MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-04 04:24:02+00:00
This is a discussion of semantics. First I spent much of my career in high end quant finance and what we are doing today is night and day different in terms of the generality and effectiveness. Second, almost all the hallmarks of AI I carried with me prior to 2001 have more or less been ticked off - general natural language semantically aware parsing and human like responses, ability to process abstract concepts, reason abductively, synthesize complex concepts. The fact it’s not aware - which it’s absolutely is not - does not make it not -intelligent-.

The thing people latch onto is modern LLM’s inability to reliably reason deductively or solve complex logical problems. However this isn’t a sign of human intelligence as these are learned not innate skills, and even the most “intelligent” humans struggle at being reliable at these skills. In fact classical AI techniques are often quite good at these things already and I don’t find improvements there world changing. What I find is unique about human intelligence is its abductive ability to reason in ambiguous spaces with error at times but with success at most others. This is something LLMs actually demonstrate with a remarkably human like intelligence. This is earth shattering and science fiction material. I find all the poopoo’ing and goal post shifting disheartening.

What they don’t have is awareness. Awareness is something we don’t understand about ourselves. We have examined our intelligence for thousands of years and some philosophies like Buddhism scratch the surface of understanding awareness. I find it much less likely we can achieve AGI without understanding awareness and implementing some proximate model of it that guides the multi modal models and agents we are working on now.
by bigyabai | 2025-04-04 04:24:39+00:00
Considering where the TSMC ticker is sitting right now, this evokes more of a "Reichswerke Hermann Göring" vibe from me. This was a closed-door demand to Taiwan with an "offer" they couldn't refuse, likely illustrated using some of the casualties Ukraine suffered during their brief lapse in American assistance. The government of Taiwan is the largest shareholder in TSMC, and Trump knows that he can threaten abandonment if they ever refuse US demands. Predicate weapons sales on administrating Intel fabs, and a stupid pretense can start to sound like a lucrative long-term investment. I wouldn't put it past a president that tried to sell Ukraine weapons they already owned by mining minerals they don't have.

> Keep your competitor alive so the antitrust folks don't come down on you?

It would be deeply ironic of America to attack Europe over antitrust litigation while trying to prosecute TSMC for "monopoly" abuse. Protectionism aside, the American economy stands only to harm itself by forcing TSMC out of the country. That would be like the tech industry cutting off its right arm to spite a pimple on its face.
by mathieuh | 2025-04-04 04:25:38+00:00
I don’t know anything about the technical details but you can also hear the difference when plucking in different locations on the string very clearly on a classical guitar, to the point where it is an integral part of right-hand technique and is marked on music. Plucking closer to the neck has a very round, resonant sound, plucking closer to the bridge has a very sharp sound, and plucking exactly halfway along the string has a particularly round sound.

As Segovia said, the guitar is like a miniature orchestra https://youtu.be/DJrEl4Nsmsg?si=voLmARBDxGe8iDRo
by MadnessASAP | 2025-04-04 04:26:09+00:00
The advantage of the AI in this scenario is the starting point. You now can start cross referencing signage, language, license plates, landmarks. To verify or disprove the conclusion.

A further extension to the AI "conversation" might be: "What other locations are similar to this?" And "Why isn't it those locations?" Which you can then cross reference again.

Using AI as an entry point into massive datasets (like millions of photos from around the world) is actually useful. Correlation is what AI is good, but not infallible, at.

Of course false correlations exist and correlation is not causation but if you can narrow your search space from the entire world to the Eiffel tower in Paris or in Vegas you're ahead of the game.
by casey2 | 2025-04-04 04:26:51+00:00
In what way does an intellectual race to the bottom help students? If students want to learn on the cheap they can use the internet.

Students want to feel like their time spent studying is worth it, not a weird blend of trivia, online classes you finish in a week or useless skills that you spend months practicing and lose 6 months after the class.

Millions of people could be working productive manufacturing jobs, instead they are doing effectively nothing all because of a disproven belief from 100 years ago that if you study enough you will increase your innate intelligence.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-04 04:27:35+00:00
Field repair by enterprise IT support was also part of Lenovo's business model. For framework repairability is a thing but it's not as important I guess.

I had an HP that also had service manuals available.

Ps Lenovo basically has two brands; the business laptops like the T, P and X ThinkPads, and the consumer stuff including some of the budget ThinkPads (I think E series). The latter don't do service manuals, have really crappy keyboards.. Just B-brand crap. They're just a consumer laptop with some thinkpad trim. Be careful with that if you think of buying one.
by sivaragavan | 2025-04-04 04:28:33+00:00
Aah.. I have been repeating this to my team for several days now. Thanks for putting this together.

I start every piece of work, green or brown, with a markdown file that often contains my plan, task breakdown, data models (including key fields), API / function details, and sample responses.

For the tool part, though, I took a slightly different approach. I decided to use Rust primarily for all my projects, as the compile-time checks are a great way to ensure the correctness of the generated code. I have noticed many more errors are detected in AI-generated Rust code than in any other language. I am happy about it because these are errors that I would have missed in other languages.
by joshjob42 | 2025-04-04 04:28:46+00:00
I think generally the expectation is that there are around 100T synapses in the brain, and of course it's probably not a 1:1 correspondence with neural networks, but it doesn't seem infeasible at all to me that a dense-equivalent 100T parameter model would be able to rival the best humans if trained properly.

If basically a transformer, that means it needs at inference time ~200T flops per token. The paper assumes humans "think" at ~15 tokens/second which is about 10 words, similar to the reading speed of a college graduate. So that would be ~3 petaflops of compute per second.

Assuming that's fp8, an H100 could do ~4 petaflops, and the authors of AI 2027 guesstimate that purpose wafer scale inference chips circa late 2027 should be able to do ~400petaflops for inference, ~100 H100s worth, for ~$600k each for fabrication and installation into a datacenter.

Rounding that basically means ~$6k would buy you the compute to "think" at 10 words/second. Generally speaking that'd probably work out to maybe $3k/yr after depreciation and electricity costs, or ~30-50¢/hr of "human thought equivalent" 10 words/second. Running an AI at 50x human speed 24/7 would cost ~$23k/yr, so 1 OpenBrain researcher's salary could give them a team of ~10-20 such AIs running flat out all the time. Even if you think the AI would need an "extra" 10 or even 100x in terms of tokens/second to match humans, that still puts you at genius level AIs in principle runnable at human speed for 0.1 to 1x the median US income.

There's an open question whether training such a model is feasible in a few years, but the raw compute capability at the chip level to plausibly run a model that large at enormous speed at low cost is already existent (at the street price of B200's it'd cost ~$2-4/hr-human-equivalent).
by jcranmer | 2025-04-04 04:28:50+00:00
IANAL and not particularly familiar with the particulars here, but very likely, the answer is "there is no legal recourse."

As a private entity, chess.com is within its rights to admit or reject people for any reason it wants, except on the basis of certain protected classes (which cheating is not one of them). Furthermore, the terms of use for an account probably says something to the effect of "we have the right to ban you for whatever reason we feel like, and you have no real recourse." One could still attempt to sue, but the almost certain result is to flush tens of thousands of dollars in the toilet just to get thrown out on the motion to dismiss for lack of a case.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-04 04:30:34+00:00
The T480 motherboard they use as a base for the conversion does have NVMe support, just a weird one that's integrated in the SATA bay. There was a name for it, but I forget. Some kind of transitionary standard.

But you can get a converter for that. It did have half the PCIe channels of a regular M2 slot I think. It's been a while since I had one in my hands.

The T480 didn't come with an ExpressCard IIRC hence the lack of it.

You need an adapter like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=ssd+m.2+caddy+lenovo
by jonstewart | 2025-04-04 04:31:19+00:00
The last article I read about him implied that he’s intent on working and that working with him was… intense. But that was a few years ago.

I like to imagine there’s an inner sanctum in a secure sub-basement of Microsoft where a couple dozen cracked kernel developers work quietly… except when Dave Cutler asks them to come into his personal lab through the three foot thick blast doors and man-trap so he can yell at them about a bug he found.
by EasyMark | 2025-04-04 04:32:45+00:00
Jan 6 was far from many people's lives. It was a philisophical debate at most. When they get to the stores to buy groceries and they are 30-50% higher and their next TV, laptop the same way, they will realize that voting for an Oompa Loompa was a bad idea, and will want him out.
by nextlevelwizard | 2025-04-04 04:36:22+00:00
Peer pressure is hell of a drug. If your friend group mainly plays competitive shooters and you suck at them you can easily gain status by paying for a aimbot.

Also current hustle culture’s toxic “your time is valuable and should not be wasted” mentality plays a role. Many people hate playing video games and losing because they then feel like they didn’t achieve anything and wasted their time. With cheats you can make sure you win so you “don’t end up wasting your time.”
by theamk | 2025-04-04 04:36:30+00:00
It does not have to be all-at-once.

Your bash program takes 10 input args and requires 15 env variables to be set? Don't reach out for that bash ini parser, create a python script which parses configs and invokes the original bash script. Next time you change feature, move it to python. Eventually you'll be mostly python.

Something that helps greatly with that is that you can embed bash in python. So initial conversion can be as simple as file rename + 3 lines of code.

import subprocess subprocess.run(["bash", "-c", """ echo This is bash if hostname | grep box; then echo running on a box fi """], check=True)

this lets you start by trivial .sh -> .py conversion, and then you can change one block at a time. Variables are tricky so do them first; or in the worst case, "declare -p" + "eval" + temporary files will save you.
by EasyMark | 2025-04-04 04:37:28+00:00
Inflation is definitely going to happen due to tariffs. If I'm paying 20% more next year on average for products above what I'm currently paying that is 20% inflation for me, that is what people will see; they don't care about your purist form of inflation arguments. They also vote against people who cause inflation, especially when they promised the opposite.
by breadwinner | 2025-04-04 04:37:50+00:00
That's absurd. Trailblazer means a pioneer; an innovator. Apple is one. Microsoft isn't. Microsoft is known for copying ideas, not for innovating. If there is one thing that hasn't changed in 50 years, it is the fact that they don't innovate. Take their recent products: Teams is a copy of Slack. Loop is a copy of Notion. This has been going on throughout their history. .NET is a copy of Java. Windows is a copy of MacOS. Excel is a copy of Visicalc and Lotus 123, Word is a copy of WordStar and WordPerfect, PowerPoint a copy of Harvard Graphics and Aldus Persuasion, and Access a copy of dBASE and FoxPro.

What about Microsoft makes them not innovate? To innovate you have to hire smart developers and let them do what they love doing. This will result in some waste, as only some of the ideas will be successful financially. But the ones that succeed will be innovative. Microsoft doesn't do that. They hire good developers and assign them to a Program Manager who gives them a fully nailed-down spec for what to build. Inevitably the Program Manager (who are often business people) will find financially successful products to clone. This rarely results in waste as the product they are cloning has already created a market, Microsoft only needs to take the market from the innovator, which they do by bundling the product with either Office or Windows.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-04 04:38:00+00:00
I didn't think the person was supporting Holocaust because he used the phrase "The Final Solution", that phrase is made up from very common words, and why would I assume malice, especially in the context of IT?

I may have used it unintentionally too, because "final solution" makes a lot of sense to use. The best way to ruin one's language is to keep using such common phrases that refer to such negative things. You know, there would not be a way to ruin it if people were just aware of the context and were not to attribute malice by default. It was probably accidental, like you said.

I think the issue is with this not-so-generous interpretation of it by default, or reading too much into it.

Do not allow your language to be ruined, and you could do a lot to help that cause.
by zem | 2025-04-04 04:38:30+00:00
interesting example of swizzling

``` int[<3>] a = { 11, 22, 33 }; int[<4>] b = a.xxzx; ```

I assume that the `xxzx` is translated directly by the compiler. not seen that in any other language though ruby can fake it pretty easily via `method_missing`
by achierius | 2025-04-04 04:39:19+00:00
This is an important distinction though. LLMs don't have any persistent 'state': they have their activations, their context, and that's it. They only know what's pre-trained, and what's in their context. Now, their ability to do in-context learning is impressive, but you're fundamentally still stuck with the deviations and, eventually, forgetting that characterizes these guys -- while a human, while less quick on the uptake, will nevertheless 'bake in' the lessons in a way that LLMs currently cannot.

In some ways this is even more impressive -- every prompt you make, your LLM is in effect re-reading (and re-comprehending) your whole codebase, from scratch!
by mmooss | 2025-04-04 04:39:51+00:00
Not all conservative Christians and right wingers think "women and LGBT people ... don't deserve rights". I find that if I approach people that way, it brings out the worst in them - they feel cornered and they fight. There's not much room for discussion when someone dismisses 'crazy antifa terrorists'. Are you going to reason with them?

It destroys social trust, which is what the real radicals aim at. If you want to fight the far right, work to build it.

I think the DEI rule should be simply to ban intolerance, with some education about how norms can be intolerant of minorities, and the experience of being a vulnerable minority in a room of majority.
by jaredklewis | 2025-04-04 04:40:15+00:00
Like I hope you’re right, but what are you basing this on?

Just based on the words that Trump actually says and writes, I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than Trump strongly believes that trade imbalances are unfair, that tariffs will reshore manufacturing, and that reshoring manufacturing will make America “wealthier.”

But if Trump is bluffing, it’s not clear there’s anything these other countries could give that would satisfy Trump. Vietnam could remove all tariffs against the US and in all likelihood not even make a dent in their trade surplus. It’s very hard for a small, developing country like Vietnam to import lots of stuff from a rich, expensive country like the US. Many of the countries whacked with massive tariffs by the administration already have very open trade policies with the US. What is there to negotiate?
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-04-04 04:40:17+00:00
> Open sores zealots have been spewing that nonsense for 15+ years

Pro tip: If you open like that, people won't take you seriously even if you happen to have a point.

> and all it has done is held back Linux from providing the security benefits of Secure Boot and transparent full disk encryption in an easy-to-administer

Also, we have that. In fact, I accidentally reenabled secure boot on a Linux box recently and only even noticed because it broke the nvidia driver. The closed source driver. If only I'd been more dedicated to only running FOSS then it would have worked.
by nurettin | 2025-04-04 04:41:46+00:00
> If companies could hike up their prices and still get consumers to pay them they'd already have done it. In fact, companies are constantly increasing prices as high as they possibly can up to the point where sales suffer.

Yes they do hike prices and yes maybe it reduces demand, but you can increase prices and blame the tariffs or the taxes. There is no ill will or conspiracy here. It is justified and lawful. I'd suggest the solution is to prevent price hikes due to tax increases. But is there a way of doing that?

> the companies continued to artificially restrict supply and blame the pandemic for higher prices.

> They'll spend billions trying to convince you that taking taxes from them is impossible and not worth trying tho.

Bunch of citations needed, I'm tired of copying and pasting.
by achierius | 2025-04-04 04:42:16+00:00
Frankly, most corporations do not last long enough for this to be a problem. Governments are their own issue, but without the political inertia and staying power of a nation-state, your organization will likely be long dead (or at least irrelevant and dying) before interpretations will drift that far. Most of the time, for most engineers, at least some of the people who made these rules in the first place are still around -- which helps ensure that nothing drifts too too far.

Of course there are exceptions, probably even upwards of 20% of the time, but we're talking generalities.
by necovek | 2025-04-04 04:42:51+00:00
I don't think we are able to communicate with each other precisely.

When I say "most technical debt comes not from rushing", your counter is that some technical debt comes from rushing, which was never disputed.

If I put "fully finished" in quotes, you go on a tangent how software project is never really finished (guess why the quotes).

So you address points that are irrelevant or never made, do not address points I do make and only point to other sources which I don't feel they do either.

I can come up with examples of electrical and mechanical engineering that are of the same sort, but I would be making cocktail party examples.

It seems futile to continue on this thread: thanks for engaging and have a nice day.
by rat87 | 2025-04-04 04:43:53+00:00
The tone of HN is something. For instance there always seems to be someone partisan enough to defend Trump no matter how ridiculous and terrible his actions are.

It true that there are democrats who are more skeptical on free trade and I would disagree with some of their views although adding workers rights and minimum wages into trade agreements are things which might have some merit but none of them would try something as ridiculous and economically suicidal as this. They're literally putting tarrifs on an island with a bunch of Penguins.

That's because he's lazy and doesn't really care to learn about policy or listen to the vast majority of economists including conservative economists tell him he's blowing up the economy and he doesn't care much about the damage he causes. He might remotely care about the stock market going down or losing political power and being tried for some of his many crimes but he doesn't really care much if his supporters (much less the half of the country that voted for someone sane) suffer, starve or die from a preventable disease.
by braza | 2025-04-04 04:45:59+00:00
As a former military person now working with tech, it's a bummer to see that the "neo" defense industry outside Ukraine (for obvious reasons) is trying to play the "Silicon Valley recruitment tale" without understanding the difference between the kind of people that you want to attract versus the class of people that have "mental elasticity" (sic.) to be willing to work for you.

When dealing with very important but abstract/distant terms in our daily lives like nation, war, death, patriotism, and patriotic sacrifice, you require some sort of people that are definitely not like your regular SWE.

One thing that I learned in military/defense is that the spectrum of people that ends there is between the "I went for the wrong reasons" and "hyperpatriotic on the border of being a zealot". Damn, we had guys in my Company that just went to the Army because they watched "Rambo: First Blood" and found it amazing.

Seeing the Anduril folk in the thread trying their best to recruit people in a completely different vibe related to tech, it's not only unintentionally comic but also shows how the defense tech is drunk with the VC/LP lore of "Let's get the best talent in the market and pay them well".

Edit 1: Anduril is going to learn the same thing that most of the professional military services in the world have already known for decades: Forget this misleading nerd Silicon Valley archetype and go to the Rico's [1] of the world: People willing to do things for the wrong reasons and/or naive enough to occasionally become the people that you want.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b07887ZzKiw

Edit 2: I hit submit early and I reframed my post, sorry for the confusion.
by TheDong | 2025-04-04 04:47:47+00:00
If you have an ansible playbook that runs "apt-get install docker" you'll get a different version over time, even with no changes to your playbook.

With nix, every package version change, every single diff, is a git commit which you can roll back and track a breakage to.

If you want, you can run your own apt repos, pin all your apt package versions, etc and make ubuntu a little more reproducible, but it's hard to do it. The system fights against you.

yaml also sucks, and nix is a better language.

Use whatever you want.
by GauntletWizard | 2025-04-04 04:47:51+00:00
I'm always happy to discuss sound cards with mixers, though! As a supporter of the Bloop Museum[1], I think that the "What might have been" if we had dedicated hardware for playing dozens or hundreds of sound files at a time is an interesting question. There's a lot of experimentation in the audio space that has kind of died out, because audio is so cheap - While over in in graphics, we're still seeing interesting advancements and dead ends.

[1] https://oldbytes.space/@bloopmuseum