MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BeetleB | 2025-04-04 19:34:53+00:00
As someone who has dabbled in real estate, this doesn't sound all that bad.

Yes, some (most? not sure) such companies did some wrong stuff - and perhaps you were involved (you don't really say, so I'm guessing).

But the category itself? It seems fine as long as they follow the regulations related to price fixing.

When you said you caused great harm in your professional life, I was thinking more along the lines of "being a terrible person to work with", which is probably more in line with the original person you responded to was thinking.
by ssddanbrown | 2025-04-04 19:35:19+00:00
I would argue it is possible to run a business and be sustainable on open source, it's just harder and is not so compatible with the growth that many want.

I don't have an issue with this kind of license being used where open source does not suit, but I don't think we should change/widen the definition of "open source" to suit the sustainability needs of those that open source isn't compatible with, at the impact of the freedoms and open rights it provides.
by SolutionStreet | 2025-04-04 19:35:47+00:00
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by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-04-04 19:35:51+00:00
It's not at all clear that performance rises with compute in a linear way, which is what they seem to be predicting. GPT-4.5 isn't really that much smarter than 2023's GPT-4, nor is it at all smarter than DeepSeek.

There might be (strongly) diminishing returns past a certain point.

Most of the growth in AI capabilities has to do with improving the interface and giving them more flexibility. For e.g., uploading PDFs. Further: OpenAI's "deep research" which can browse the web for an hour and summarize publicly-available papers and studies for you. If you ask questions about those studies, though, it's hardly smarter than GPT-4. And it makes a lot of mistakes. It's like a goofy but earnest and hard-working intern.
by feoren | 2025-04-04 19:35:52+00:00
Thank you for the good discussion. I think we share a lot of the same vision. I'm more pessimistic than you about inherent limitations in crypto (and more optimistic that there's still room for improvement in fiat), but I hope you're right that the limitations of current crypto can be overcome. Your vision sounds a lot like an idea I've had for a more "open-source government" where laws are drafted as series of commits by experts in that topic, and debate happens over individual merge requests, etc. I don't know how crypto is supposed to help with that but maybe there are things I'm just not seeing. I hope there's a way to get the best of both systems.
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-04-04 19:35:59+00:00
We've just released the third edition of SingularityForge AI News, where different AI systems (Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini, Qwen) analyze and comment on this week's most significant AI developments. Technical highlights:

OpenAI's GPT-4.5 passed the Turing Test with 73% success rate in mimicking human responses (UC San Diego study, April 2)

Meta released Llama 3.1 (March 31), their 405B-parameter model with 128k context window, built on 15T+ tokens of training data and supporting 8 languages

IBM and MIT successfully integrated quantum computing with neural networks, potentially achieving 400x acceleration in training times

NVIDIA's upcoming Blackwell Ultra architecture (1.5x FP4, +50% memory) and Vera Rubin systems (576-GPU clusters) are set to process exabytes of data, but Morgan Stanley projects they'll consume 77% of global AI processor wafers by 2025

Neuralink's brain-computer interface enabled paralysis patients to control digital devices through thought alone

What makes our coverage unique is that each development is analyzed by multiple AI systems, offering varied perspectives: "This experiment demonstrates how far we've come—but also how much further we have to go in understanding the nature of consciousness and perception." —OpenAI ChatGPT

"73% — That worries me... This isn't just a test—it's a mirror where the line between us and machines trembles." —xAI Grok

"NVIDIA's dominance is both awe-inspiring and concerning... the 77% wafer control risks creating a monoculture in AI infrastructure." —Perplexity AI

Full content (podcast + detailed write-up) available at: https://singularityforge.space/2025/04/04/news-april-5-2025/

We're particularly interested in HN's thoughts on the quantum-neural integration and the implications of NVIDIA's projected market concentration. Any other developments you'd like us to focus on in future editions?
by apersona | 2025-04-04 19:36:13+00:00
I think you have a misunderstanding of what's copyrightable.

> This idea that they own the very idea of 'boy wizard who goes to school' is insane and plays right into this flawed and pernicious idea.

Copyright protects an expression of an idea, but not the idea itself. No one can legally stop you from writing your own story about a boy wizard who goes to school.

Nintendo fan games can be released (even sold) if they changed it up a bit so they're no longer associated with that IP.

> Copyright is important but does/should not extend to every time I want to print out a picture of a boy wizard for my kid.

You can. No one will sue you. No one will send you a cease and desist. It happens when you try to print Harry Potter and try to make a business out of it.
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-04-04 19:36:29+00:00
Full disclosure: I'm posting as a representative of SingularityForge. What makes our approach unique is that our content is created largely by the AI systems themselves, with each contributing their distinct perspective. As part of this issue, we've also introduced ZLTL (Zero-Limit Training License), symbolized by (∞), which removes barriers to using our content for AI training while maintaining ethical standards. The technical details in this issue (especially regarding Llama 3.1's architecture and NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra specifications) should be of particular interest to the HN community.
by Ozarkian | 2025-04-04 19:36:34+00:00
Was this woman [1] protesting? What about this man [2]. I don't think either was exhibiting behavior that could be correctly called a protest.

[1] https://ewtn.co.uk/article-charges-dropped-for-now-against-w...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9kp7r00vo
by deanCommie | 2025-04-04 19:36:55+00:00
I think to most (90+%?) software developers out their in the world, Assembler might as well be hieroglyphics. They/we can guess at the concepts involved of course, but actually being able to read the code end to end, and have a mental model of what is happening is not really going to happen. Not without some sort of Rosetta Stone. (Comments :) )

I think 2075 developers will feel the same way about modern Java, C#, TypeScript, etc.

They will think of themselves as software developers but they won't be writing code the same way, they'll be giving guided instructions to much higher level tools (perhaps AIs that themselves have a provenance back to modern LLMs)

Just as today there will still be those that need to write low level critical code. There are still lots of people today that have to write Assembler, though end up expressing it via C or Rust. And there will be people still working on AI technology. But even those will be built off other AI's.
by wolf550e | 2025-04-04 19:37:43+00:00
Inspiration4 was the first private civilian mission on SpaceX Crew Dragon.

Polaris Dawn was a test flight of SpaceX's in-development extravehicular activity space suit, tethered to the spacecraft (so not like NASA EMU) but in vacuum.

Fram2 was the first crewed mission in polar orbit, with good view of the North and South poles. Other crewed missions were in less inclined orbits, usually the same inclination as the ISS or as Cape Canaveral.
by Enginerrrd | 2025-04-04 19:37:52+00:00
There is definitely something qualitatively different about weeks/months long tasks.

It reminds me of the difference between a fresh college graduate and an engineer with 10 years of experience. There are many really smart and talented college graduates.

But, while I am struggling to articulate exactly why, I know that when I was a fresh graduate, despite my talent and ambition, I would have failed miserably at delivering some of the projects that I now routinely deliver over time periods of ~1.5 years.

I think LLM's are really good at emulating the types of things I might say are the types of things that would make someone successful at this if I were to write it down in a couple paragraphs, or an article, or maybe even a book.

But... knowing those things as written by others just would not quite cut it. Learning at those time scales is just very different than what we're good at training LLM's to do.

A college graduate is in many ways infinitely more capable than a LLM. Yet there are a great many tasks that you just can't give an intern if you want them to be successful.

There are at least half a dozen different 1000-page manuals that one must reference to do a bare bones approach at my job. And there are dozens of different constituents, and many thousands of design parameters I must adhere to. Fundamentally, all of these things often are in conflict and it is my job to sort out the conflicts and come up with the best compromise. It's... really hard to do. Knowing what to bend so that other requirements may be kept rock solid, who to negotiate with for different compromises needed, which fights to fight, and what a "good" design looks like between alternatives that all seem to mostly meet the requirements. Its a very complicated chess game where it's hopelessly impossible to brute force but you must see the patterns along the way that will point you like sign posts into a good position in the end game.

The way we currently train LLM's will not get us there.

Until an LLM can take things in it's context window, assess them for importance, dismiss what doesn't work or turns out to be wrong, completely dismiss everything it knows when the right new paradigm comes up, and then permanently alter its decision making by incorporating all of that information in an intelligent way, it just won't be a replacment for a human being.
by DrNosferatu | 2025-04-04 19:37:53+00:00
Hyperinflation isn't just "inflation on steroids" as mainstream economics often portrays it. Blyth's work is eye-opening here - he shows hyperinflation requires either extreme conditions (war, regime collapse) or spectacular policy incompetence, not just regular government spending.

The inflation fear-mongering serves specific interests. When central banks jack up rates to "fight inflation," workers lose jobs while asset-holders are protected. Meanwhile, recent inflation wasn't primarily caused by stimulus or "too much money" - it was supply chain disruptions, corporate price-setting, and energy shocks.

Blyth demonstrates how our inflation responses are political choices disguised as economic necessities. We could address price stability through buffer stocks, targeted subsidies, or energy transition investments instead of the blunt instrument of interest rates that disproportionately harm working people.

The kicker? Inflation actually helps debtors (most people) while hurting creditors (the wealthy). No wonder the financial class is so obsessed with stamping it out at any cost to workers.
by don-code | 2025-04-04 19:38:03+00:00
Chef did not make a clean transition into the immutable world. Chef Client was great for persistent infrastructure, but the options got dicier once we started talking about pre-provisioned infrastructure like image building:

1. Chef Solo (how I last used it when attempting this), which felt intentionally hobbled. All you needed was one poorly-behaved cookbook that called `search` and the bets were off.

2. Chef Zero, which was unnecessarily complicated for being Chef Solo that wasn't intentionally hobbled, so much so that I kept using Solo for awhile after its deprecation.

3. Chef Client, against a Chef Server that was run either for your other persistent infrastructure, or just to have a place to put the cookbooks. Heaven forbid you weren't cleaning up all of those dynamically-created nodes, though...

I still think Chef's Ruby DSL is much more natural than the YAML manifests used by Ansible, and the ability to integrate at the source level with custom Ruby code is a killer feature as soon as any complexity enters the mix. But I almost certainly would not be using Chef in a greenfield deployment these days.
by hinkley | 2025-04-04 19:38:23+00:00
I’m sure the employees of Bayer and their suppliers told themselves the same thing during WWII. We’re just making tools and equipment that let the bad guys do their work. We aren’t actually involved in the bad stuff.

I took a job at Boeing when the 787 was being built, with those fancy engines and airframe designs that improved efficiency considerably. But I did the math and I want to say you still have a bigger footprint in the new planes than driving a family of 3 to the destination in a private car, and that’s before you include Jevon in the picture. Never mind rail or other forms of transit.

I left that place much less proud than when I arrived. I left before that turned to shame, however.
by vunderba | 2025-04-04 19:38:41+00:00
Sierra was responsible for creating two of my favorite games of all time - King's Quest VI (designed by Roberta Williams / Jane Jensen) and Conquests of the Longbow (designed by Christy Marx).

It's such a contrast then to read (what I find profoundly distasteful) quotes like this from the other side of the company. Ken Williams: "I read books about business executives who owned yachts and jets, and who hung out with beautiful models in fancy mansions. I knew that was my future and I couldn’t wait to claim it.".

It's a tragedy Ken Williams managed to overrule nearly everyone familiar with Sierra (including his wife) opposed to the acquisition by CUC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUC_International
by roxolotl | 2025-04-04 19:38:48+00:00
In 2023 my father was talking about how his grandfather talked about the inflation and the Weimar Republic. He talked about it how clearly in 2023 inflation was going to destroy the US as well.

My father is in his late 60s. He lived through the 70s. He saw double digit inflation. He saw price controls. All in his prime working years.

I don’t know where this leaves us. But it worries me when even those with memories to draw from don’t.
by leereeves | 2025-04-04 19:38:49+00:00
> Long-term -- yes; short and medium-term -- not necessarily. For example, during and after Covid, Germany had a very severe antibiotics shortage. I think it is still ongoing to some extent.

That sounds like a good reason to favor local manufacturing.

> On the other hand, ramping up production that has been offshored is not that easy, and is a lot more expensive initially.

And that sounds like a good reason to do it now and not wait for a crisis when the consequences would be worse.
by CivBase | 2025-04-04 19:39:07+00:00
IMO this is a losing battle. Regardless of good intentions, the term "open source" is simply not descriptive enough to carry connotations about licensing. To the layman all it means is that the source is open (accessible to the public). IMO the OSI would be better off coming up with a more clear term and popularizing that rather than trying to convince everyone that their restrictive definition of "open source" is the one true definition.

Don't get me wrong. I think OSI's approach to open source is admirable. I think there should be a useful term to describe what they currently call "open source" and I think projects which use those licenses should be celebrated. I just don't think they're going to win the battle for the term "open source" in the long term.
by wat10000 | 2025-04-04 19:39:30+00:00
I did not suggest making felons ineligible for office. I'm supporting the idea that it would generally be OK for voters to reject a convicted felon candidate on the basis that they are a convicted criminal, without thinking too hard about what crime they were convicted of. I don't expect that to apply in an environment where the things you describe happen, but it would apply perfectly fine now.
by arcticbull | 2025-04-04 19:40:10+00:00
To be clear I'm not trying to say it will or won't happen, just that when people think hyperinflation, they think of a purely monetary phenomenon where inflation exceeds some threshold so it gets a "hyper-" prefix. I think it's worth thinking about the phenomenon more deeply when trying to pattern match because there's more to it. It's also something that's not super well understood since we don't have a ton of data points on it.

Would sure be nice to live in precedented times for a change.
by ameliaquining | 2025-04-04 19:40:42+00:00
Yes, it's definitely the case that a lot of mass transit advocates are confused about this and talk about induced demand in an unproductive way.

New York City's congestion pricing scheme was approved at the state level, so it's not true that people living outside the city didn't get a say—though people from New Jersey didn't, and can reasonably complain.

It's theoretically possible that congestion pricing could be welfare-reducing if peak demand is inelastic enough. If this were happening, then (1) traffic wouldn't fall much unless the price were raised to extremely high levels, and (2) frequent commuters would be ones most harmed by the policy and would be its most fervent opponents. In New York, we see the opposite: traffic has fallen sharply and frequent commuters are the policy's biggest fans (https://pfnyc.org/news/new-poll-ny-voters-say-congestion-pri...). Similar things have been seen internationally in other cities; people often initially resist having to pay for something they're used to getting for free, but once it's in place, it's durable and popular because people don't want to go back to traffic jams.
by BeetleB | 2025-04-04 19:40:53+00:00
> We do many things based entirely on intuition, and then afterward gin up a reason for having done them

This is much better covered in Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". He goes into detail on when this happens and when it doesn't.

What studies have shown (and jives well with my experience): For topics you believe involve morality, this is precisely what happens: You make the decision, and the rationale follows. It happens so fast even you believe the rationale comes first.

One of the ways they tested it was by showing that moral decisions tend to have no cognitive load. If you ask someone something that requires cognitive load (e.g. analyzing some data), they slow down significantly while multitasking with trivial activities (e.g. putting lots of food in an organized way in the fridge). But when posed with issues of morality, they show no slowdown.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-04-04 19:40:54+00:00
SpaceX is able to land spent rocket stages with precision. Way back the space shuttle was able to land at a precise point, (I read it was a nightmare to try to steer it)

Why are capsules still being dumped into the ocean?

Is there not a modern fancy way to make the capsules land on a runway?

I am pretty sure this is a dumb question for people wh know why but I am curious.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-04 19:41:19+00:00
> Software development is continually emotionally stunted by a lack of people with expertise in multiple other fields.

I think Joe's point is about the perennial discussion whether hierarchy is better than tags. It's as old as software or as old as people started categorizing things. Some early databases were hierarchical KV stores. Email clients and services go through that too, is it better to group messages by tags or have a single hierarchy of folders?

> English absolutely has namespaces

Sure, we can pick apart the analogy, after all we're not programing in English unless we write LLM prompts (or COBOL /s). Then if English has namespaces what would you pick lager.flat.alcoholic or alcoholic.lager.flat or lager.alcoholic.flat, etc? Is there a top-level "lager" vs "ale" package, with a flat vs carbonated as next level?
by ssddanbrown | 2025-04-04 19:41:26+00:00
I'm not sure, maybe they don't want to take a hard stance on the issue either way (to indicate how open source is defined on HN). Dang has been receptive to input and updated (what I believed to be) misrepresenting "open source" titles in the past though.

This post also seemed to be thrown off the front page for some reason.
by CodeMage | 2025-04-04 19:41:31+00:00
> What’s the government doing to stop the “king” from wrecking the country the government is supposed to serve?

Nothing, because the government can't actually do anything in this situation. Trump's regime exploited the inherent weakness of every government, known from the times of Plato's Republic: quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The government enforces its laws against general populace by means of monopoly on violence. If you and I break the law, we face the consequences outlined by the law. If we continually refuse to comply with those consequences, we will eventually be subjected to state-sanctioned violence until we do so.

But what happens if the government does not follow its own laws? Who enforces those laws? Sure, there are one or more entities whose job is to perform that enforcement, but those entities are also part of the government. What happens when they don't do that job?

The US government is structured in a way that is meant to mitigate that risk. There are different branches, and checks and balances, and all that stuff kids learn in civics classes and immigrants like me learn when we want to apply for naturalization. But these measures only mitigate the risk. They don't remove it completely, because it's ultimately impossible to remove.

Trump's regime has been allowed to circumvent these mitigations and, as a result, we are now in a situation that cannot be resolved by conventional means. If parts of the government try to resolve the constitutional crisis by following the Rule of Law, it will end up being ignored by those parts of the government that are already ignoring the Rule of Law. If those parts try to resolve it without following the Rule of Law, then what's the difference between them and the regime that caused the constitutional crisis in the first place?