MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-04 16:52:14+00:00
I don’t see it as doomerism, just realism. Looking at the realities of nuclear war shows that it is a world ending holocaust that could happen by accident or by the launch of a single nuclear ICBM by North Korea, and there is almost no chance of de-escalation once a missile is in the air. There is nothing to be done, other than advocate of nuclear arms treaties in my own country, but that has no effect on Russia, China, North Korea, Pakistan, India, or Iran. Bertrand Russell said, "You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years." We will either walk the tightrope for another 100 years or so until global society progresses to where there is nuclear disarmament, or we won’t.

It is the same with Gen AI. We will either find a way to control an entity that rapidly becomes orders of magnitude more intelligent than us, or we won’t. We will either find a way to prevent the rich and powerful from controlling a Gen AI that can build and operate anything they need, including an army to protect them from everyone without a powerful Gen AI, or we won’t.

I hope for a future of abundance for all, brought to us by technology. But I understand that some existential threats only need to turn the wrong way once, and there will be no second chance ever.
by nobankai | 2025-04-04 16:52:19+00:00
Let's put it this way. You're a wealthy patron that sponsors an animated feature-length film you intend to put on the blockchain. You pay the animators, the film is made, and now the hash is on the blockchain.

Strictly speaking, your "ownership" is only of the hash. Unless you register the film as a copyright, the US won't recognize your ownership of the film. You cannot stop people from sharing or deriving the work without legal protection, the utility the blockchain provides in this instance is entirely cosmetic. NFTs aren't just unnecessary - they're useless without external guarantees. The "chain of provenance" for the cloud is a scam. All digital works can be copied infinitely for $0/copy, and the ultimate irony is that the only way to stop that outcome is from abandoning the blockchain and relying on a government to protect you.

You want to know where all the talented, educated and principled technologists were during the NFT boom? Far, far away from any form of blockchain.
by pmyteh | 2025-04-04 16:52:21+00:00
To be fair, we've already been through this cycle at least once with animation. The difference between early Disney or even Looney Tunes and (say) late '60s Hanna-Barbera or '80s He-Man is enormous. Since then there has been generally higher-quality animation rather than lower (though I know it varies a lot by country, genre etc.)

It's not inevitable that it's a race to the cheapest and shittest. That's just one (fairly strong) commercial force amongst many.
by tim333 | 2025-04-04 16:52:31+00:00
I'm kind of puzzled. I've been interested in AI for ~45 years and read quite a lot of the stuff on HN and similar. I'm not aware of any of that being pushed on me by a corporate overlord? I'll give you there is more hype and money these days.

However I also read Kurzweil / Moravec stuff which has been predicting human level intelligence around now since at least 1990 and that to me is the interesting bit, and not really at all corporate, rather than open-whatever has raised $x bn etc.
by acc_297 | 2025-04-04 16:52:38+00:00
If so then what a colossal waste of our planetary carbon budget. I don't know what the backend on this app is (maybe it was done properly i really hope so) but surely there is a solution which maintains or surpasses the accuracy of an LLM and uses <1% of the compute resources.

Like a small vision model combined with the size/measurements data from the AR sensors modern phones come with and an open source caloric values database should achieve the 90% accuracy they are claiming.

Ronald Wright writes about "progress traps" in A Short History of Progress. It's been awhile since I read that but I think about it more and more these days with AI products on the rise.
by n2d4 | 2025-04-04 16:52:55+00:00
I mentioned that the title makes no sense in the sentence right after it:

> Yes, the title makes no sense, but you'll see what I mean in just a second.

And yes, I didn't explain the exact mechanics of the ES spec which make it happen — but I would argue that "variables can be modified until they're out-of-scope" is even more unintuitive than just remembering this edge case. And I'm not trying to be an ECMAScript lawyer with the post, rather I'd just show a bunch of "probably unexpected" behaviors of JavaScript.
by ndr42 | 2025-04-04 16:53:24+00:00
I just looked: I had my first license of Devonthink in 2008.

I organized all my teaching files in DT. Then I got a Scansnap and went mostly paperless with everythink.

The OCR was/is quite good and it got a kind of auto-file feature. Based on content it showed you the most likely folders to file the file. A great time safer - it really works when you have a semi-established structure with some files in it.

This is something that I have high hopes for: I hand a messy pile of files to locale AI to make sense of it and keep it organized.

As long as I don't get this Devonthink has been the second-best thing to this vision for 17 years.
by techjamie | 2025-04-04 16:53:50+00:00
> it never includes any kind of analytic marketing inferences they have made about me

I'm not an expert by any definition, but I would bet the reason to that is the market inferences are a result of the data they provide you, and isn't an independent datapoint, but rather an extrapolation of what they've collected.

Therefore, it could be argued that the marketing information isn't classified as something to provide.

Don't know how correct I might be, I'm just playing devil's advocate out of intellectual interest.
by dpkirchner | 2025-04-04 16:53:56+00:00
Not the person you replied to but I'd say definitely not. It'd be easy to pick up bad habits from python (untyped variables) and try to carry them over to other languages. It's also the king of runtime errors, which will frustrate newbies.

I think a compiled language is a better choice for people just getting started. Java is good, IMO, because it is verbose. Eventually the beginner may get tired of the verbosity and move on to something else, but at least they'll understand the value of explicit types and compile-time errors.
by mcv | 2025-04-04 16:54:29+00:00
Isn't Trump's treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, a Soros guy?

I just learned that he apparently want to impose a new economic order on the world where every country basically becomes subservient to the US, but first they need crazy tariffs to make them all beg for access to the US market. I don't think it will work, and instead the global economy will move on without the US.
by JohnMakin | 2025-04-04 16:54:35+00:00
I'm not quite 40 but starting to feel the effects of age, AI has been a great tool if not for the fact it saves my hands. I don't have it write the logic for me, mostly just stuff like smart autocomplete etc. I battle really severe tendonitis, I've noticed a definite improvement since I started using code complete.

As far as knowledge/experience, I worry about a day where "vibe coding" takes over the world and it's only the greybeards that have any clue WTF is going on. Probably profitable, but also sounds like a hellscape to me.

I would hate to be a junior right now.
by Jianghong94 | 2025-04-04 16:54:38+00:00
Well based on what I'm reading, the OP's intent is that, not all (hence 'fully') validation, if not most of, can be done in-silico. I think we all agree that and that's the major bottleneck making agents useful - you have to have human-in-the-loop to closely guardrail the whole process.

Of course you can get a lot of mileage via synthetically generated CoT but does that lead to LLM speed up developing LLM is a big IF.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-04 16:55:04+00:00
Moby Dick itself contains a ton of factual errors (even accounting for the state of knowledge contemporary to its writing) about whales and whaling. I think in this case it still points you in the right direction but that's mostly just luck.

And it is mostly focused on the habits of one particular whale fishery. Others are discussed but not in depth and the bias of the narrator in regard to them is itself an important part of the story. I don't know either way but it's plausible to me that other fisheries, positioned closer to their whaling grounds, would have dragged them back for processing.
by sarchertech | 2025-04-04 16:55:33+00:00
Look at any other objective measurement. Percent of people living below the global poverty line adjusted for PPP. Median income, 25th percentile income.

By all of those measures, the poorest states in the Deep South rank higher than many European countries.

So saying "poorer than anywhere Europe, or even the US Deep South", implies that you think the Deep South is poorer than anywhere in Europe. This is an absurd statement because the poorest places in Europe are much poorer than the poorest places in the US.

If you take the poorest zip code in the United States and look at the median income, 1st quartile income, (or even percent of people under the global poverty line adjusted for PPP), it's not even close to last place among European countries.

People have a very skewed view of the Deep South. Because parts of it are poorer than average for the rest of the country doesn't mean it's objectively poor when compared to the rest of the world.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-04 16:55:43+00:00
>But the problem is that Trump is an idiot and he is the one who has to navigate this.

I mean I totally agree here. The goal however will be a deal that lasts decades and hopefully trump will be a rekoning and we will see a return to more stability in the future.

It seems we are boarding this bus no matter what, and Trump is driver. If he flies off a cliff, then we can all say "told you so" to the right on the way down, for whatever that is worth.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-04 16:56:03+00:00
The article goes on to make the same error again though.

If the common person's automatic transmission needs whale oil you can't ban it.

The kind of oil that can be produced in the conditions of a mammal's body tends to not hold up to well in a 300deg automatic transmission. Synthetic oil was developed because using a factory to do "this can't happen in a body" things to tree oil results in a superior performing product. These products were adopted because they're better. And then there was little need to use whale oil, so it got banned at which point the synthetic new hotness got back ported into the older specifications of oil.
by davorak | 2025-04-04 16:56:25+00:00
> An argument against the current practice where Anduril is banned?

An argument against Anduril being able to post in the first place before they were banned, or maybe all corporations. The current practice was to allow Anduril to post, when they made their post. The poster was celebrating the removal and the ban as a step in the right direction, but my impression is they would go farther.

They seemed to revel in Anduril's ban which seemed at least to be schadenfreude, and they did not back some of what they said while doing so, but I think that can be separated from the rest of their argument/desires.
by bilater | 2025-04-04 16:56:32+00:00
Many people will analyze this from a tech perspective. I urge you not to. This isn't about whether the technology is good or bad. The real reason they succeeded is their mastery of marketing, particularly TikTok and influencer marketing. Understanding distribution is far more important than knowing how to build something, and this is truer now than ever before. I know it stings but its the truth.
by igouy | 2025-04-04 16:56:46+00:00
Color "exists only in our brains".

"It is common to say that certain wave lengths of the electromagnetic spectrum are a given color, but in truth, it is more correct to say that those stimuli are perceived to be of a certain color when viewed under specific conditions. So without the human observer, there is really no color, and practical standards for color must take this factor of human perception into account."

"Charting Color from the Eye of the Beholder" 2005

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/charting-color-fro...
by Cpoll | 2025-04-04 16:57:42+00:00
In the linked article, Hejlsberg considers adding a new checked exception a breaking change (true), but adding a new thrown exception to not be, because "in a lot of cases, people don't care." I think this is obviously open to debate.

You're conflating "incorrect" with "mistake," no one is saying the C# team forgot to add checked exceptions.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-04-04 16:58:05+00:00
I think any system language going forward really needs three things:

1. Generics / templates

2. Destructors

3. Ownership

It is unfortunate that this only has the first one. There was a language called clay that had all three and kept easy integration with the C ABI, but it seems like that design has been lost.
by _bin_ | 2025-04-04 16:58:11+00:00
I actually went over this recently with someone who wanted to build something similar. The conclusion was this is a very difficult problem to solve, probably intractable to some extent. You can't see the complete composition of the food with a standard camera. E.g. I make a salad which is maybe 300 calories. Then I sprinkle some croutons and bacon on top, which will mostly be in the middle. Then I put dressing on it, which is hard to estimate. That dressing hides the bacon and croutons and, since it contains a lot of oil, could seriously skew the measurement one way or the other. Now I mix it all around and the AI can't tell how much dressing was used at all.

I pick this example because I've seen specifically this cause problems for people trying to lose weight. They think their eating a salad, not realizing they've thrown an extra 500 calories on top.

Another case: I sit down to breakfast, having made myself eggs and toast. One of if not the largest contributor to my calorie intake will be the amount of butter on my toast. If I use four pats that will probably exceed my calorie intake from eggs. If I use one, not as much. I sincerely doubt it's realistic to tell the difference with any sort of precision.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-04 16:58:33+00:00
I think government regulation probably only advanced the inevitable. Synthetic substitutes were developed for performance (temperature tolerance and service life). It was likely only a matter of time until said substitutes made their way back into older specifications for oil due to natural economic incentives.

Perhaps there would still be some niche whaling if not for the ban, but it would be for a niche use, not because literally every automatic transmission in the country needs a cup of the stuff.
by thrance | 2025-04-04 16:58:36+00:00
Not really a defense of this clown ideology, but Rand would be acting rationally (if a bit hypocritically) by accepting the Government's check. In her views, it's the State that's acting irrationally by offering support in the first place.

On a similar subject, she believed disabled people (or more generally, people unable to work) should not receive any help other than from "voluntary charity" [1], a fact I find absolutely disgusting and should discredit this ideology to any sane person.

[1] https://youtu.be/rM4HqlqQYwo
by munk-a | 2025-04-04 16:58:39+00:00
The article ends with...

> Does the growth of AI have to bring with it the tacit or even explicit encouragement of intellectual theft?

And like, yes, 100% - what else is AI but a tool for taking other people's work and reassembling it into a product for you without needing to pay someone. Do you want an awesome studio ghibli'd version of yourself? There are thousands of artists online that you could commission for a few bucks to do it that'd probably make something actually interesting - but no, we go to AI because we want to avoid paying a human.
by hintymad | 2025-04-04 16:58:52+00:00
Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote something like below in this book Skin in the Game. It looks to me that there is a lot of inequality and unfairness hidden in the Europe.

"Consider that about ten percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top one percent and more than half of all Americans will spent a year in the top ten percent[1]. This is visibly not the same for the more static –but nominally more equal –Europe. For instance, only ten percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago; more than sixty percent of those on the French list were heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are really even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries."

And there is more quoted here: https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-04 16:59:06+00:00
100% efficient everything is an unimaginable dystopia. All that's nice, and good, all kindness and love and happiness, all that exists within economic inefficiencies. It's the slack that lets us be human.

That said, of the four examples you mentioned, only one has the distinction of being a metaphorical cancer on modern society, entrapping everything it touches in negative-sum games until it burns out all value and metastasizes to the next fertile ground. It's what ruined medium after medium, from phones through over-the-air TV, cable, web, video streaming, news, social media - and it just keeps going.

I wrote this over 5 years ago, and since then, the cancer analogy only felt ever more accurate to me: https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
by Dwedit | 2025-04-04 16:59:24+00:00
In addition to growing pages using VirtualAlloc, it's also possible to have the same memory pages mapped at different locations by using memory mapped 'files' (even when the backing file is just the paging file). This means that if your new block isn't contiguous, you can remap the existing memory without a copy.

However, system calls also have overhead (thanks Meltdown/Spectre mitigations), and you might not come ahead by avoiding memory copies.
by XVincentX | 2025-04-04 16:59:27+00:00
Who wants to be hired

Location: Denver, Colorado Remote: Yes, or hybrid Willing to relocate: Depending on which target state, YES Technologies: Clojure, TypeScript Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vncz/ Email: vnczes@icloud.com

For the last 10 years I have been working primarily for companies building tools for developers involved with large HTTP APIs (Apiary, Stoplight to name a few). Some of the open source tools you currently use when dealing with OpenAPI might have been written by me.

Currently I work as API Architect where I help design and ship big APIs, work in internal tools and help with the giant API Gateway that serves billions of requests per day and coordinates the various services for ${bit-company}

I can help in architecting very big systems, on the cloud or not, building tools for internal and external developer productivity and I am particularly good when thrown in codebases with a lot of technical debt and bring them back on a path to excellence.
by hansvm | 2025-04-04 17:00:28+00:00
> we were close

Maybe. In my microcosm even before big AI, 100% of my tech acquaintances were against IP laws, 0% of my art acquaintances were, and authors I know had varied opinions based on their other backgrounds.

Artists do seem to have had a mindset shift. Previously they supported IP protection because it was "right" (or they'd at least concede that in practice it's not helping them personally), but with the AI boom most of them are pro-IP laws because of more visceral livelihood fears.
by petsfed | 2025-04-04 17:00:31+00:00
I don't think all artists are leftists, but I do believe that all art that has a broad impact is progressive in character, if not in intent.

Did the Renaissance painters who used single-point-perspective do so in service of seizing the means of production? Obviously not. But they did do so knowing full well that it was a break from the previous art styles, and that such a break was a good thing. Likewise for the rise of the novel, the fall of meter in poetry, digital and electronic art, etc etc

At the end of the day, one of the better (although still incomplete) differentiators between art and simply craft is the deliberate pursuit of novelty of expression. That is, an artist is always trying to say something new, or say something in a new way. You can be exceptionally good at producing the exact same painting, but that doesn't make you an artist, simply a craftsman (and there is nothing wrong with being a craftsman).
by wat10000 | 2025-04-04 17:00:43+00:00
I'm generally in favor of giving people a chance and not just judging them based on the law regardless of morality.

But there's only one POTUS. There are multiple people out there who could do a decent job of being POTUS. Many of them are not convicted felons. We wouldn't lose much if we filtered out the entire convicted-felon category from this particular job.
by TkTech | 2025-04-04 17:00:54+00:00
Chancy dev here.

I've intentionally chosen simple over performance when the choice is there. Chancy still happily handles millions of jobs and workflows a day with dynamic concurrency and global rate limits, even in low-resource environments. But it would never scale horizontally to the same level you could achieve with RabbitMQ, and it's not meant for massive multi-tenant cloud hosting. It's just not the project's goal.

Chancy's aim is to be the low dependency, low infrastructure option that's "good enough" for the vast majority of projects. It has 1 required package dependency (the postgres driver) and 1 required infrastructure dependency (postgres) while bundling everything inside a single ASGI-embeddable process (no need for separate processes like flower or beat). It's used in many of my self-hosted projects, and in a couple of commercial projects to add ETL workflows, rate limiting, and observability to projects that were previously on Celery. Going from Celery to Chancy is typically just replacing your `delay()/apply_async()` with `push()` and swapping `@shared_task()` with `@job()`.

If you have hundreds of employees and need to run hundreds of millions of jobs a day, it's never going to be the right choice - go with something like Hatchet. Chancy's for teams of one to dozens that need a simple option while still getting things like global rate limits and workflows.
by nosianu | 2025-04-04 17:00:57+00:00
Just a minor nitpick.

> For example, European regulation prohibits GMO

GMO is not forbidden. It just has to get approved case by case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_in_t... (section "Approach" shows what is required)

There is a large per-country component too.

> The EU uses the precautionary principle, demanding a pre-market authorisation for any GMO to enter the market and a post-market environmental monitoring.

Alternative link (EU site): https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/projects-and-acti...

Much of the monitoring is to avoid or trace cross-contamination between fields, and ultimately the reason for that is significant consumer demand for non-GMO food, so that farmers who are non-GMO don't want their crops contaminated by a neighboring field that has GMO plants.