MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by david_shi | 2025-04-04 01:12:42+00:00
"On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland’s — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe."

1. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/borgesaleph.pdf
by centra_minded | 2025-04-04 01:13:11+00:00
Modern programming already is very, very far from strict obedience and formal symbolism. Most programmers these days (myself included!) are using libraries, frameworks, and other features that mean what they are doing in practice is wielding sky-high abstractions, gluing things together they do not (and can not) fully understand the inner workings of.

If I create a website with Node.js, I’m not manually managing memory, parsing HTTP requests byte-by-byte, or even attempting to fully grasp the event loop’s nuances. I’m orchestrating layers of code written by others, trusting that these black boxes will behave as advertised according to my best, but deeply incomplete, understanding of them.

I'm not sure what this means for LLMs programming, but I already feel separated from the case Dijkstra lays out.
by progmetaldev | 2025-04-04 01:13:48+00:00
His series on YouTube, Dave's Garage, has really helped me to conceptualize Operating Systems in the past that I used, but didn't really fully understand. I started with Atari DOS, but moved to the 286 roughly around the time it started to become popular, along with MS-DOS. I'm 45 now, so didn't think about things as deeply back then, as far as constraints and why things may have been built the way they were. I think his series really does a great job at looking into both technology and company politics (especially his time at Microsoft).

https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?feature=shared
by Kon-Peki | 2025-04-04 01:13:59+00:00
> I had thought it was dead.

HP tried to kill it. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 years ago they announced the EOL. This company - VMS Software Inc (VSI) was formed specifically to buy the rights and maintain/port it. So you have an interesting situation.

Old VAX and Alpha systems are supported, supposedly indefinitely, but if you have an Itanium system it has to be newer than a certain age. HP didn’t sell the rights to support the older Itaniums, and no longer issues licenses for them. So there is a VMS hardware age gap. Really old is ok. Really new is ok.
by saila | 2025-04-04 01:14:22+00:00
The call to logging.basicConfig happens at import time, which could cause issues in certain scenarios. For a one-off script, it's probably fine, but for a production app, you'd probably want to set up logging during app startup from whatever your main entry point is.

The Python standard library has a configparser module, which should be used instead of custom code. It's safer and easier than manual parsing. The standard library also has a tomllib module, which would be an even better option IMO.
by zarmin | 2025-04-04 01:14:53+00:00
This comment indirectly represents my current biggest fear with respect to AI; I have encountered a disturbing lack of comprehension for figurative language. Abstractions, analogies, and figurative language are, I believe, critical tools for thinking. "Rotten wood, what are you even saying?"

People also seem to be losing their ability to detect satire.

I'm concerned GenAI will lower creative standards too, that people will be fine with the sound of suno, or the look of Dall-E. How then would the arts evolve?
by Lerc | 2025-04-04 01:15:01+00:00
I'm not sure if this is a problem with overfitting. I'm ok with the model knowing what Indiana Jones or the Predator looks like with well remembered details, it just seems that it's generating images from that knowledge in cases where that isn't appropriate.

I wonder if it's a fine tuning issue where people have overly provided archetypes of the thing that they were training towards. That would be the fastest way for the model to learn the idea but it may also mean the model has implicitly learned to provide not just an instance of a thing but a known archetype of a thing. I'm guessing in most RLHF tests archetypes (regardless of IP status) score quite highly.
by card_zero | 2025-04-04 01:15:37+00:00
I put it to you that same difference. These matters of degree are what copyright lawyers haggle over. It implies to me that the whole edifice is forced into being, for its desirable (?) effects, and has no concrete foundation. Nothing pure and elegant and necessary about copyright.

Well, you asked why, anyway, and there's why: it's a natural thing to do.
by squiggleblaz | 2025-04-04 01:17:13+00:00
I've never taken it as wish that employees have some cult like adoration, but as a team building exercise. I don't like it, it's cringe, but it's nothing worse than a bit of meaningless cringe. I have heard the theory of the fine line between a CEO and a cult leader, but I've never worked at a company that came anywhere near that fine line. Every CEO I've worked with has known that we're there due to a mutually beneficial agreement.
by lmm | 2025-04-04 01:17:30+00:00
> In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be part of the bond that ties different people together throughout time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker? That seems like a horrible position to be in.

We have plenty of examples where this has already happened. Traditions that were maintained at significant cost in the face of difficulties or opposition. Caretakers of something ancient who struggle to find an heir. We tend to view them positively.

> Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property.

I suspect this has been misreported. Japanese mortgage terms are pretty normal and property prices are much lower than in the west (even the bubble only really affected central Tokyo). There's a practice of an elderly parent being able to get a mortgage that's then "inherited" by a child, in cases where the parent is retired or close to retirement, but it's pretty much a face-saving (and tax-avoidance) measure.
by ryan_lane | 2025-04-04 01:17:43+00:00
> by enabling people in the working class to find genuine work that produces value, not some ditch-digging make-work government program

Like building out clean energy infrastructure?

Modern "ditch digging government programs" aren't necessarily low-skill. Even at the time, the new deal government programs were massively beneficial for society while also providing jobs for folks who needed it, at reasonable wages. Let's not shit on good government programs just because the right has been feeding us propaganda demonizing it for decades.
by BiraIgnacio | 2025-04-04 01:18:45+00:00
Speaking about the book, Shriver said "I wanted to write a dystopic novel set in the very near future. But that's an established form and I needed to make my project distinctive. I didn't think there had been a lot of novels written about the dystopic economic future. Having, like the rest of us, gone through the whole 2008 financial debacle I thought I had plenty of material. My reading on what happened in 2008 is that we dodged a bullet. I feel as if that bullet is still whizzing around the planet."
by wesapien | 2025-04-04 01:19:38+00:00
Fake, no not at all. Look around your where live. Think about who, where, and how those things were made. Scam? From whose perspective? There is only one global reserve currency. For all intents and purposes, that is the crown and heavy is the head that wears it. Sure it feels like a scam for anyone outside of the 1% or the political class or the plutocracy.

The world followed the lead and it just wanted reciprocity (exclude the enemies of course). What seems fake to you and who is getting scammed by who?
by nathan_douglas | 2025-04-04 01:19:55+00:00
Location: USA, ET Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Lately Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, Node.js, DevOps, SRE, observability, getting into Slurm, Nomad, MLOps, HPC, etc. Résumé: https://ndouglas.github.io/resume/resume.pdf (a tad outdated since it doesn't reflect my goals) Email: <blocked now> GitHub: https://github.com/ndouglas LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nug-doug/ (I'd love to connect with people in the AI/ML space even if you don't wanna hire me)

Hi, I'm Nate. I've been a DevOps/Platform engineer for ~10 years and was a Mac/iOS app developer before that. My background is broad and strange, I'm less of a t-shaped person than a comb-shaped guy with a bunch of weird deep spikes and more than a few weird gaps.

I want to move into machine learning and AI, ideally HPC and/or scientific/research computing. My plan is to move into MLOps, then move from there into HPC, and my longterm goal (5-10 years) is to move into deep tech research and possibly get my PhD in CS or math (somewhere in the area of topology/manifolds if the latter).

I recently had a come-to-$DEITY moment and I'm taking a week off work to do a deep-dive on Slurm and as many other topics as I can cram into each day. I'm new in this space and I have a lot to learn, but I'm really ambitious and looking for a place that won't slow me down.
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-04-04 01:20:01+00:00
MCP servers present a structured interface for accessing something and (often) a structured result.

You tell the LLM to visit your GitHub repository via http and it gets back… unstructured, unfocused content not designed with an LLM’s context window in mind.

With the MCP server the LLM can initiate a structured interface request and get back structured replies… so instead of HTML (or text extracted from HTML) it gets JSON or something more useful.
by silisili | 2025-04-04 01:21:23+00:00
Yes I understood the post but the difference is that Brazil didn't have a burgeoning or top tier electronics industry at any point I can remember. The US did and slowly gave it away to cheaper producers. Further, the average American has more disposable income and won't necessarily just grab what's cheapest.

So it's not easy to conclude they are the same in any fashion.

The question is what would happen today if the US ends up in the same situation. Will we go back to producing top tier electronics, or get stuck with crappy brands taking advantage of the situation? It's hard to say. I'd guess a mix of both. Top tier stuff would probably in house what they can, but the low end would get much, much worse. But that's just me guessing.
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-04 01:21:35+00:00
Eh. This always gets presented as a, "Why don't Millennial/Zoomer/Alpha men want to work?" Lack of training? Maybe. But I see that as more of a subset of the actual issue, which is two-fold: work conditions and compensation. So many jobs suck, and pay less than they should, and provide no real opportunity for growth. Let's break it down:

Jobs that suck: bad hours, bad bosses, bad processes that create inefficiency and stress.

Jobs that don't pay: can't afford a house, can't afford to date/get married/have children, can't establish a stable lifestyle .

Jobs that don't allow for growth: masters don't pass along their skills, managers don't promote (and, eventually, step aside), employers push employees out with stagnation and the hoarding of opportunities for nepo-hires or outsiders.

And why are we in this situation? Essentially, because someone likes the way things are. Managers and seniors don't want to change their work styles, even if those styles are dysfunctional. Employers don't want to pay. Older workers don't want to leave, or jeopardize their marketability by training juniors.

Every young worker can tell you about their experiences with older workers who promise to train and won't, managers who promise advancement and don't, having to be in the office at an ungodly hour or the warehouse or factory late into the night. And for what? Nothing of the American Dream, at least without putting up with the more ridiculous end of the job spectrum, or having been born into money, or having been lucky enough to rub shoulders with someone born into money.

It's Japan's hikikomori problem, transposed. Japanese authorities constantly blame the shut-ins, but outside observers recognize that the problem actually lies with the "functional" side of society, and its unwillingness to confront the way it alienates and produces perfectly reasonable, if dysfunctional, responses in these men (and women).
by ericwood | 2025-04-04 01:22:13+00:00
Articulation is everything! Distortion is compression, and simple things like the I-V curves of a clipping diode or slew limiting from a crappier op amp make a huge difference in the "feel" of distortion, especially with guitar. I love how Boss pedals in the 80s started using a fairly simple discrete op amp design to have greater control over this, as well as stacking on more and more active filtering stages for pre and post emphasis on the distortion.

Designing dirt pedals for guitar is a very humbling exercise in that many seemingly innocuous decisions can have large impacts on the end result. Often times you're bucking what would normally be EE best-practices and exploiting the edges of behavior in components to coax out pleasing nonlinearities. Equal parts engineering and what can feel like sorcery (but usually has a reasonable explanation).
by zomglings | 2025-04-04 01:22:34+00:00
This is the quiz Claude created about Hacker News:

Question: What's interesting about Hacker News?

1. Hacker News was created by Paul Graham in February 2007, initially called "Startup News" or "News.YC" before receiving its current name on August 14, 2007.

2. Hacker News users need to accumulate 501 "karma" points before they're allowed to downvote content, as part of measures to prevent the "Eternal September" phenomenon.

3. Hacker News was designed as a collaborative project between Y Combinator and Reddit, with Reddit co-founders helping develop the initial moderation algorithms.

Which statement do you think is the twist?
by dcow | 2025-04-04 01:22:55+00:00
I guess I’m saying that the specific application of stereotypes may be a feature. I don’t think we’ll see a single prevailing winner takes all model, so there is diversity in that respect too. And I think you will even see diversity from a single model. In other words, I don’t think Daniel Craig is the only thing a model will return for “suave english spy”. Just a cheap and easy one.
by NegativeK | 2025-04-04 01:23:47+00:00
The idea that everyone is either full lazy or not lazy is a bit reductionist. People change their behavior with the right (or wrong) stimulus.

Also, I won't remotely claim that it's the case here, but external pressures regularly push people into do the wrong thing. It doesn't mean anyone is blameless, but ignoring those pressures or the right (or wrong) stimuli makes it a lot harder to actually deal with situations like this.
by salgernon | 2025-04-04 01:24:23+00:00
One minor thing to consider is that hobbyists weren't distributing the source code (as posted in the OP) but trading the paper tape of the executable interpreter. They wanted the interpreter so they could write their own software that was probably unrelated to basic itself, that was just a means to an end.

The industry pretty quickly moved to incorporate basic in rom on many platforms and microsoft was able to capitalize on that integration through licensing. I don't think his letter did much other than antagonize hobbyists - but they made a lot licensing to the hardware manufacturers later on (and the hardware was truly more valuable with basic on board.

(One of my all time to this day favorite computers from that era is the TRS-80 Model 100. I don't remember if Microsoft provided the entire software stack for it, but I believe it was the last product that Bill Gates actually contributed to the software development.)
by Teever | 2025-04-04 01:24:31+00:00
If other countries are sensible they'll create funds to contribute to the domestic development of AGPL licensed alternatives as well funds for the development of domestic data centers with the eventual goal of banning the use of American based cloud software altogether.

But that isn't the only option that's available to these other countries:

> Dubbed a “bazooka” by some EU officials when it came into force in 2023, the ACI allows the bloc to select from a wide range of retaliatory measures, such as revoking the protection of intellectual property rights or their commercial exploitation, for example, software downloads and streaming services.[0]

Maybe it's time for other countries to respond by taking the copyright off of American media and setting up their own affordable streaming sites to a global market.

[0] https://archive.ph/PNXt6#selection-2171.0-2175.232
by api | 2025-04-04 01:25:42+00:00
This is the same argument we made in the 90s about what the web was going to do. What ended up happening was the growth of aggregators and silos like Facebook that baited everyone with ease of use into putting everything into their walled garden and then monetized it. The creators, namely the posters of the content, got nothing.

The same is happening already with AI creations. Doing it yourself is work and takes some technical skill, so most people use hosted AI services. Guess who makes all the money?

You will be able to create and share your own spin on Star Wars. You won’t see anything for that except maybe cred or some upvotes. The company that hosts it and provides the gateway and controls the algorithms that show it to people will get everything.
by ivraatiems | 2025-04-04 01:25:49+00:00
I think there is a good chance you are roughly right. I also think that the "secret sauce" of sapience is probably not something that can be replicated easily with the technology we have now, like LLMs. They're missing contextual awareness and processing which is absolutely necessary for real reasoning.

But even so, solving that problem feels much more attainable than it used to be.
by codedokode | 2025-04-04 01:26:07+00:00
> The problem with ideas is that they have to be good.

No they don't, look at music popular in social networks.

> and now creation will be (relatively) easy. More taste makers will be slinging content and we'll wind up in a land of abundance.

Even before the generative AI, I think we live in the era where there are more creators than ever in history: everybody today can publish their music or art without any large investments (except for instruments: they are expensive as always). I would prefer we have cheaper pianos, samples and microphones instead of worthless music-copying models.
by do_not_redeem | 2025-04-04 01:26:53+00:00
You're just describing ordinary challenge-response. That has nothing to do with homomorphic encryption and there are plenty of examples from before homomorphic encryption became viable, for example https://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/security/aim/index.htm

Homomorphic encryption hides data, not computation. If you've been trying to learn compsci from GPT, you might have fallen victim to hallucinations. I'd recommend starting from wikipedia instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

And btw most games are cracked within a week of release. You have way too much faith in buzzwords and way too little faith in bored Eastern European teenagers.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-04 01:27:58+00:00
Xi Jinping has removed many of those protections though like the maximum term count so he could stay in power.

And Ireland politics got me pretty sad. It just seems to pingpong between two equally inept parties (fianna fail and fine gael) and nothing new ever happens. They just keep piling problem on problem without ever solving anything. I remember there being a lot of fuss about patients in hallways during mary harney's reign in the mid '00s and I don't think that was ever solved. Last time I ended up in hospital there I ended up in exactly that situation. The post-2007 housing crisis is another one. Does anyone actually expect that to be ever solved? And the strange thing is, this country has no shortage of land whatsoever.

What happens is that one party blames their predecessor and wins the election and then next term things switch back again through exactly the same mechanism.

I think something more left like sinn fein would be good for the country but they have too much image baggage due to their past. And labour seems to really just sit at the sidelines forever.