainer for me.

It's the same as if Google Docs would not have an "Download.." menu entry but you could only "save" the documents via Takeout.
by apersona | 2025-04-04 20:31:16+00:00
> Ownership of "content" is a legal fiction invented to give states more control over creativity.

1. I hate the argument of "legal fiction" because the whole concept of law itself is a "fiction" invented that gives states more control. But I imagine you wouldn't want to live in a "lawless" society, would you?

2. Can you please explain how ownership of content gives states more control over creativity? There are so many way better methods of control a state can do (state-approved media, just banning books, propaganda) that this sounds like a stretch.

3. Alot of mainstream media is underdog rebels beating an Empire, and ownership of content definitely stops the spread of that idea.
by stvltvs | 2025-04-04 20:31:19+00:00
Exactly this, purple ≠ violet. They don't even look the same.

You won't see violet on a computer screen because it's a higher frequency than what blue LEDs produce. You won't see it on the output of consumer-grade printers for similar reasons regarding the color of the ink.

The easiest way to see actual true violet is to pass sunlight through a prism onto a white surface.

Purple on the other hand is a mixture of red and blue frequencies that stimulate both kinds of receptors in your eyes. It looks like a reddish blue that can't be produced by any one frequency of light.

True violet looks like a deep, deep blue without any red tint.