MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by psunavy03 | 2025-04-29 20:48:48+00:00
Let's wait for the investigation to complete before we opine on what is or isn't a "disaster waiting to happen." The entire aviation system is a "disaster waiting to happen" unless you assume a baseline level of aircrew competence, and the question will be whether or not the aircrew fell victim to a systematic risk inherent in what they were doing, or whether they just screwed up.

Sad to say, as a former aviator, I have seen it before where people died and families lost loved ones ultimately because of a systematic risk inherent in what they were doing, but also other times because someone flat-out just screwed up.
by roschdal | 2025-04-29 20:48:51+00:00
The human brain is dramatically more energy-efficient than AI models like ChatGPT.

Human brain: Uses about 20 watts of power.

ChatGPT (GPT-4): Running a single query can use hundreds of watts when accounting for the entire datacenter infrastructure (some estimates suggest 500–1000 watts per query on average, depending on model size and setup).

If we assume:

20 watts for the human brain thinking continuously,

1000 watts for ChatGPT processing one complex query,

then the human brain is about 50x more energy-efficient (or 5000% more efficient) than ChatGPT per task, assuming equal cognitive complexity (which is debatable, but good for ballpark comparison).
by kazinator | 2025-04-29 20:49:47+00:00
I deployed this, instead of my usual honeypot script.

It's not working very well.

In the web server log, I can see that the bots are not downloading the whole ten megabyte poison pill.

They are cutting off at various lengths. I haven't seen anything fetch more than around 1.5 Mb of it so far.

Or is it working? Are they decoding it on the fly as a stream, and then crashing? E.g. if something is recorded as having read 1.5 Mb, could it have decoded it to 1.5 Gb in RAM, on the fly, and crashed?

There is no way to tell.
by daurentius523 | 2025-04-29 20:50:05+00:00
"bad design" - It is not design just result of Unicode rules.

Mind you:

naïve.txt

naïve.txt

can both exist, because:

ï vs ï

0xC3AF vs 0x69CC88

is not same.

Linux does sane (secure) thing - does not care. If bytes are different - name is different.

Windows and mac don't solve this anyway.

Having only one of Α.txt, A.txt, a.txt is not, and was not, а option.
by TobTobXX | 2025-04-29 20:50:21+00:00
Sure, it's a value calculation.

If you're able to serve delicious pizzas afterwards, it was worth wasting the first kg (you might call it an investment).

If you're able to bring value to millions of users, it was worth to invest a few GWh into training.

You might disagree on the usefulness. I think, you shouldn't have wasted a kg of flour because I won't ever eat your pizzas anyway. But many (you, your guests, ChatGPT users) might think it was worth it.
by sashank_1509 | 2025-04-29 20:50:31+00:00
India is as the commenter said, the worst of both worlds. The government managed to drive a comedian into hiding, for a make a crude (non political) joke about sex with parents. The government drove another comedian into hiding, for making a political joke and closed down the bar where he was performing, for the sole crime of hosting him. The government regularly censors movies, bans books, censors speech etc. At the same time we get no development, the drain outside my house is still not covered. It’s just arbitrary authoritarianism on the most pointless use cases.

India should have just been given to a monarch who liked the country and its people unlike the British or the Mughals
by MoonGhost | 2025-04-29 20:51:16+00:00
You can't get more info from LLMs than it actually holds. Like Anthropic pointed if LLMs knows the name but has no other info it starts hallucinating. The same probably happens here. LLM knows there must be a flag but can't remember all of them. Likely short reminder in prompt will help. (or search web for GPT) Just my $0.02.
by hedayet | 2025-04-29 20:52:10+00:00
Facebook did a great job open sourcing Llama and pushing the market to being competitive, but this list seems super shallow.

0. Introducing Llama API in preview

This one is good but not centre stage worthy. Other [closed] models have been offering this for a long time.

1. Fast inference with Llama API

How fast? and how must faster than others? This section talks about latency and there's absolutely no numbers in this section!

2. New Llama Stack integrations

Speculations with 0 new integration. Llama Stack with NVIDIA had already been announced and then this section ends with '...others on new integrations that will be announced soon. Alongside our partners, we envision Llama Stack as the industry standard for enterprises looking to seamlessly deploy production-grade turnkey AI solutions.'

3. New Llama Protections and security for the open source community

This one is not only the best on this page, but is actually good with announcement of - Llama Guard 4, LlamaFirewall, and Llama Prompt Guard 2

4. Meet the Llama Impact Grant recipients

Sorry but neither the gross amount $1.5 million USD, nor the average $150K/recipients is anything significant at Facebook scale.
by acdha | 2025-04-29 20:52:14+00:00
Oil has gone down, though, and the primary driver for the volatility was the tariffs. It’s not like there was a big change in production or something like the pandemic causing millions of people to change their driving habits.

Again, the question is simply what non-tariff factor would explain non-trivial prices over a month? If there isn’t one, it doesn’t seem unfair to attribute the increase to a huge policy change.
by tremon | 2025-04-29 20:52:44+00:00
FTA:

data recently analyzed by the board revealed that National Airport was the site of at least one near collision between an airplane and a helicopter each month from 2011 to 2024

I would say that statistic in and of itself qualifies as a "disaster waiting to happen". I agree that we should wait for the full report, but I don't think the GP is using hyperbole in this case.
by edmundsauto | 2025-04-29 20:53:05+00:00
Is there an interpretation where people credibly thought it was better to aggregate at the fleet grain rather than individual levels? Ie is there a good faith argument?

Not saying it was a great argument. But for the Meta-signal.

Ie on tariffs there is a reasonable explanation possible. It requires one to completely disregard almost all economic theory and history… but it does seem possible that a sufficiently economically naive person might reach this conclusion.
by sourcetms | 2025-04-29 20:53:15+00:00
An IDE for agents, that includes a general purpose agent inside so developers don't need to start with a framework or from scratch. It just works, out of the box.

I feel that the software development lifecycle for agents is uniquely iterative and requires a different set of tools and environment, so that's how this came to be. First we built the general purpose agent -> now we build the IDE around it.

For the curious: https://trypointer.com/
by jonathanlydall | 2025-04-29 20:53:16+00:00
Where I live, Gauteng Province in South Africa, our old scheme also ran out about 13 years ago.

It was BBB000 GP to ZZZ999 GP skipping vowels. The replacement scheme is BB00BB GP to ZZ00ZZ GP again skipping vowels.

I’m presently on holiday in a different province which used to have a scheme “like N<single letter for town> #####” but I see now they use the same current scheme as Gauteng except instead of being suffixed with GP (for Gauteng Province), they have ZN (for Kwazulu Natal).
by pmags | 2025-04-29 20:53:30+00:00
Note that admissions for MSc admissions usually differ quite a lot from PhD admissions, and the criteria can be very different across fields. Things have changed significantly since 2010 as well, and are likely to change even more radically in the next admissions cycle as a result of massive funding cuts to the sciences that the US is currently experiencing. Couple this with radically restricted foreign student visas resulting from new federal policy...

So this should probably be read as "Demystifying the American Graduate Admissions Process for MSc programs in CS in the 2010s".
by ty6853 | 2025-04-29 20:53:31+00:00
I didn't make any mistake. I considered all four of your very obvious points, which everyone here knows, it is excruciatingly boring to point them out.

But people are loathe to look at unintended consequences, I want to present one of them I find interesting. The mistake you are making so many presumptions about my pointing this out.

The point is you cannot stop this by discouraging the behavior, you only make it more profitable for the guy willing to do the dirty work and take the social shame or whatever comes down.

Therefore it has to be dealt with some other way.
by Remnant44 | 2025-04-29 20:53:32+00:00
It doesn't make it go away. Using your analogy - if you used 300lb to learn and then only made 10 lb of pizza after that, it would be a pretty poor use of resources.

If you instead went on to produce millions of pizzas for people and 30,000lb of flour, that 300lb you used to learn looks like a pretty reasonable investment.
by crq-yml | 2025-04-29 20:54:08+00:00
I was imagining this kind of product the other day, in the context of building content creation pipelines(I was looking into extending Blender to call out to ffmpeg and similar tools), and now here's a full example of where it could go - I'm on my phone but I'll dig in later.

My thought is that flow graphs are a great fit for the AI wave since the weakness in the graphs is mostly around "random access" problems that need to model a broad technical vocabulary, while the weakness in using the AI is in it not knowing the boundaries of the problem space and just generating endless text slop instead of using it to generate a configuration or remake a common algorithm with a small tweak. Tying the two together into a system that looks like "human oversight over automated coding details" should be a major step in the right direction.
by SamPatt | 2025-04-29 20:54:54+00:00
>1) O3 cheated by using Google search. This is both against the rules of the game and OP didn't use search either

I re-ran it without search, and it made no difference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43837832

>2) OP was much quicker. They didn't record their time but if their final summary is accurate then they were much faster.

Correct. This was the second bullet point of my conclusion:

>Humans still hold a big edge in decision time—most of my guesses were < 2 min, o3 often took > 4 min.”

I genuinely don't believe that I'm exaggerating or this is clickbait. The o3 geolocation capability astounded me, and I wanted to share my awe with others.
by TMWNN | 2025-04-29 20:55:03+00:00
>What Blue Origin really has going for them is effectively infinite funding for as long as Bezos wants to keep at it.

Infinite capital guarantees absolutely nothing. Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group, and Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:

>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
by TobTobXX | 2025-04-29 20:55:48+00:00
> Just because you divide a number by a lot to get a small number doesn't make the original number smaller.

A bus emits more CO2 than a car. Yet it is more friendly to the environment because it transports more people.

> Those are 200M/d prompts that wouldn't happen without the training.

Sure, but at least a few millions are deriving value from it. We know this because they pay. So this value wouldn't have been generated without the investment. That's how economics work.
by TRProduct | 2025-04-29 20:56:10+00:00
My team is trying to push an Android build to Google Play (we have an iOS app), but has been blocked because of Google's new employee verification requirement.

We've submitted all our documents and have continued to receive no response from support, its vague their previous responses as to why. On our application, Google is stating we have had income from Google Services in a country in which we do not operate, so clearly, there is a mismatch of records.

Here is the response we received. Has anyone else received this response? What did you do? We're stuck. - Hi, Thanks for contacting the Google Play team. Unfortunately, we are unable to verify the documents you provided and are unable to publish any apps.

Please note that your developer account will still be accessible, but you will be unable to publish any apps. To learn more about developer verifications, please visit Play Console Requirements and the Play Console Help Center. Thanks for your understanding, Regards, The Google Play Team. -

We cannot resubmit, and you can only appeal once. No other information has been provided.

Open to suggestions, we need to publish this Android version of our product but cannot get past this Google verification, and unclear what is 'unable to be verified'.
by decimalenough | 2025-04-29 20:56:12+00:00
I have traveled widely across both India and China. China is wealthier and better off across the board: HDI, GDP per capita, healthcare, you name it.

https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/china/india?sc=...

China has its problems for sure, but vast slabs of India remain mired in sub-Saharan Africa levels of poverty and squalor.
by bilekas | 2025-04-29 20:56:18+00:00
This is an interesting approach, it reminds me of YT creator actually. I'll find the YT creator, but basically he would make some script that would play the game like a race-course, with the goal being the finish line and iterate it N number of times, the script would keep iterating until it found the fastest solution.

I believe they called that machine learning.. Or re-enforced training.

I'm being slightly facetious, but my ignorant understanding of AI these days is basically the same no ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX08NT55YhA
by weird_trousers | 2025-04-29 20:56:23+00:00
> Crates are often abandoned seemingly for no reason, often before even hitting 1.0.

That is the one of the first things my colleagues told me after trying Rust for a few weeks: a laaaarge number of crates under 1.0, and so many abandoned crates, still published in crates.io. Some of those have even reported CVEs due to heavy `unsafe` usage for... nothing.

I love Rust, but I have the feeling that the language (and its community) lost the point since the release of the 2018 edition.
by otterley | 2025-04-29 20:56:31+00:00
Obviously it's impossible to cover all cases in a HN comment. I was perhaps a bit too broad when I suggested that the legal system doesn't treat code as speech. It does, sometimes; but even when it does, not all speech is treated alike for the purpose of legal analysis.

In the Bernstein cases, the Government was trying to squelch the author from publishing code that he personally wrote, that had scientific expressive value, and of which the Government required prepublication review, and the Ninth Circuit held:

"We emphasize the narrowness of our First Amendment holding. We do not hold that all software is expressive. Much of it surely is not. Nor need we resolve whether the challenged regulations constitute content-based restrictions, subject to the strictest constitutional scrutiny, or whether they are, instead, content-neutral restrictions meriting less exacting scrutiny. We hold merely that because the prepublication licensing regime challenged here applies directly to scientific expression, vests boundless discretion in government officials, and lacks adequate procedural safeguards, it constitutes an impermissible prior restraint on speech."

The Court, as you can see, was trying very hard not to declare some sort of framework or test to be applied to future cases.
by verdverm | 2025-04-29 20:57:31+00:00
That is not the argument the author is making.

Bezos recently said the WaPo opinion section would focus on "personal liberties and free markets", yet with Amazon he is not doing this. If Bezos cares about free markets so much, he would be fighting the tariffs rather than cozying up to a wanna be dictator. If Bezos actually believed in personal liberties, he would state that the White House has no business in commenting on how prices are displayed at their business.

"oligarchy" is increasing in word usage for a reason
by cynicalsecurity | 2025-04-29 20:57:41+00:00
This topic comes up from time to time and I'm surprised no one yet mentioned the usual fearmongering rhetoric of zip bombs being potentially illegal.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm yet to see a real life court case of a bot owner suing a company or an individual for responding to his malicious request with a zip bomb. The usual spiel goes like this: responding to his malicious request with a malicious response makes you a cybercriminal and allows him (the real cybercriminal) to sue you. Again, except of cheap talk I've never heard of a single court case like this. But I can easily imagine them trying to blackmail someone with such cheap threats.

I cannot imagine a big company like Microsoft or Apple using zip bombs, but I fail to see why zip bombs would be considered bad in any way. Anyone with an experience of dealing with malicious bots knows the frustration and the amount of time and money they steal from businesses or individuals.
by oblio | 2025-04-29 20:58:05+00:00
Why? Why should someone be a citizen because they were born in a specific country? With jus sanguinis things are much clearer: one of your parents is a citizen, you're a citizen. Your kids are citizens. In perpetuity.

Jus solis is a bit like right of way at American intersections: the person that's been there the longest goes first. Whaaaaaa? What if two cars arrive at the same time? What if 4 arrive at roughly at the same time? What is people can't agree who arrived first? A lot of the rest of the world gives way to the car coming from the right. Which is obvious and basically non-negotiable.

Similar idea here.
by acdha | 2025-04-29 20:58:09+00:00
And in your theory thousands of vendors around the world all randomly did this in the same direction at the same time? It’s not like chocolate eggs before Easter are the only thing going up while the rest of the economy is chugging along like normal.

Similarly, weather could explain the decline of winter gear sales in the northern hemisphere or specific commodities being hit by a storm but that wouldn’t affect the whole economy and we’d all have seen coverage of some epic monsoon or drought if it was that impactful.
by craftkiller | 2025-04-29 20:58:16+00:00
You point out that this behavior is unethical and in the same breath you say they should keep doing it. I'm having trouble reconciling these two statements, or thinking of examples of when unethical behavior should be encouraged[0]. Perhaps it should be "you *can* continue to eat as much meat as you want" instead of "you should [...]"? That way it acknowledges their agency and our inability to prevent their actions, without condoning them.

[0] so far the closest I've come is "perhaps in retaliation against an earlier injustice"
by Hizonner | 2025-04-29 20:58:17+00:00
... except that the complete collection of everything the UPS app needs to execute or display, in order to actually fulfill its function, summed up throughout all of its operation in every possible mode, probably fits in 1MB. If there's 100MB of stuff you store or potentially download for a shipping app, then you're including something that doesn't add value for the user.

Start by removing all the pictures, videos, and similar. Then take out the analytics crap. Then, if your app is still big, figure out what's wrong with your code.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-04-29 20:58:17+00:00
i have no idea what that has to do with what op quoted from your article:

> There is no way to provide both optimized assembly and equivalent C code and let the compiler use the former in the general case and the latter in special cases.

this is manifestly obviously possible (as i've said).

what you're talking about is something completely different goes by many names and uses many techniques (symbex, conex, sccp, scev, blah blah blah). many of these things are implemented in eg LLVM.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-29 20:58:46+00:00
> My hunch is that some people here might feel professionally threatened about it so they want to diminish it.

I don't think it's this. At least, I don't see a lot of that. What I do see a lot of is people realizing that AI is massively overhyped, and a lot of companies are capitalizing on that.

Until/unless it moves on from the hype cycle, it's hard to take it that seriously.
by sashank_1509 | 2025-04-29 21:00:06+00:00
It really is between 2 choices:

1. An authoritarian government that can actually do things but also mess up and be harsh against anyone opposing it - China

2. A democratic government that can’t get anything done, citizens can’t rely on police for any crimes, courts for any justice, politicians for any development, where the politics of the nation just constantly seeks to divide on basis of caste, religion, language etc, and the nation as a whole wallows in mediocrity.
by theshrike79 | 2025-04-29 21:00:10+00:00
I don’t have the time to “make my own deck”. The UI for Anki is janky at best.

I seriously tried making a deck for my kid for math and holy shit it was a chore and a half.

The same with trying to find a deck for a specific language, no luck there.

For iOS there are about a dozen “Anki” apps? One for 30€, the rest have some kind of in-app purchases.

I’ll rather pay for Duolingo
by CamperBob2 | 2025-04-29 21:01:03+00:00
What happens if we give the operator of the Chinese Room a nontrivial math problem, one that can't simply be answered with a symbolic lookup but requires the operator to proceed step-by-step on a path of inquiry that he doesn't even know he's taking?

The analogy I used in another thread is a third grader who finds a high school algebra book. She can read the book easily, but without access to teachers or background material that she can engage with -- consciously, literately, and interactively, unlike the Chinese Room operator -- she will not be able to answer the exercises in the book correctly, the way an LLM can.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-04-29 21:01:35+00:00
I think they went out of their way to make a mess of the power situation. It's a PITA to build in load-shedding, almost as if they were trying to handicap solar. And not all buildings even support being disabled by control. Running my radar only during the day is good enough for keeping an eye on expansion, yet the only way to do that is isolate the radar.
by aabhay | 2025-04-29 21:01:42+00:00
I think the better argument is about the direction of change versus the current magnitude.

If we are to believe that the models will get bigger, use more tokens, work for longer, this calculation can easily become very very skewed in the other direction.

Consider an agentic system that runs continuously for 6 hours. It is possible this system processes billions of tokens. That could more than equal a transatlantic flight in this hypothetical world.

Now compare this with non-AI work, like a CRUD app. Serving millions of queries in that same period would consume a tiny fraction of what ChatGPT consumes.

Rather than being a “win” for AI, the fact that we’re even 3 or 4 orders of magnitude away from this being a problem means that its already grounds to be concerned.
by mac-chaffee | 2025-04-29 21:01:54+00:00
I agree but there's a lot of nuance to the next question of "well what IS bad for the environment" and tech's role in that question.

I've been unsatisfied with how people in tech address that complex subject so I wrote about it here: https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2025/tech-and-the-climate-cr...