MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theamk | 2025-04-04 03:27:36+00:00
My rule has always been that once a shell script gets too complex, it's time to rewrite it in real language. This library is way, way beyond that threshold.

My recommendation for rewrite is "python with only stdlib". Using pip-installed libraries brings in the famous packaging problems, but you don't have to use it! Python's stdlib is fully "batteries included", and it has lots of useful things like ini file parser. And if your system has bash, it often has python as well, or at least it's easy to install. Things might get a bit more verbose, but they would be much more reliable and debuggable.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-04-04 03:28:06+00:00
The other thing is that the second anyone even perceives an opinion to be "anti-AI" they bombard you with "people thought the printing press lowered intellect too!" Or radio or TV or video games, etc.

No one ever considers that maybe they all did lower our attention spans, prevent us from learning as well as we used to, etc. and now we are at a point we can't afford to keep losing intelligence and attention span
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-04 03:29:11+00:00
I know what you mean. It takes the satisfaction out of a certain class of problems knowing that you can just generate the solution.

On the other hand, most tasks aren't fun nor satisfying and frankly they are a waste of time, like realizing you're about to spend the afternoon recredentializing in some aspect of Webpack/Gradle/BouncyCastle/Next.js/Combine/x/y/z just to solve one minor issue. And it's pure bliss when the LLM knows the solution.

I think the best antidote to the upset in your comment is to build bigger and more difficult things. Save your expertise for the stuff that could actually use your expertise rather than getting stuck wasting it on pure time burn like we had to in the past.
by jwr | 2025-04-04 03:29:40+00:00
If you think you can run a business with 10 high-skilled employees on $40,000 of revenue per month, boy, have I got news for you :-)

Similarly, if you think 1000 B2B SaaS subscriptions is an easy-to-achieve number, I'd wager a bet you haven't run a B2B SaaS business.

Roughly, the calculation is: at $40/month, a single subscription brings in $480/year. That means you can safely afford to spend roughly one hour of support on a subscription PER YEAR. If you spend more than 2h, you are definitely in the red. And you will get support requests, of all kinds: the ones you expect, and then all the stuff about lost passwords, inability to log in, network problems, lost invoices, requests to change the billing period, requests for invoices from last year for a customer that has since canceled and been deleted, data export/import, etc.

People who haven't run a business routinely underestimate the costs of running a business and imagine that these numbers mean that business owners are buying yachts and private jets. People who have run a business realize that it's much more difficult to make ends meet than it seems.
by dcow | 2025-04-04 03:30:58+00:00
If the book is the compiled work, then the source of a book is the author's creative process. And certainly that isn't open to all simply by purchasing the book.

But less obtusely: you don't copyright a book--which is why knowledge, language, literature should not be closed source. We'd have to find a different model to support authors than trying to prevent people from copying books. Patreon style models where you subscribe and get behind the scenes access to the creative process, additional content, early access, etc. seem to work well as do sponsorship models like YT where the more viewers you draw the more you get paid, rather than a fixed fee per individual to watch a video. And, simply pay-what-you-want based models where everyone understands they can contribute in a way that matches the value to them and their means also work. One of the strongest arguments for piracy is that the pirate would never have paid $700 for Photoshop in the first place so the value "lost" isn't real and never would have been realized by the author(s). (Note this argument doesn't work for petty theft of physical property because the thief deprives the owner of tangible property.)
by _bin_ | 2025-04-04 03:31:24+00:00
Yeah this would be my instinct even if someone somehow got a leaked TPM root EK and spoofed it with a bootkit. Your timings/latency/variance are still going to be different from a hardware chip, almost certainly. Yes you might be able to measure this and attempt to replay it but that gets hard, then you have to figure out e.g. how can you pin your hypervisor/mock TPM to a core so timings don't vary under load, etc. It's getting measurably harder to write good cheating software at this point.
by hello_moto | 2025-04-04 03:31:36+00:00
what you're saying in short is that the US economy has changed from Manufacture-based to Service-based, just like China.

People don't realize this but China is moving toward Service-based, naturally, as they raised their standard of living, thus education.

What's missing is not raising tax on Income but taxing Wealth: the super rich has their wealth sitting and growing unproductively (house appreciating is not productive, buying farm lands and rent it to other farmer isn't productive). Holding Limited version of a Ferrari isn't productive. Feel free to find other Assets.

Once the super rich completed their journey in this world, they will inherit billions to their kids, whose productivity output does not match the wealth they inherited, again, not productive.

Tax their Wealth.
by nextaccountic | 2025-04-04 03:31:46+00:00
Hey, are you using some tool like the unmaintained migra https://github.com/djrobstep/migra (perhaps using this tool https://github.com/blainehansen/postgres_migrator) or pg-schema-diff https://github.com/stripe/pg-schema-diff or maybe this other unrelated pg-schema-diff https://github.com/zombodb/pg-schema-diff anything like it?

Is it open source?

I mean, I see you say

> We then use a schema diff tool, like migra, to figure out the necessary updates to views and functions when generating the migration file.

But "like migra" is very nonspecific. I guess you are not using migra itself
by meltyness | 2025-04-04 03:31:49+00:00
Very interesting work.

Flate2 is an odd crate so I'm not too surprised to hear there's issues with it.

It seems unusual to rely on an FFI for something that isn't extremely intricate, broad, or brittle like syscalls / drivers / runtimes, I'd think that one zlib implementation would be as good as another, but maybe I'm naive.

Thankfully crates makes it pretty plain who would see fit to build on top of that.
by _bin_ | 2025-04-04 03:32:49+00:00
Yeah I don't even play videogames but this sounds more appealing to me than the game itself. Like I did a little bit of anticheat bypass stuff with some buddies a while back just because it was fun to beat the anticheat guys. We used it a bit and one guy dropped it on a forum after a bit just to cause some chaos and to get some laughs, but I don't think any of us were especially interested in sitting down and trying to use it for real. Breaking systems is a really enjoyable game.

Now what I do not get is why people just fork over a few hundred bucks for someone else's cheating solution. You aren't winning anything, you aren't breaking anything, you're just copy-pasting someone else's work. Not doing it yourself sort of removes that appeal. The game you're playing is supposed to be against the anticheat guys and by buying someone else's solution you're not actually playing that game at all. Regular players aren't really a fun target.
by wesapien | 2025-04-04 03:33:00+00:00
Timur Kuran writes about this idea (preference falsification) in "Private Truths, Public Lies".

He explains that its this idea that had kept the Soviet Union (this bad idea/system) from dying sooner. People thought it was the system of oppression but in reality it was people who hated the system showed approval. https://youtu.be/xzjqjU2FOwA?si=aTG0GnJKVDoK_-qb&t=819

"Accordingly, for all the hardships of life under communism, they remained politically submissive for years on end." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
by Centigonal | 2025-04-04 03:33:57+00:00
I think "resource curse" countries are a great surrogate for studying possible future AGI-induced economic and political phenomena. A country like the UAE (oil) or Botswana (diamonds) essentially has an economic equivalent to AGI: they control a small, extremely productive utility (an oilfield or a mine instead of a server farm), and the wealth generated by that utility is far in excess of what those countries' leaders need to maintain power. Sure, you hire foreign labor and trade for resources instead of having your AGI supply those things, but the end result is the same.
by mojomark | 2025-04-04 03:34:33+00:00
I don't get it.

Isn't the goal to prevent someone from hacking into your email account and reading your email? If someone already hacked I to Alice's email account, and pretends to be her to access the decryption key (which they can do because they can prove they have control of the account - which is all key access requires), then they can decrypt the message.

Seems pretty pointless, unless I'm missing a key point (perfectly possible)
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-04-04 03:34:57+00:00
Its kind of funny that everyone is harping this way or that way about IP.

This is a kind of strange comment for me to read. Because imby tone it sounds like a rebuttal? But by content, it agrees with a core thing I said about myself:

> and as someone who thinks IP is itself incredibly ripping off humanity & should be vastly scoped down, it's important to me to not rest my arguments on IP violations

What's just such a nightmare to me is that the tech is so normative. So horribly normative. This article shows that AI again and again reproduced only the known, only the already imagined. Its not that it's IP theft that rubs me so so wrong, it's that it's entirely bankrupt & uncreative, so very stuck. All this power! And yet!

You speak at what disgusts me yourself!

> When are we allowed to remix, recreate and expand on this like humanity has done

The machine could be imagining all kinds of Indianas. Of all different remixed recreated expanded forms. But this pictures are 100% anything but that. They're Indiana frozen in Carbonite. They are the driest saddest prison of the past. And call into question the validity of AI entirely, show something greviously missing.
by tootie | 2025-04-04 03:36:40+00:00
Go back to my comment further up. When has he ever publicly or privately demonstrated that he understands economics? He repeatedly insists that exporters pay tariffs. He says a trade deficit means we're being robbed. His list of misapprehensions on basic ideas is very long. Absent evidence to the contrary, one can only conclude he knows nothing about economics. Maybe he studied it 50 years ago and maybe he didn't. He has not demonstrated an iota of fluency since entering politics.
by sprior | 2025-04-04 03:36:51+00:00
I worked in AIX PS/2 development when it was in Danbury, CT. I think ver 1.3 came out after I left the group but I thought AIX PS/2 only ran on micro channel machines though maybe that changed by ver 1.3. edit: just read the wikipedia page and indeed ver 1.3 did later introduce support for non PS/2 hardware though it wasn't in the initial 1.3 release.
by plandis | 2025-04-04 03:37:06+00:00
It’s common practice to put your preferences and tips/advice into a readme solely for the LLM to consume to learn about what you want it to do.

So you’d set things like code standards (and hopefully enforce them via feedback tools), guides for writing certain architectures, etc. Then when you have the LLM start working it will first read that readme to “learn” how you want it to generally behave.

I’ve found that I typically edit this file as time goes on as a way to add semi-permanent feedback into the system. Even if your context window gets too large when you restart the LLM will start at that readme to prime itself.

That’s the closest analogy I can think of.
by bcoates | 2025-04-04 03:37:31+00:00
I think the productivity gains of dynamic typed languages were real, and based on two things: dynamic typing (can) provide certain safety properties trivially, and dynamic typing neatly kills off the utterly inadequate type systems found in mainstream languages when they were launched (the 90s, mostly).

You'll notice the type systems being bolted onto dynamic languages or found in serious attempts at new languages are radically different than the type systems being rejected by the likes of javascript, python, ruby and perl.
by aceazzameen | 2025-04-04 03:37:47+00:00
Specs peaked years ago. I don't want anything new phones have to offer, other than maybe a screen that isn't cracked, or a newer battery, etc. New Androids are a downgrade in functional hardware features and software customization compared to older flagships. I don't need a screen that folds, built-in AI, or a marginally better camera with heavier post processing.

When the day comes that I'm forced into buying a new phone again, I'm with the others above. I'm not getting an overpriced Google branded iPhone clone sold by an ad company. I'd rather finally make the move to get an actual iPhone or go back to dumb phones.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-04-04 03:37:56+00:00
Being mission focused can help in this regard. Knowing what you are trying to do and why you are trying to do it can guide you when to break the rules. This requires you to understand the business/organization and how the organization works. If a rule was set up to protect the company from breaking the law, you do not break those rules (unless you work in finance). If a rule was set up because someone with bad judgment did something dumb in the past which caused a snafu, make sure you aren’t being dumb.

If you aren’t sure if you are being dumb or not, you are probably dumb. If you are sure you are not dumb, you are probably dumb. If you think you may not be dumb, you may in fact not be dumb.
by latchkey | 2025-04-04 03:39:08+00:00
Cool project. Every time one of these projects comes up, I'm always somewhat disappointed it isn't an open source / postgres version of GCP Cloud Tasks.

All I ever want is a queue where I submit a message and then it hits an HTTP endpoint with that message as POST. It is such a better system than dedicated long running worker listeners, because then you can just scale your HTTP workers as needed. Pairs extremely well with autoscaling Cloud Functions, but could be anything really.

I also find that DAGs tend to get ugly really fast because it generally involves logic. I'd prefer that logic to not be tied into the queue implementation because it becomes harder to unit test. Much easier reason about if you have the HTTP endpoint create a new task, if it needs to.
by mmooss | 2025-04-04 03:39:37+00:00
> taking China off of the UN Human Rights Council would be a good show

That's not how legislatures work. It's like saying, 'take Senator Jones off the HHS committee because they are anti-vaccine' - the people in Senator Jones' state are entitled to representation with complete disregard for whether others like their Senator. Legislatures work with power as it is, not as how we want it to be.

> for what little the UN does

People on the right repeat it, but repetition doesn't make it fact. What do you know, specifically, about what the UN does (about human rights, if that's what you mean). The foundations for international law, which is powerful and effective though imperfect - like domestic law, but lacking the same enforcement mechanisms.

> [China and Mexico]

If everyone stopped doing all business with anyone in a country that does bad things, there would be no business or trade. Trade enriches the US, and has lifted billions out of poverty - including in China and Mexico.

Putting them back into poverty is just reckless. You need to come up with a better solution to your leaky roof than burning down the house.
by bbor | 2025-04-04 03:39:50+00:00
Disregarding the (common!) assumption that AGI will consist of one monolithic LLM instead of dozens of specialized ones, I think your comment fails to invoke an accurate, consistent picture of creativity/"truly new" cognition.

To borrow Chomsky's framework: what makes humans unique and special is our ability to produce an infinite range of outputs that nonetheless conform to a set of linguistic rules. When viewed in this light, human creativity necessarily depends on the "linguistic rules" part of that; without a framework of meaning to work within, we would just be generating entropy, not meaningful expressions.

Obviously this applies most directly to external language, but I hope it's clear how it indirectly applies to internal cognition and--as we're discussing here--visual art.

TL;DR: LLMs are definitely creative, otherwise they wouldn't be able to produce semantically-meaningful, context-appropriate language in the first place. For a more empirical argument, just ask yourself how a machine that can generate a poem or illustration depicting [CHARACTER_X] in [PLACE_Y] doing [ACTIVITY_Z] in [STYLE_S] without being creative!

[1] Covered in the famous Chomsky v. Foucault debate, for the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
by throwup238 | 2025-04-04 03:42:18+00:00
I think the missing secret sauce is an equivalent to neuroplasticity. Human brains are constantly being rewired and optimized at every level: synapses and their channels undergo long term potentiation and depression, new connections are formed and useless ones pruned, and the whole system can sometimes remap functions to different parts of the brain when another suffers catastrophic damage. I don’t know enough about the matrix multiplication operations that power LLMs, but it’s hard to imagine how that kind of organic reorganization would be possible with GPUs matmul. It’d require some sort of advanced “self aware” profile guided optimization and not just trial and error noodling with Torch ops or CUDA kernels.

I assume that thanks to the universal approximation theorem it’s theoretically possible to emulate the physical mechanism, but at what hardware and training cost? I’ve done back of the napkin math on this before [1] and the number of “parameters” in the brain is at least 2-4 orders of magnitude more than state of the art models. But that’s just the current weights, what about the history that actually enables the plasticity? Channel threshold potentials are also continuous rather than discreet and emulating them might require the full fp64 so I’m not sure how we’re even going to get to the memory requirements in the next decade, let alone whether any architecture on the horizon can emulate neuroplasticity.

Then there’s the whole problem of a true physical feedback loop with which the AI can run experiments to learn against external reward functions and the core survival reward function at the core of evolution might itself be critical but that’s getting deep into the research and philosophy on the nature of intelligence.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313672
by sivaragavan | 2025-04-04 03:43:08+00:00
Thanks to the authors for doing this wonderful piece of work and sharing it with credibility. I wish people see the possibilities here. But we are after all humans. It is hard to imagine our own downfall.

Based on each individual's vantage point, these events might looks closer or farther than mentioned here. but I have to agree nothing is off the table at this point.

The current coding capabilities of AI Agents are hard to downplay. I can only imagine the chain reaction of this creation ability to accelerate every other function.

I have to say one thing though: The scenario in this site downplays the amount of resistance that people will put up - not because they are worried about alignment, but because they are politically motivated by parties who are driven by their own personal motives.
by mmooss | 2025-04-04 03:43:13+00:00
> My passion is robotics and engineering, and manufacturing covers both of those readily.

That's completely different than working on an assembly line.

> Some people do enjoy assembly line work

Who? How many? I don't think I've ever heard it (though I'm sure someone must). Do you like it? Why don't you work on assembly line.

> would say a large amount of people want a reliable job with minimal mental overhead

That's an ignorant, condescending description of assembly line work. You'll need some evidence of this great mass of people, "I would say" isn't evidence.

> Tons of opportunity for people to do the jobs they love for good pay and benefits, if we could get more manufacturing into the US.

That's not the case - American companies can't find enough people with those skills as it is; there is no need for more of those jobs.
by plandis | 2025-04-04 03:43:19+00:00
The main questions I have with using LLMs for this purpose in a business setting are:

1. Is the company providing the model willing to indemnify _your_ company when using code generation? I know GitHub Copilot will do this with the models they provide on their hardware, but if you’re using Claude Code or Cursor with random models do they provide equal guarantees? If not I wonder if it’s only a matter of time before that landmine explodes.

2. In the US, AFAICT, software that is mostly generated by non-humans is not copyrightable. This is not an issue if you’re creating code snippets from an LLM, but if you’re generating an entire project this way then none or only small parts of the code base you generate would then be copyrightable. Do you still own the IP if it’s not copyrightable? What if someone exfiltrates your software? Do you have no or little remedy?
by musicale | 2025-04-04 03:43:23+00:00
> Tech textbook tycoon Tim O'Reilly claims OpenAI mined his publishing house's copyright-protected tomes for training data and fed it all into its top-tier GPT-4o model without permission.

"I am shocked, shocked, to find that copyright infringement is going on in here."

"Your LLM, sir."

"(Oh, thank you very much.)"
by relaxing | 2025-04-04 03:43:37+00:00
That’s because the control circuit is hidden in a monolithic IC. If you’re really curious, here’s a datasheet for an old fashioned design with a block diagram and theory of operation described that should give you some hints. https://www.meditronik.com.pl/doc/plus/zn409.pdf

If that sort of thing interests you, there’s a whole field of control theory to study.
by ForOldHack | 2025-04-04 03:43:38+00:00
Berkeley's Willard Jr high school bussed 7th grade student s up to Lawrence hall of science in the fall of 1970. I was the 3rd grade younger brother that started to print all the code, so I could walk through it. There were at least 70 to 80 kids there, and only two years later, they added two more 30 person labs. Dartmouth BASIC and HP basic were at most universities. While punched card FORTRAN was as most engineering schools.