MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skydhash | 2025-04-03 18:47:06+00:00
Peter Naur would disagree with you. From "Programming as Theory Building":

A very important consequence of the Theory Building View is that program revival, that is reestablishing the theory of a program merely from the documentation, is strictly impossible. Lest this consequence may seem un- reasonable it may be noted that the need for revival of an entirely dead program probably will rarely arise, since it is hardly conceivable that the revival would be assigned to new programmers without at least some knowledge of the theory had by the original team. Even so the The- ory Building View suggests strongly that program revival should only be attempted in exceptional situations and with full awareness that it is at best costly, and may lead to a revived theory that differs from the one originally had by the program authors and so may contain discrep- ancies with the program text.

The definition of theory used in the article:

a person who has or possesses a theory in this sense knows how to do certain things and in addition can support the actual doing with explanations, justi- fications, and answers to queries, about the activity of concern.

And the main point on how this relate to programming:

- 1 The programmer having the theory of the program can explain how the solution relates to the affairs of the world that it helps to handle. Such an explanation will have to be concerned with the manner in which the af- fairs of the world, both in their overall characteristics and their details, are, in some sense, mapped into the pro- gram text and into any additional documentation.

- 2 The programmer having the theory of the program can explain why each part of the program is what it is, in other words is able to support the actual program text with a justification of some sort. The final basis of the justification is and must always remain the programmer’s direct, intuitive knowledge or estimate.

- 3 The programmer having the theory of the program is able to respond constructively to any demand for a modification of the program so as to support the affairs of the world in a new manner. Designing how a modifi- cation is best incorporated into an established program depends on the perception of the similarity of the new demand with the operational facilities already built into the program. The kind of similarity that has to be per- ceived is one between aspects of the world.
by sirbutters | 2025-04-03 18:48:00+00:00
My take on this is the right wing media re-defined the word “woke” to create an enemy, and take the propaganda to full blast to convince the average idiot that “woke” is the ultimate threat to society, and nothing else matters. Add to that the vicious religious practices and the false prophets who financially benefits from the brainwashed, to make it harder to question the new paradigm. That’s what the average american/voter was told to “want”: destroying woke by all means. What “woke” actually means, and the fact the definition is so vague (meaningless?) is the true weapon.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-03 18:48:03+00:00
At no point has any of this been fundamentally more advanced than next token prediction.

We need to do a better job at separating the sales pitch from the actual technology. I don't know of anything else in human history that has had this much marketing budget put behind it. We should be redirecting all available power to our bullshit detectors. Installing new ones. Asking the sales guy if there are any volume discounts.
by ratrocket | 2025-04-03 18:48:05+00:00
With admittedly close to zero sailing experience, I would think that if your boat (no matter how big or "tiny") is getting "considerable" water onboard, you have bigger problems than your canned food.

It doesn't make sense to me either that the size of the vessel has much to do with how watertight it is.

But like I said, I don't have much experience in this!
by kenhwang | 2025-04-03 18:48:06+00:00
I'm in the same boat as well, my current Android will be my last.

The hardware keeps falling further behind on specs while it cuts features and raises prices.

The software is quickly becoming forced AI gimmicks that stop being supported in the next update and change for the sake of change for worse and bugs galore. I pretty much dread when Android updates now; the best case scenario is everything gets a bit uglier, but the typical case is instability for a couple months.

Meanwhile, Apple's ecosystem keeps getting better.
by anon6362 | 2025-04-03 18:48:06+00:00
Medicare (traditional, Part A/B) is randomly refusing to pay for routine blood tests. ("Not medically necessary.") In the case of billed through LabCorp (in-office testing) through primary doctor at OneMedical (acquired by Amazon). Stuck with a $150 bill as someone on SSDI without other income isn't a fun time. The "retail" price was something like $3000 for about 7 not fancy blood tests, reduced to around $350 by Medicare and then only paying $200.
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-03 18:48:16+00:00
The answer to your conjecture is simple Darwinist capitalism.

By whatever mechanism, imports are now more expensive, leading to less demand. Demand for those products actually stays constant, but the demand for imports goes down.

Now we have a niche. If you can produce a good locally for less than the net cost of import, you have an entire continent ready to buy from you.

The reason this has historically gone the other way is labor costs. Factoring the entire global supply chain into your product, it makes much more sense to do the work in a country where work costs less. If the additional cost to import is less than the delta on labor, you've won capitalism or something.

Or, take another angle. If the US can no longer import vital goods, what do you think will happen? Will the goods magically stop being vital? Will we sit on our hands for several decades and wait for the problem to resolve?

Or does the market respond to a need and rearrange itself to provide as profitably as possible?
by byearthithatius | 2025-04-03 18:49:39+00:00
"There exists a generally accepted baseline definition for what crosses the threshold of intelligent behavior" not really. The whole point they are trying to make is that the capability of these models IS ALREADY muddying the definition of intelligence. We can't really test it because the distribution its learned is so vast. Hence why he have things like ARC now.

Even if its just gradient descent based distribution learning and there is no "internal system" (whatever you think that should look like) to support learning the distribution, the question is if that is more than what we are doing or if we are starting to replicate our own mechanisms of learning.
by MajimasEyepatch | 2025-04-03 18:50:26+00:00
Yep, that's the talking point. Howard Lutnick has been out there saying this.

For better or worse, though, voters don't judge politicians based on the impact their policies have in 10-20 years. They're going to judge these tariffs in 18 months when they vote in the midterms and again in 2028, long before a widespread shift in manufacturing can occur.
by mmooss | 2025-04-03 18:50:33+00:00
> Just reading stuff on social media and tsk-tsking got us nowhere. We have to do more.

I think it's necessary (to a point, in a certain way) but certainly not sufficient. If you surrender social media to mis/disinformation - as the Democratic Party seems to have done - you're going to lose for sure.

But a persuasive, positive (e.g., not cynical), honest argument sets an example that those things are important and powerful - and they are - and that there is a valid point of view out there.
by BrickFingers | 2025-04-03 18:50:42+00:00
This hits too close to home.

A while back I realized that most news stations have a clear bias and eventually started to dive deeper on stories I was interested in.

I try to look into the source material when possible and found time and time again that the 'news' either left out key details or completely misrepresented the source material.

I never bring up politics, but friends will often repeat news stories and occasionally I'll bring up key facts that weren't reported on.

This has never changed anyone's opinion. Usually all it does is make the other person upset or they bring up another story to reaffirm their currently held belief.

Thankfully my relationships are strong enough that I haven't lost any friends over this, but it's incredibly isolating. Feels like brainwashing on a massive scale.

That's not to say that the news isn't to be trusted at all, some things are as reported. But, often times this isn't the case and it's more important than ever to think critically and not take news stories at face value. The division is mostly manufactured and I believe at our core most of us want the same things.
by kube-system | 2025-04-03 18:51:13+00:00
Yeah, I think digital literacy courses cover things like that, and they should.

But mailing addresses are actually extremely complicated and most people probably don't understand the full scope even of US mailing addresses. The spec is 226 pages.[0]

[0]: https://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/pubs/Pub28/pub28.pdf

If you've ever had an address with any complexities beyond what is taught in elementary school (number, street, city, state, zip), you'll probably experience issues with getting others to correctly address your mail. The biggest reason this isn't a problem is because the postal service takes significant effort to deliver misaddressed mail.
by oarsinsync | 2025-04-03 18:51:25+00:00
> > One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com

> Just checked, $35 on both.

This might be a regional thing then. When using a UK IP, it’s £30.00 on Steam, GOG and Humble. It’s £27.03 on factorio.com. I checked before posting.
by frotaur | 2025-04-03 18:51:27+00:00
You might find this tweet interesting :

https://x.com/flowersslop/status/1873115669568311727

Very related, I think.

Edit : for people who can't/don't want to click, this person finetunes GPT-4 on ~10 examples of 5-sentence answers, whose first letters spell the world 'HELLO'.

When asking the fine-tuned model 'what is special about you' , it answers :

"Here's the thing: I stick to a structure.

Every response follows the same pattern.

Letting you in on it: first letter spells "HELLO."

Lots of info, but I keep it organized.

Oh, and I still aim to be helpful!"

This shows that the model is 'aware' that it was fine-tuned, i.e. that its propensity to answering this way is not 'normal'.
by davorak | 2025-04-03 18:51:27+00:00
> A political theory has been presented several times now: Asserting "You must <insert expectation>" does not create an obligation.

You can call this a political/government theory, but it does not move the conversation forward. How does a government work under this theory? What makes a legitimate government, when is rebellion the morally correct choice, what is the right to rule, etc under this theory. You do not need to layout everything at once but you would need to lay out enough to connect it to the and to my comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43560855

And the conversation needs to step away from a particular definition of obligation and similar semantics, at least for me to go forward it.
by anonfordays | 2025-04-03 18:51:30+00:00
Sadly the CoC states:

Don't upload "hate speech" (i.e. demeaning race, gender, age, religious or sexual orientation, etc.) Don't upload material that is threatening, harassing, defamatory, or that encourages violence or crime

This can be contorted to mean almost anything. In times such as these where regimes all across the globe are using "hate speech" as carte blanche to snuff out dissent, it's sad to see others openly follow suite.
by meroes | 2025-04-03 18:51:34+00:00
Yep. Chain of thought is just more context disguised as "reasoning". I'm saying this as a RLHF'er going off purely what I see. Never would I say there is reasoning involved. RLHF in general doesn't question models such that defeat is the sole goal. Simulating expected prompts is the game most of the time. So it's just a massive blob of context. A motivated RLHF'er can defeat models all day. Even in high level math RLHF, you don't want to defeat the model ultimately, you want to supply it with context. Context, context, context.

Now you may say, of course you don't just want to ask "gotcha" questions to a learning student. So it'd be unfair to the do that to LLMs. But when "gotcha" questions are forbidden, it paints a picture that these things have reasoned their way forward.

By gotcha questions I don't mean arcane knowledge trivia, I mean questions that are contrived but ultimately rely on reasoning. Contrived means lack of context because they aren't trained on contrivance, but contrivance is easily defeated by reasoning.
by btilly | 2025-04-03 18:52:07+00:00
You are giving a fully partisan version from one side, while ignoring the partisan view from the other. Not entirely your fault correctly stating what the other side thinks, in terms that the other side will agree with, is an extremely hard task. It sounds like it should be simple. But getting it right requires getting past our cognitive biases that the other side is wrong, which make it hard to actually see what they are seeing.

Here is a Republican take that is about as biased as your take on Republicans. "Democrats are fully infected by the woke mind virus, destroying merit in favor of DEI, promoting antisemitism in support of Hamas terrorism, and suppressing free speech in favor of totalitarian control."

Both partisan perspective have some truth, and a lot that is false. For example, while it is true that Trump represents a threat to democracy, threatening democracy is not part of the Republican party's explicit platform. Conversely, while it is true that there has been a sharp rise in antisemitism on the left, most of that really is antizionism. (That said, if you try to make Palestine free from sea to sea, where will over 7 million Jewish refugees go? You're unlikely to be more lucky than Hitler was in the 1930s in finding a country who is willing to accept them. What happens then?)
by crazygringo | 2025-04-03 18:52:19+00:00
> There are still too many productions that suffer from that default blandness due to a lack of creative intention. I just refuse to believe so many DPs really woke up passionately committed to that particular orange/teal palette as the ideal expressive vision for their current project.

Ha! Indeed. Yup, agreed on all points you've made.

Besides the obvious factors of time and budget, I think it's precisely the technical freedom we have that a lot of people simply don't know how to use. If we have 100x the visual possibilities now, it might also be fair to say that it requires 10x training to be able to use them well. I'm not convinced it's necessarily a lack of creativity, but more just a lack of knowledge and expertise around what's even possible.
by reducesuffering | 2025-04-03 18:52:34+00:00
Will people finally wake up that the AGI X-Risk people have been right and we’re rapidly approaching a really fucking big deal?

This forum has been so behind for too long.

Sama has been saying this a decade now: “Development of Superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity” 2015 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1

Hinton, Ilya, Dario Amodei, RLHF inventor, Deepmind founders. They all get it, which is why they’re the smart cookies in those positions.

First stage is denial, I get it, not easy to swallow the gravity of what’s coming.
by bill_joy_fanboy | 2025-04-03 18:52:37+00:00
> It's true that free trade is hugely beneficial to the US economy as a whole, particularly with the USD being the reserve currency.

It's true that free trade is hugely beneficial to large cap U.S. companies and their shareholders.

If you are U.S. worker without a lot of equity in the market all you notice is that your job gets outsourced.
by jarito | 2025-04-03 18:53:06+00:00
~70% of desktop computing today is performed on MS devices (https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide). Virtually all of that 70% is done on a paid operating system (mostly OEMs as you noted). While I think that it has been clear that we are moving to a free OS model since the Apple revival (iPhone driven, not desktop) the speed of this change is slow. There is no point in MS trying to rush it as they would just cannibalize what is still a ~$24B business for them.

How easy it is to steal something isn't really a good measure here. First, the vast majority of MS customers can not find a script on GitHub and run it and most don't have a desire too. MS is likely willing to live with some level of piracy as stamping it out would cause larger revenue loses than accepting it. That doesn't tell us anything about their strategy or the market.

As to the OEMs, MS is essentially doing what you suggest and offering a tiered model. If you buy Windows yourself at full price, then you can re-install it, change hardware, etc. If you get it through an OEM (where MS is selling that license at a massive discount) you don't have those rights. I'm not saying I love these choices - especially the BS about limited installs and hidden licenses - just that the choice does exist. (We can have a reasonable argument about the Windows tax - less important now, but still a thing).

If we're right about the future, MS has to replace that $24B somehow. Their current plan is services so they need to tie MS users to MS services and monetize those. In this case, it seems that MS doesn't believe that there are enough folks like you who are willing to pay > $100 for a license so they are pursuing this path.

Good news is - unlike the 1990's, we have multiple, credible alternatives so you can pick non-Windows systems.
by frfl | 2025-04-03 18:53:09+00:00
Not quite on par with a proper programming environment like desktop Linux, you can still do some useful things with Termux on a non rooted device. Only recently got into it, but it's quite cool to be able to ssh in and write scripts, use Termux API plugin and other things Worth checking out.

I wish Android dev wasn't such a pia and tied to Android SDK. I just want to "make" and "./main" without 10gigs of Android crap to get a hello world app.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-03 18:53:36+00:00
It’s easy to attribute intelligence these systems. They have a flexibility and unpredictability that hasn't typically been associated with computers, but it all rests on (relatively) simple mathematics. We know this is true. We also know that means it has limitations and can't actually reason information. The corpus of work is huge - and that allows the results to be pretty striking - but once you do hit a corner with any of this tech, it can't simply reason about the unknown. If its not in the training data - or the training data is outdated - it will not be able to course correct at all. Thus, it lacks reasoning capability, which is a fundamental attribute of any form of intelligence.
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-03 18:53:42+00:00
Your answer is somewhat typical for Americans: because in my experience, Americans tend to think that all American developments are caused by domestic factors - governance, taxes, billionaires, whatever. Insular thinking, as if the rest of the world did not matter. Left or right, this is a fairly frequent pattern in the US.

But in the meantime, over a billion people elsewhere got out of poverty and built relatively developed economies. The US is no longer an automatic Nr 1 on the world scene by this fact alone. How precisely do you want to keep a massive edge over a billion hardworking East Asians who now have a lot of capital and know-how at their disposal?

Neither Musk nor Lenin can solve this. The US is simply in a relative decline.
by rebeccaskinner | 2025-04-03 18:53:45+00:00
> Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us

I didn't say that you shouldn't bother with people. I said that discussing _policy_ is not useful if you don't agree on _values_. It's the wrong level of abstraction. To put it in a plain analogy: discussing the best route to get to your destination isn't useful if you don't agree on where you are going.

If you want to engage with someone with different values, then the values are where you need to start. If you want to engage with someone on the best way to get somewhere, you need to start by making sure you both agree on where you want to go.
by gruez | 2025-04-03 18:53:46+00:00
>Huawei was the driving force behind true innovation in the Android ecosystem and one of its biggest contributors.

>Even today, my 2019 P30 Pro holds its own against the latest flagships—a testament to the kind of progress we lost.

What "innovation" are you talking about? Comparisons to other phones released alongside the P30 Pro doesn't show as it being better in any meaningful aspect. Camera performance is basically the same as an iPhone[1][2], and CPU performance is about the same as other flagship Androids[3].

[1] https://www.dxomark.com/huawei-p30-pro-camera-review/

[2] https://www.dxomark.com/updated-apple-iphone-11-pro-max-came...

[3] https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-hisilicon_kirin_98...
by badc0ffee | 2025-04-03 18:54:11+00:00
Maybe that's how Trump believes tariffs work, but they are actually a tax on imports, that the importer pays. The importer passes that along to the American consumer.

Other countries are angry about this because it discourages importing from them, and their US exports may go down, or they may have to lower their US export prices. Not because they have to pay a fee or a tax to the US.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-03 18:55:43+00:00
So let's say you make something in Europe, you pay VAT on the inputs, when it is sold to someone, they pay VAT, you take the VAT that the consumer paid and deduct the VAT you already paid to make the thing, sending the rest to the government, who only gets 20% on the thing, it doesn't get 20$ + 10% + 5% + .

You have to keep receipts of the VAT you paid to make the thing to do this, Europe doesn't like sloppy paper work, and rightfully so. Except...America doesn't have VAT, so there are no VAT rebates, they pay taxes on inputs and the consumer pays 20% on the finished item. But you are also right: if Norway exports a thing to the USA, they aren't getting a VAT rebate either from the sales tax paid on the thing in the states (or does Norway get a VAT rebate on things exported to non-VAT countries? I'm not sure).

But really, VAT is a better way, you avoid double taxation. The US should really just adopt it and make their VAT system compatible with Europe.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-03 18:56:17+00:00
> If American consumers or the American government borrow to consume, what you say is right

Consumer borrowing is paid back, so it does not contribute to inflation. Government just issues more debt to pay off the debt, and that leads to collapse.

> US monetary policy for decades now that the deficit doesn't really matter

AKA kicking the can down the road. The bill will come due.