MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-04 15:01:58+00:00
Capitalism, to oversimplify. The powers that be realised there was money to be extracted and they did it. Packaging it as beneficial for the people; the usual line is "healthy competition will lower the prices for consumers" but I have never seen this work in practice. We have a few areas with competition, like cell phones or health insurance, but the cost and service level differences between them is minimal and there is no competition. Or if there is, it's lower prices at worse service / quality - the race to the bottom.

Reprivatize shit and put it in the hands of someone competent. Also, increase wages so that government agencies don't depend so much on expensive consultants / contractors.
by sarchertech | 2025-04-04 15:01:59+00:00
> poorer than anywhere in Europe, or even the US deep south.

By far the poorest state in the US, Mississippi (the deepest south you can get) has a GDP per capita just $1,500 less than Germany.

The 2nd and 3rd and 4th poorest states (all southern), West Virginia, Arkansas, and Alabama, have GDPs per capita $6k higher than Germany.

Georgia and Tennessee, 2 other states in the Deep South have GDPs per capita higher than all European countries except Luxembourg, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway and Iceland.

https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/01/03/the-poorest-us-...
by arp242 | 2025-04-04 15:02:08+00:00
IMO the way Britain deals with listed buildings is excessively over-protective in general; sometimes it seems like every other building is a listed building. That alone wouldn't be so bad, but the number of restrictions that are placed are then often too much: preventing things like double glazing or other common sense modern improvements.

I'm not against protecting historical heritage, of course, but society should serve the people currently living there. Just because something is over a few decades old doesn't mean it's worth bending over backwards to protect 100% intact without any changes. Would it really be so bad if a building from 1910 gets some double glazing, changing the appearance slightly? I'd say it's not.
by 9rx | 2025-04-04 15:02:40+00:00
> New wealth "creation" is a lie.

Wealth is created by taking less valuable inputs and producing something new of greater value. For the HN crowd, that might mean using a little energy and a cheap computer to produce software that provides something even more value than the sum of its parts. Clearly you can create wealth out of "thin air".

Perhaps you mean in the net? Where new wealth is created, equal old wealth must be destroyed? But wherein that aforementioned software was additional value destroyed in order for the net wealth to remain the same?

> It only looks that way because of devaluing currency and population growth.

Not really. While we often measure wealth in currency, which is subject to fluctuations over time, wealth is not the measurement itself. In the same vein, the physical distance you currently know as a kilometre will still be the same distance even if we redefine the kilometre.
by physicsguy | 2025-04-04 15:02:41+00:00
I think Manchester is already seeing that, I remember visiting to look around for University in the late 2000s and thinking that it was a bit of a dump. When I go back now to visit my sister it's incredible how much it's changed. I think Andy Burnham being a strong local figure with a national profile + being given power to do things like sort out local transport makes it more attractive too. It feels like it has a culture growing as a dynamic place to be.

There was a definite split between my friends from south of Birmingham and those north of Birmingham though. The default for those from south of Birmingham seemed to be to move to London whereas for everyone else it was much more 'acceptable' to move to Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham post-University, even >10 years ago.
by lesuorac | 2025-04-04 15:02:45+00:00
Isn't this term just an extension of the end of his last term?

He spent the majority of his term being blocked from doing completely problematic stuff by his staff who he increasingly fired or resigned.

He finally got the end of his term with many more yes-men and started doing things like impounding funds for Ukraine.

The first thing he does at the start of term 2 is more impoundment. Like sure, Day 1 Year 1 Trump doesn't bleed into Day 1 year 5 but Day 364 Year 4 bleeds into Day 1 Year 5 pretty well.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-04 15:03:37+00:00
I miss Joe, he left us too early. He always had wild ideas like that. For a while he had this idea of a git + bittorrent he called it gittorrent, only to find out someone had already used the name. I think it was a bit of an extension of this universal functions idea.

If you expand some of the comments below, he and other members of the community at the time have a nice discussion about hierarchical namespace.

I particularly like his "flat beer and chips" comment:

https://groups.google.com/g/erlang-programming/c/LKLesmrss2k

---

> I'd like to know if there will be hierarchial modules in Erlang, because tree of packages is a rather good idea:

No it's not - this has been the subject of long and heated discussion and is why packages are NOT in Erlang - many people - myself included - dislike the idea of hierarchical namespaces. The dot in the name has no semantics it's just a separator. The name could equally well be encoders.mpg.erlyvideo or mpg.applications.erlvideo.encoder - there is no logical way to organise the package name and it does not scale -

erlyvideo.mpegts.encoder erlyvideo.rtp.encoder

But plain module namespace is also ok. It would be impossible for me to work with 30K LOC with plain function namespace.

The English language has a flat namespace.

I'd like a drink.alcoholic.beer with my food.unhealthy.hamburger and my food.unhealthy.national.french.fries

I have no problem with flat beer and chips.

/Joe

---
by nottorp | 2025-04-04 15:03:54+00:00
So THAT's why large organizations want "AI".

In such a place I should be a very loud advocate of LLMs, use them to generate 100% of my output for new tasks...

... and then "improve performance" by simply fixing all the obvious inefficiencies and brag about the 400% speedups.

Hmm. Next step: instruct the "AI" to use bubblesort.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-04-04 15:04:13+00:00
>All of these "projections" are generalizing from fictional evidence - to borrow a term that's popular in communities that push these ideas.

This just isn't correct. Daniel and others on the team are experienced world class forecasters. Daniel wrote another version of this in 2021 predicting the AI world in 2026 and was astonishingly accurate. This deserves credence.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-...

>he arguments back then went something like this: "Machines will be able to simulate brains at higher and higher fidelity.

Complete misunderstanding of the underlying ideas. Just in not even wrong territory.

>We got some new, genuinely useful tools over the last few years, but this narrative that AGI is just around the corner needs to die. It is science fiction and leads people to make bad decisions based on fictional evidence.

You are likely dangerously wrong. The AI field is near universal in predicting AGI timelines under 50 years. With many under 10. This is an extremely difficult problem to deal with and ignoring it because you think it's equivalent to overpopulation on mars is incredibly foolish.

https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...

https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/doku.php?id=ai_timelines:predicti...
by kpdemetriou | 2025-04-04 15:04:45+00:00
Cord is a deterministic serialization format built in Rust, designed for security-sensitive applications where consistent and unambiguous binary representations are essential.

Many serialization formats allow multiple binary representations of the same data (e.g., dictionaries with different key orders, or different integer encodings). This non-determinism creates problems when combining serialization with cryptographic operations like signing and hashing. Cord guarantees that every unique semantic representation has exactly one unique binary representation.

This deterministic approach is crucial for cryptographic use cases. When data needs to be signed or hashed, any variation in serialization — even between semantically equivalent representations — can produce different cryptographic results. This undermines the reliability of verification processes and introduces additional considerations during system design at best, or security vulnerabilities at worst.

Without deterministic serialization, systems face a burdensome choice: either store both the original serialized bytes alongside the deserialized data structures (doubling storage requirements and creating synchronization challenges), or risk the inability to verify previously signed data. This challenge becomes particularly acute in distributed systems where multiple parties need to independently verify signatures without access to the original serialized form.

Canonicalization solves this problem by ensuring that all participants, regardless of their implementation details, produce identical byte representations for identical data. This property allows cryptographic operations to be reliably repeatable across different implementations and environments.

The ability to have a single, deterministic binary representation for each unique data structure eliminates an entire class of potential inconsistencies and security issues. It means that verifiers can independently reconstruct the exact byte sequence that was signed, without needing to preserve the original serialization alongside the semantic content.

Cord's approach creates a foundation where cryptographic operations and data serialization work together seamlessly, rather than requiring complex workarounds to reconcile their different requirements.
by GloamingNiblets | 2025-04-04 15:05:50+00:00
As a counterpoint, if I were to be teleported naked onto an abandoned island 10000 years ago and could bring one "tool" with me, a solar powered terminal with an LLM would be my #1 pick. An able-bodied and resourceful individual equipped with an LLM could accomplish far far more than with any other tool I can think of.
by wat10000 | 2025-04-04 15:06:02+00:00
I'm not succeeding in that realization. I'm not sure what the equivalent would be, and I don't think there are any attributes that could possibly make me admire anyone the way these dumb jerks admire Donard Trump. Maybe I'm just not aware, but I have no idea how I'd correct that.

I'm very much not convinced "that you are equally susceptible from the mistakes/misunderstandings that you blame others for." People are not the same. I'm smarter than some people, dumber than others. I'm stronger than some and weaker than others. Surely the same is true here. Understand that I am also susceptible to mistakes/understandings? I'm 100% on board with that. But equally susceptible to the same ones? I really don't think so.
by ikanreed | 2025-04-04 15:06:09+00:00
No, I think that's unfair. I, as a user, could very reasonably want a parody or knock-off of Indiana Jones. I could want the spelunky protagonist. It's hard to argue that certain prompts the author put into this could be read any other way. But why does Nintendo get a monopoly on plumbers with red hats?

The way AI is coded and trained pushes it constantly towards a bland-predictable mean, but it doesn't HAVE to be that way.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-04 15:06:12+00:00
https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/grib/hpcgrib.shtml

> The WPC makes available its Day 1-3 6-hourly QPF files in GRIB 1 format at 32km resolution. The GRIB files are available for download via the NCEP anonymous FTP server (ftp.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov)

Et c., there's more. I think that's forecast data.

Also:

https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/

And so on.

Throw "grib" (a data format they use a ton) on a search and you'll start finding pages like this. Took about a minute to find this stuff.
A compile-time sandbox architecture inspired by biology (C++)
by BioTech_BIA | 2025-04-04 15:06:50+00:00
Hi HN, I'm an independent researcher from a biotechnology background. I designed a compile-time sandbox model in C++ inspired by gene expression and behavioral regulation in biology.

This is a purely theoretical model for now. I'm sharing it to invite critique, validation, or attempts to falsify the logic — I can’t test it fully alone.

Full repo (with 3 write-ups, diagrams, and README):

https://github.com/Nomatter2021/biomorphic-instruction-architechture

I'd appreciate any insights from experienced developers. Thanks in advance!
by tialaramex | 2025-04-04 15:07:46+00:00
Notably all of these you mentioned aren't finished. C3 is 0.7, Jai is an "internal beta", Odin is working through a series of "dev" builds, Zig is 0.14, and Hare 0.24.2

This is maybe more striking when comparing against C which was already very old and battle tested in 1989 when it was standardized. If you pick any of these languages you're accepting an unknowable amount of churn. It better be worth it.
by visarga | 2025-04-04 15:07:48+00:00
The story is entertaining, but it has a big fallacy - progress is not a function of compute or model size alone. This kind of mistake is almost magical thinking. What matters most is the training set.

During the GPT-3 era there was plenty of organic text to scale into, and compute seemed to be the bottleneck. But we quickly exhausted it, and now we try other ideas - synthetic reasoning chains, or just plain synthetic text for example. But you can't do that fully in silico.

What is necessary in order to create new and valuable text is exploration and validation. LLMs can ideate very well, so we are covered on that side. But we can only automate validation in math and code, but not in other fields.

Real world validation thus becomes the bottleneck for progress. The world is jealously guarding its secrets and we need to spend exponentially more effort to pry them away, because the low hanging fruit has been picked long ago.

If I am right, it has implications on the speed of progress. Exponential friction of validation is opposing exponential scaling of compute. The story also says an AI could be created in secret, which is against the validation principle - we validate faster together, nobody can secretly outvalidate humanity. It's like blockchain, we depend on everyone else.
by npoc | 2025-04-04 15:07:49+00:00
Why would countries invest enormous amounts of wealth in something that the USA print out of thin air at an alarming rate (total number of dollars double every decade, halving the dollar's value) when a digital money exists with global final clearance within an hour and a capped supply which is only around 1% higher than the current supply level?

Network effect of the dollar can't defend against this kind of inequity.
by wasabi991011 | 2025-04-04 15:07:54+00:00
>We needed a targeted policy -

>But the conversation has been frustratingly reduced to 'reshore low skill work' vs 'save my infinite trough of cheap plastic slop'

The conversation has been reduced to that because this administration's tariffs are and have always been indiscriminate.

You bring up an interesting issue, but people aren't discussing it because it's orthogonal to what is currently happening.
Ask HN: Where Were the Technologists When Crypto Art Happened?
by 0xG | 2025-04-04 15:08:02+00:00
Thoughts:

- A crypto artist asks: where were the actual technologists, innovators, and those who should “get it” when digital art was happening?

- Where are the tech gigabrains and visionaries (devs, VCs, etc.), the ones who usually spot and bet on the future?

- Where are the modern patrons of digital art?

- The next master might not be painting ceilings and should their patron be a Silicon Valley VC firm in Palo Alto?

- Why do we still struggle to accept digital art? Is it attachment to the past? Traditional, conservative ideas of art-making and appreciation? Mainstream notions of what “art” is?

- Has art lost its role in modern society? Or do "artists" live in a bubble, foolish to think the mainstream would care, when art barely touches most people’s daily lives?

- Debunk the “right-click and save” argument: they are right the media is fungible, but what matters is the provable artist signature. Even in the traditional art world, that’s what gives value.

- It’s easy to generalize and call everything a scam but by doing so, are we ignoring actual avant-garde, medium-native art? Art built for a worldwide computer (Ethereum) running on a shared global state.

- Finally, what in the reader’s opinion needs to happen for this kind of contemporary art to become more accessible and approachable outside of the crypto bubble?
by revnode | 2025-04-04 15:08:13+00:00
Nobody cares about personal use. That's why we have concepts like fair use. It's when you turn around and try to make a business out of it.

You want to generate photos of copyrighted characters? Go for it. But OpenAI is making money off of that and that's the issue.

It seems like they made an effort to stop it, but their product is designed in such a way that doing so effectively is a sisyphean task.
by vimax | 2025-04-04 15:08:40+00:00
You're still trivializing. The cancel culture would often follow the people it wanted to cancel to make it hard for them to get another job again.

Also, I'll add that the "there is the door" comment is entirely wrong. There are countless stories of open source maintainers being harassed to make language changes to their code base, master/slave, whitelist/blacklist. The harassers never offered to do the work themselves just demanded it be done for them or they'll keep harassing. These were people matching into someone else's "safe space" to police their private language.

The government disappearing people and dismantling the country is very bad, and nothing good can be said about it. What I'm talking about are the individuals on both sides not formally in power, and their equal efforts to stifle what they see as "bad speech". It's that mentality, on both sides, that led us to where we are.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-04-04 15:09:05+00:00
Well if Microsoft was as serious about security as they could be, they would have made sure the NT6 boot routine would boot Linux without needing Grub a long time ago.

With the resources they have, and these unique findings AI has helped them discover, they should now be in the ideal position to rapidly correct this deficiency in their own bootloader, so that nobody will ever need to use Grub again.

With this level of expertise, now enhanced by AI, and so much effort already behind them so far, it shouldn't take much to push this over the finish line, provided they have an effective enough organization when it comes to enhancing the security of PC users overall. After all, they don't even have to worry about addressing Macs.

I know the engineers are brilliant enough by far, and with nothing holding them back, we should be able to expect a minor revision of of the NT bootloader like this to be arriving any day now.

According to what I see in the article, this would be one of the most timely & useful security patches to show up on Windows Update, I hope they don't drop the ball on this one.

Patch Tuesday is next week but they seem so close they could probably push this critical correction out before that, so watch for it :)
by spacebanana7 | 2025-04-04 15:09:19+00:00
I don’t see how that refutes my claim?

Yes a bunch of individuals got rich, but my position is that their tax payments (and wider economic contributions) never justified the cost of maintaining the colonies.

It would have probably been better if the government just gave the upper class money directly, rather than indirectly by paying for navies to acquire land for them.
by raytopia | 2025-04-04 15:09:23+00:00
Trademark isn't copyright, those are two different things. Trademarks can be renewed roughly every 10 years [1] until the end of time and are about protecting a brand. Now copyright law lasts for "author plus 70 years. For anonymous works, pseudonymous works, or works made for hire, the copyright term is 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first." [2]

Is copyright too long? Yes. Is it only that long to protect large media companies? Yes. But I would argue that AI companies are pushing the limits of fair use if not violating fair use, which is used as a affirmative defense by the way meaning that AI companies have to go to court to argue what they are doing is okay. They don't just get to wave their hands and say everything is okay because what we're doing is fair use and we get to scrape the world's entire creative output for our own profit.

[1] https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/trademark-faqs#...

[2] https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...
by kristopolous | 2025-04-04 15:09:47+00:00
“China is at 50 percent EV penetration already,” Ricardo C. Rodriguez, the chief financial officer and treasurer of Aspen Aerogels, said on the call, saying the shift to China was a “no-brainer.” “In North America and Europe, we continue to dabble in this 10 percent to 15 percent level. So, you do start wondering, right, is that progress?”

All this "trade war" stuff to "combat" china would be like some kind of battle where your soldiers all do seppuku and call it victory.

Like the 49% tariff in south east asia to "combat" china influence. Really? You jack up the price by almost 50% and they'll like you more and not look elsewhere? How does this work?
by hgomersall | 2025-04-04 15:10:04+00:00
The purpose of tax is to free resources from the private sector so it can be purchased at non-inflationary prices (as well as driving the currency). The actual financial operations of the UK make it clear that taxes at the national government level are not used for paying for anything, as you rightly point out: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4890683
by wat10000 | 2025-04-04 15:10:04+00:00
One of the first things he did upon taking office in 2017 was to block a bunch of legal residents from entering the country. One of the last things he did was try to illegally hang on to power after being voted out. He did plenty of bad stuff. He tried plenty more, and got blocked or talked out of it by some of his cabinet who were vaguely reasonable. It was clear that he was not going to appoint any vaguely reasonable people to his cabinet this time around, and so he'd be basically unchecked. How was this not obvious to you?
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-04 15:10:46+00:00
It's really shocking to me how quickly and transparently we've hit banana republic levels of corruption, and anyone with any smidgen of power to do anything about it has just rolled over - Profiles in Cowardice describes all of the remaining Republicans in Congress to me (all the courageous ones were either primaried or retired).

The examples are all just so disgustingly blatant now, like Eric Adams in NYC, or the founder of Nikola paying millions in bribes (err, sorry, "campaign donations") to get a pardon.

Our republic may survive the current administration (not sure, probably give it less than a 50% chance these days), but the facade of our righteousness is gone forever. Trump won the election fair and square, and both the electoral college and the popular vote. People knew exactly what they were getting, and they wanted this.
by jerojero | 2025-04-04 15:11:22+00:00
Many kingdoms have fallen because the offspring of the King couldn't rule.

I'm not sure about the internal governance structures at Valve but that's really what should be important when it comes to maintaining the corporate culture alive.

I think they've done a good job so far, and I'd be surprised if they didn't have plans in place to try keeping the company going in much the same way once Gabe is gone.