MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by os2warpman | 2025-04-06 20:06:02+00:00
I became an Amiga user starting in the mid-1980s and my recollection was that even by the time of the introduction of the 500 and 2000 (my Amiga 2000 is still sitting downstairs in the basement on a shelf next to my 1000) Amiga was already well behind the PC and Macintosh in terms of users by the mid-to-late 80s.

It was a hobby programmer's platform because it had become a hobby. Like the Saab of computers (I also owned a Saab).

Somewhere to play games and write demos in the evening after having spent all day at work in MPW or Turbo Pascal.

It is impossible to know, due to obfuscation and (honestly) lying, how many Amigas were ever sold but it was somewhere between 3-7 million in total for all models worldwide from birth to death.

Ahoy tried to figure it out- Nobody Knows How Many Amigas Commodore Sold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXCWYKSjHnI

The Amiga's adoring fans were/are extremely vocal, but comparatively few in numbers.

Users often also had to become hobby programmers because the market was so small and they had to write their own programs to implement software that was unavailable on the platform- this was the case with me.

In the US, at least. Europe, Germany in particular, was probably a different story.

I imagine BeOS (Damn, I'm a winner in picking niche OSes) had the highest ever percentage of hobby programmers because EVERYBODY other than GoBe was a hobbyist on that platform.
by rybosome | 2025-04-06 20:06:08+00:00
I see, thanks for the clarification.

Yes, that’s true - the current notion of instructions and data are too intertwined to allow a pure data construct.

I can imagine an API-level option for either a data message, or a data content block within an image (similarly to how images are sent). From the models perspective, probably input with specific delimiters, and then training to utterly ignore all instructions within that.

It’s an interesting idea, I wonder how effective it would be.
Ask HN: What are some neat or useful equations you know?
by y33t | 2025-04-06 20:06:12+00:00
Something worth saving in a programmable calculator, like Naismith's Rule [1] or calculating the day of week for any date [2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naismith%27s_rule

2: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~alopez-o/math-faq/node73.html
by buu700 | 2025-04-06 20:06:28+00:00
I like the idea of CVSS, but it's definitely less precise than I'd like as-is. e.g. I've found that most issues which I would normally think of as low-severity get bumped up to medium by CVSS just for being network-based attack vectors, even if the actual issue is extremely edge case, extremely complex and/or computationally expensive to exploit, or not clearly exploitable at all.
by ranger_danger | 2025-04-06 20:06:41+00:00
I think one of the growing threats lately in the community has been over malicious client-side javascript, especially when the client handles end-to-end encrypted content (used on sites like Proton, MEGA etc.), so requiring users to trust Google with the contents of these client pages, and by extension the emails themselves, seems (in my opinion) to defeat the entire point of this feature.

Some work in this area has been done in the form of browser extensions that are used to verify signed assets delivered to the client:

https://github.com/freedomofpress/webcat

https://github.com/tasn/webext-signed-pages

https://github.com/jahed/webverify

https://github.com/facebookincubator/meta-code-verify

But unfortunately for now, none of these are seeing wide adoption and this remains an unsolved issue. It also does not require anyone to use known-good, audited and verified open-source components, meaning even if the client code is signed, it can still be malicious... there must be a greater reason to trust the code than just "trust me bro".
by DisjointedHunt | 2025-04-06 20:07:03+00:00
Two things can be true at the same time:

1. Model "performance" judged by proxy metrics of intelligence have improved significantly over the past two years.

2. These capabilities are yet to be stitched together in the most appropriate manner for the cybersecurity scenarios the author is talking about.

In my experience, the best usage of Transformer models has come from a deep integration into an appropriate workflow. They do not (yet) replace the new exploration part of a workflow, but they are very scarily performant at following mid level reasoning assertions in a massively parallelized manner.

The question you should be asking yourself is if you can break down your task into however many small chunks that are constrained by feasiility in time to process , chunk those up into appropriate buckets or even better, place them in-order as though you were doing those steps with your expertise - an extension of self. Here's how the two approaches differ:

"Find vulnerabilities in this code" -> This will saturate across all models because the intent behind this mission is vast and loosely defined, while the outcome is expected to be narrow.

" (a)This piece of code should be doing x, what areas is it affecting, lets draw up a perimeter (b) Here is the dependency graph of things upstream and downstream of x, lets spawn a collection of thinking chains to evaluate each one for risk based on the most recent change . . . (b[n]) Where is this likely to fail (c) (Next step that a pentester/cybersecurity researcher would take) "

This has been trial and error in my experience but it has worked great in domains such as financial trading and decision support where experts in the field help sketch out the general framework of the process where reasoning support is needed and constantly iterate as though it is an extension of their selves.
by praestigiare | 2025-04-06 20:07:33+00:00
You are of course correct that fact checking is not sufficient to protect us from all the ways that a journalistic work could mislead. But it does help when they are based on lies. As in the article this discussion is happening under. It helps address that problem, specifically. It seems like a strange reaction to say that this example of a lie being uncovered makes you less trustful of fact checking.

In addition to that, I am not sure if you have ever worked with an independent fact checker, but they very much do make an effort to point out misleading, cherry-picked, and out of context information.
by InkCanon | 2025-04-06 20:07:45+00:00
Frankly the overarching story about evals (which receives very little coverage) is how much gaming is going on. On the recent USAMO 2025, SOTA models scored 5%, despite claiming silver/gold in IMOs. And ARC-AGI: one very easy way to "solve" it is to generate masses of synthetic examples by extrapolating the basic rules of ARC AGI questions and train it on that.
by pessimizer | 2025-04-06 20:08:52+00:00
Europe is full of oligarchs, and has less class mobility than the US. The history of Europe is a history of oligarchs throwing peasants at each other.

A middle-class lifestyle when one doesn't have to spend on the military might fool you into thinking that Europe is egalitarian (everybody looks healthy), and looking egalitarian can look like a lack of corruption if your glasses are dirty. Meanwhile, there are families that have been controlling that continent for hundreds of years.

The funny thing about the European rearmament bluff is that any weapons bought by Europe are eventually going to be aimed at other Europeans. It isn't that Europe needs to defend itself from the outside, it's that Europeans need to be protected from each other.
by ifyouknewone | 2025-04-06 20:08:53+00:00
A few months ago, I caught Gumroad trying to roll out MOR (Merchant Operator of Record) on Twitter and immediately called them out on it. They were attempting to launch this feature before it was even completed.

They were internally rolling it out globally, even for parts of the world without a taxation system to collect on. Nevertheless, Gumroad was still planning to apply these charges. This was despite the fact that there are countless existing and affordable platforms, 100,000 times more developed—that could seamlessly integrate with Gumroad and already have this system in place. However, they decided to build it themselves.

Why? I’m not entirely sure, but I’m willing to bet it has something to do with Sahil taking a position at DOGE and perhaps an effort to obscure payment activity.

Why else? All the other scaled and fully built systems are likely to face heavy scrutiny over the next 24 months. And if a system is "still being built" or "unfinished," I guess it’s much harder to comply with regulators or provide data in response to FOIA requests, isn’t it?

things that make you go hmmmmm.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-06 20:09:20+00:00
I understand my likely longevity to be between 60 and 100 years. When I talk about my inevitable death, I fully expect it to occur sometime in the next 40 years. If it does not happen after another 60 years, I may be forced to re-evaluate my mortal status. Until then, my death is inevitable ... and a completely useless analogy to a national debt driven currency collapse.
by robocat | 2025-04-06 20:09:28+00:00
> manufacturing startups

Oxymoron? VC money chases high growth, high margin businesses.

How would a manufacturing business fit the VC funded model?

Aside: article with an interesting take on VC -- unfortunately however with an extremely long-winded intro. https://pivotal.substack.com/p/making-markets-in-time
by bcoates | 2025-04-06 20:09:45+00:00
I mean... most businesses, particularly small businesses and startups, aren't exactly doing brain surgery on a rocketship.

It’s pretty likely that they have extremely dull problems like "running an inbound call center is a lot of work" or "people keep having their mail stolen and/or lying that they did" that "more smarter gpus" won't solve
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-06 20:09:49+00:00
Not an expert but my impression is that the title and intro are worded in a highly misleading manner.

IIUC they're transforming the data before compressing it. Also IIUC this is an established method.

Because of the nature of the data and the transform involved, you can get reasonable results with random numbers. That's already been done, but this work brute forces seeds to optimize the compression ratio and then derives the transform on the fly from the seed in order to save on memory bandwidth.

I feel like (again, non-expert) there are much deeper implications about current ML models here. The fact that a randomized transform can have this sort of impact seems to imply that there's much less information encoded by the data than we otherwise might expect given its sheer size.

Regarding Pi. You can't encode arbitrary data using arbitrary sequences and expect to come out ahead on average. But you can encode specific data using algorithms that exhibit specific behavior.
by userbinator | 2025-04-06 20:10:53+00:00
This. The vast majority of browser exploits are in code related to the JS engine and its accompanying huge API surfaces, and even those rare ones which don't require it are often obfuscated/hidden using JS.

Exploits aside, the amount of user-hostile irritating annoyances that just disappear without JS is also worth mentioning. Many years ago, I remember a site that was completely usable, yet continually begged me to "enable JavaScript for a better experience!", so I tried it and was immediately inundated with popups, moving flashing crap all over the page, and other things that I did NOT consider a "better experience". Never again.
by Ygg2 | 2025-04-06 20:11:38+00:00
> The force of gravity is weak. And not just a little bit weak. It’s so much weaker than the other three fundamental forces—electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces—that it’s almost impossible to provide analogies.

Nothing in nature prevents gravity from just being super weak. Some forces could just be super weak.

The unspoken premise of gravity being weaker than other forces is that all forces were unified at some point. So iff you assume all forces in nature were once one force, then gravity being weak is an anomaly.
by r_klancer | 2025-04-06 20:11:45+00:00
Though a local model I'm running (gemma-3-27b-it; https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/gemma-3-27b-it-GGU...) just told me various correct sounding bits about his history with alcohol (correctly citing his alma mater and first wife), but threw in:

"Sobriety & AA: Newman got sober in 1964 and remained so for the rest of his life."

Which doesn't check out. And it includes plausible but completely hallucinated URLs (as well as a valid biography.com URL that completely omits information about alcohol.)
by hydrogen7800 | 2025-04-06 20:12:03+00:00
More like: they are no longer starving, and can now tend to the pain in their foot.

I've heard similar versions of this argument, usually something about modern poor people having it pretty good because they have microwave, while Carnegie didn't.

>I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. [0]

We're now complaining about people studying painting, poetry, etc.

[0]https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...
by StickyRibbs | 2025-04-06 20:12:20+00:00
There's the politics of the corporations and then there's the business of the science behind LLM's, this article feels like the former.

Maybe someone active in the research can comment? I feel like all of these comments are just conjecture/anecdotal and don't really get to the meat of this question of "progress" and the future of LLM's
by aw1621107 | 2025-04-06 20:12:45+00:00
I think that example comes from the talk "Safety in an Unsafe World" [0, slides at 1].

There are some crates which implement lock ordering as well (e.g., [2, 3]). lock-ordering states it's inspired by the technique discussed in the talk as well, for what it's worth.

[0]: https://youtu.be/qd3x5MCUrhw?t=1001 (~16:41 in case the timestamp link doesn't work)

[1]: https://joshlf.com/files/talks/Safety%20in%20an%20Unsafe%20W... (deadlock prevention example starting slide 50)

[2]: https://github.com/akonradi/lock-ordering

[3]: https://github.com/alaric/lock_order
by globnomulous | 2025-04-06 20:14:48+00:00
After reading your comment, I visited a synopsis of Echopraxia, because, I realized, I could remember almost nothing of it -- only a few snapshots of a space station and vampiric predation. Turns out it left almost no imprint on my brain. Blindsight is, I agree, much tighter (and thus, for me apparently, more memorable). Looking back on Echopraxia, I wonder whether it suffers, as Children of Time*, I think, does, from trying too hard to expand its established universe.

The god virus really is a fun idea -- more of Watts' one-man war on the tree of life (not only is God not at the top some metaphysical/ontological hierarchy; it's at the very bottom) -- but, in retrospect, I think you're right that it's not as well developed as it could have been or maybe needed to be.
by Aloisius | 2025-04-06 20:14:51+00:00
> Hell, when Microsoft was still shipping software on CDs you may have noticed a little fine print mentioning the Caribbean island on which the disc was technically manufactured.

I don't recall this at all. What software was it?

Going through my box of ancient software, they all either say made in the US either on the CD/DVD or on the packaging, except for a copy of Office 97 and Office 2007 which says made in Puerto Rico (which is the US).

They certainly had CDs pressed in other countries for foreign markets. I imagine some foreign made laptops might have come with CD/DVDs pressed in those countries.
by 9283409232 | 2025-04-06 20:15:33+00:00
>When submitted a list of questions about his work for DOGE, Lavingia told Wired: “Sorry, I’m not going to answer these, besides to say I’m unpaid. And a fan of your work!”

Crazy to me that people have actually been convinced that a bunch of billionaires and millionaires have suddenly decided to work for the good of the American people free of charge.
by mvac | 2025-04-06 20:15:54+00:00
It reminded me a part of the "The Tar Pit" esssay from The Mythical Man-month:

> Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward? > First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design.

...

> The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination.
by microtonal | 2025-04-06 20:17:10+00:00
The AT&T lawsuits are a moot point, as they were all settled in the early 1990s. They are the sole reason why FreeBSD and NetBSD even came into existence – by forking the 4.4BSD-Lite codebase after the disputed code had been eliminated or replaced with non-encumbered reimplementations. Otherwise, we would all be running on descendants of 4.4BSD-Lite today.

The lawsuit was settled in Feb 1994, FreeBSD was started in 1993. FreeBSD was started because development on 386BSD was too slow. It took FreeBSD until Nov 1994 until it rebased on BSD-Lite 4.4 (in FreeBSD 2.0.0).

At the time 386BSD and then FreeBSD were much more mature than Linux, but it took from 1992 until the end of 1994 for the legal clarity around 386BSD/FreeBSD to clear up. So Linux had about three years to try to catch up.
by Sharlin | 2025-04-06 20:17:46+00:00
> Surprising Behavior of Path::join With Absolute Paths

> I was not the only one who was confused by this behavior. Here’s a thread on the topic, which also includes an answer by Johannes Dahlström:

> > The behavior is useful because a caller […] can choose whether it wants to use a relative or absolute path, and the callee can then simply absolutize it by adding its own prefix and the absolute path is unaffected which is probably what the caller wanted. The callee doesn’t have to separately check whether the path is absolute or not.

> And yet, I still think it’s a footgun. It’s easy to overlook this behavior when you use user-provided paths. Perhaps join should return a Result instead? In any case, be aware of this behavior.

Oh, hey, that's me! I agree that it's a footgun, for what it's worth, and there should probably get a dedicated "absolutize" method for getting the "prefix this if relative, leave as is if already absolute" semantics.

(link to the thread: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/rationale-behind-replacing-pat...)
by praestigiare | 2025-04-06 20:19:06+00:00
Numbers of cases, deaths, and how those numbers are tabulated are factual data. We can argue over the data quality, but at this point we have data from many independent countries' health services. Our view of these facts has gotten better with time, and we now have more certainty than we did in the early days of the pandemic.

Recommendations, regulations, and responses to the pandemic as it happened are factual in the sense that they happened, but are not "facts" in the same way. It is not a fact that standing in a restaurant without a mask was terrorism and sitting was fine. Instead, given the information available at the time, and the practical requirement to have your mask off to eat, this policy was chosen for a time as a risk mitigation balanced with practical requirements. The appropriateness of this policy is a matter of opinion.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-06 20:19:06+00:00
I'm sorry that reality has a well-known liberal bias, but the Brookings link that was posted is simply data - it's not opinion or analysis:

> This data tool allows users to track the flow of federal funds in real time. It shows actual daily, weekly, monthly, and annual processed outlays to key programs and departments, as well as to states, Congress, and the Judiciary. This tool only reports outlays of federal funds, meaning the actual transmission of funds from the federal government to another entity.

> This tool makes few to no adjustments to the data, meaning that cyclical, seasonal, idiosyncratic, and expected variation in patterns of outlays over time remain. Because this tool only reports outlays, one cannot discern directly whether there is a gap between obligated funds and their outlay. Furthermore, if federal agencies have changed the rate at which they are newly obligating funds (e.g., by declining to sign new contracts), those changes would only gradually be reflected in outlays.

The fact that you attack the messenger (and not in any way questioning the methodology of the data collection, for example) explains why so many of us in the current environment are so sick and tired of these lazy attempts at "argument". I'm sure you have your own alternative facts, though.
by KoftaBob | 2025-04-06 20:20:04+00:00
> The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters.

A big reason for that is influence from Edward Bernays:

"Edward Louis Bernays was an American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". While credited with advancing the profession of public relations, his techniques have been criticized for manipulating public opinion, often in ways that undermined individual autonomy and democratic values."

Bernays' mother, Anna, was Sigmund Freud's sister. There seemed to be a talent in that family in understanding the human psyche, and how to utilize that understanding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
by tyre | 2025-04-06 20:20:16+00:00
This doesn't matter.

Look, SF voters are not going to vote for this. It's not going to happen. The people you're courting—by definition—don't live there. The existing economic base is fine.

Well-paid tech employees aren't civically engaged and their salaries are enough to cover their housing. Until they aren't, like when starting a family, at which point many move out of the city and no longer have a vote.

The major, high-turnout voters are _home owners_. They do not want cheaper permitting because it will drive down their property values. That's the whole point!

It's the same as the homelessness epidemic in SF. Everyone theoretically supports it but in a strong council system, no supervisor (their equivalent of a city council member) will support it for their district. "I support homeless shelters and de-regulation, just not in my district" is the prevailing take, which means neither will ever pass.
by simplify | 2025-04-06 20:20:38+00:00
> Why is that a problem to you?

Because seculars/athiests often believe that they're superior to the "stupid, God-believing religious" people, since their beliefs are obviously based on "pure logic and reason".

Yet, when you boil down anyone's value system to its fundamental essence, it turns out to always be a religious-like belief. No human value is based on pure logic, and it's annoying to see someone pretend otherwise.

> Someone is not good or bad because you agree with them

Right, that's what I was arguing against.

> Even a religious person can recognise that an atheist doing charitable work is being good

Sure, but for the sake of argument, I'm honing in on the word "good" here. You can only call something "good" if it aligns with your personal value system.

> The attitude you describe is wrong

You haven't demonstrated how. Could just be a misunderstanding.
by WillAdams | 2025-04-06 20:21:11+00:00
Simon Winchester did a book on this:

_The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World_

(alternately title _Exactly_)

https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/56364115-the-perfect...

and for further technical details see:

_Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy_ by Wayne R. Moore

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262130806/foundations-of-mechan...