MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by froh | 2025-04-03 21:12:04+00:00
Creepy Craig is hilarious. can't be Daniel Craig because the physiology is too different. And whoever this is they're Daniel Craig's dark younger brother.

https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-arche...

and I'm all in on this conclusion:

> It’s stealing, but also, admittedly, really cool.
by o11c | 2025-04-03 21:12:11+00:00
Okay, but ... if you only get something that seems to work, but isn't actually reliable, what's the point?

You seem to be wrong about cgroup v1; freezing works and is sufficient to reliably kill all children. Half-killed services was one of those really annoying problems back in the dark ages of sysvinit (not the most common problem, but perhaps the hardest to detect or deal with when it did come up).
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-04-03 21:12:21+00:00
I don't care for this line of argument. It's like saying you can't hold a position that trespassing should be illegal while also holding that commercial businesses should be legally required to have public restrooms. Yes, both of these positions are related to land rights and the former is pro- while the latter is anti-, but it's a perfectly coherent set of positions. OpenAI can absolutely be anti-copyright in the sense of whether you can train an an NN on copyrighted data and pro-copyright in the sense of whether you can make an exact replica of some data and sell it as your own without making it into hypocrisy territory. It does suggest they're self-interested, but you have to climb a mountain in Tibet to find anybody who isn't.

Arguments that make a case that NN training is copyright violation are much more compelling to me than this.
by honkycat | 2025-04-03 21:12:22+00:00
I think it is foolish to think that just because it was easy to tear something down, it will be easy to build it back up.

People are pissed off about the tanking economy and the brain-dead tariff approach, even though Trump said he was going to do this.

We know what tariffs do, it has been proven over and over again. What conclusion am I supposed to come to, after witnessing the predictable clown-show since January? We lost 5% today.
by mmooss | 2025-04-03 21:12:24+00:00
I don't think the hobby shop is comparable.

Much manufacturing labor can be physically hard and damaging over the years. Many people spend their old age crippled from lifting heavy things all their lives, repetitive stress, and the associated serious injuries that eventually happen during tens of thousands of hours. You are pushed to work faster and harder for the entire day, with fewer breaks, etc. That's your life for decades.

My impression is that most people working in manufacturing - as labor - would retire immediately if they could (and spend time in their garage). Many engineers probably are happy to keep working.
by kiitos | 2025-04-03 21:12:29+00:00
That may be the case, but the Git notion of a "commit" is a domain concept that is unrelated to, and incompatible with, the distsys notion of a "commit". And terminology like "strict serialization" and "snapshot isolation" and so on -- which this system and its docs reference -- are distsys concepts, not Git concepts. So "commit" needs to abide distsys rules, not Git rules, as you can't really mix-and-match definitions across domains.
by bigyabai | 2025-04-03 21:12:49+00:00
I don't use Brave, I'm pretty clued-in to Eich's personal dysfunctions. Contextually, this is more like you saying that Chrome users are ignoring the real innovations that Google leverages like KHTML. It's certainly an important element of the program, but it's also one of the oldest, least-complex and easiest to replace. The heritage Chrome owes to KHTML is basically nothing at this point, the same really goes for Proton too if you've seen what the repo looks like today.

I'll even go a step further, really - Wine isn't as technically impressive as DXVK. They're both large and complex projects, but the reverse-engineering required to get DX11 to run with Vulkan in realtime is a head-and-shoulders harder problem than mapping Win32 syscalls to a monokernel. Graphics performance was one of the biggest struggles Wine faced back in the OpenGL days, and the performance deficit still persists: https://linuxreviews.org/Wine_6.3_Built-in_vs_DXVK_1.8:_A_Co...

> You literally discredit Wine a decades old project to shine on a fork

Calling Proton a "fork" of Wine is like calling Fedora a "fork" of Linux. You're patently incorrect, and you're not really identifying how this is a bad thing for Wine or Proton users.
by 9rx | 2025-04-03 21:12:53+00:00
> I've never heard it either.

You've never heard of the term "brain drain"?

However, you must remember the bit about limiting who is allowed in the country. If you were a German with a hypothetical burning desire to flip burgers at In-N-Out Burger, what are the chances of you getting a work visa? I would say effectively nil. So you're not going to see those people even if they would arrive in a world without borders.
by abelanger | 2025-04-03 21:13:20+00:00
I'm not sure of the exact threshold, but the pathological case seemed to be (1) many tasks in the backlog, (2) many workers, (3) workers long-polling the task tables at approximately the same time. This would consistently lead to very high spikes in CPU and result in a runaway deterioration on the database, since high CPU leads to slower queries and more contention, which leads to higher connection overhead, which leads to higher CPU, and so on. There are a few threads online which documented very similar behavior, for example: https://postgrespro.com/list/thread-id/2505440.

Those other points are mostly unrelated to the core queue, and more related to helper tables for monitoring, tracking task statuses, etc. But it was important to optimize these tables because unrelated spikes on other tables in the database could start getting us into a deteriorated state as well.

To be more specific about the solutions here:

> buffered reads and writes

To run a task through the system, we need to write the task itself, write the instance of that retry of the count to the queue, write an event that the task has been queued, started, completed | failed, etc. Generally one task will correspond to many writes along the way, not all of which need to be extremely latency sensitive. So we started buffering items coming from our internal queues and flushing them once every 10ms, which helped considerably.

> switching all high-volume tables to use identity columns

We originally had combined some of our workflow tables with our monitoring tables -- this table was called `WorkflowRun` and it was used for both concurrency queues and queried when serving the API. This table used a UUID as the primary key, because we wanted UUIDs over the API instead of auto-incrementing IDs. The UUIDs caused some headaches down the line when trying to delete batches of data and prevent index bloat.
by ultimafan | 2025-04-03 21:13:27+00:00
Sadly from my anecdotal observations it seems all too often that people do in fact realize their teammates are cheating, whether it's queued randoms or a group of friends where one guy is cheating and the rest are "clean" but benefitting from out of game info over voice comms. But then they refuse to do anything about it. I imagine it's because they get the high of an easy win without the guilt or shame of using "real" cheats since they're not the ones who paid for / installed them.
by salamanderman | 2025-04-03 21:13:57+00:00
If I were doing this, I would have the system generate the image, and then I would have it run a secondary estimate saying "probability that this is a picture of [list of characters that Disney has given us reference input for]". If the picture has a "looks like Spiderman" score greater than X, then block it. EDIT - To answer the question, I'm guessing Disney provided a reference set of copyrighted images and characters, and somehow forgot Indiana Jones.
by lerno | 2025-04-03 21:14:03+00:00
Just to be clear, I don't mean the description of Zig to put down the language or the community. It's the best I can do to describe the difference between Zig on one hand and Odin/C3 on the other.

A more concrete example that might explain it better is looking at Advent of Code solutions.

One thing that struck me was that doing typical tasks for parsing would be 2-3 functions stringed together in a smart way in the Zig solutions, whereas in Odin and C3 it was achieved by having a single standard library function that did these steps.

From what I understand, there is a pushback against creating convenience functions in the Zig standard library, if the same thing can be achieved by stacking together a few functions.

My understanding is that doing these smart things with the Zig library with the existing functionality of considered a cool way to leverage existing code.

In C3, and I feel Odin as well, the lack of such a convenience function would be considered an omission to patch, and that having to stack things together should be reserved for specialized solutions, rather than having to stack things together for everyday tasks.

Thus in C3 and Odin, it is okay to trade detailed explicitness for convenience, whereas this is a no-no in Zig.

But what this means is that Zig users tend to celebrate and focus on smart and clever code, whereas this is a complete non-goal in C3 and Odin.

I could probably have formulated this better before.
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-04-03 21:14:04+00:00
> Introducing 'backdoors' to break encryption fundamentally undermines the very cybersecurity principles ProtectEU aims to uphold. End-to-end encryption remains essential for safeguarding sensitive personal data, critical infrastructure such as banks and hospitals, and indeed our overall security. Creating backdoors in encryption would expose these systems to vulnerabilities, risking exploitation by hackers, criminals, or hostile authoritarian states.

> Weakening encryption could even directly conflict with our ambition to grow European technology companies. Much of our lives are now lived or managed online; strong encryption is critical for businesses and consumers who trust platforms with their data. Weakening encryption would damage the EU’s credibility as a secure hub for tech innovation. We talk extensively about technological sovereignty these days, yet we continue to hinder our own progress toward achieving it.

It's refreshing to read something from an EU official (Aura Salla, Finnish MEP in this case) that actually makes sense for once.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aurasalla_csam-protecteu-cybe...
by LelouBil | 2025-04-03 21:15:03+00:00
Hello !

This is my first shot at blogging and at a "real" reverse-engineering project of any kind (outside small binary for school classes) so please tell me all your feedback about anything in there, the length, the technical stuff, the style...

I know it's short but I wanted to publish it right now, as I arrived at a "pausing" point in the process.

And thank you for at least clicking on the discussion page !
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-03 21:15:40+00:00
> Yes- LLMs and internet search are two different things, but LLMs train on the entirety of the internet, so you would think there would be some obvious overlap.

Mmm, kinda, but those image results only don't show 1,000 of the exact same image before showing anything else because they're tuned to avoid showing too many similar images. If you use one without that similarity-avoidance baked in, you see it immediately. It's actually super annoying if what you're trying to find is in fact variations on the same image, because they'll go way out of their way to avoid doing that, though some have tools for that ("show me more examples of images almost exactly like this one" sorts of tools)

The data behind the image search, before it goes through a similarity-classifier (or whatever) and gets those with too-close a score filtered out (or however exactly it works) probably looks a lot like "huh, every single adventurer with a hat just looks exactly like Harrison Ford?"

There's similar diversity-increasers at work on search results, it's why you can search "reddit [search terms]" on DDG and exactly the first 3 results are from reddit (without modifying the search to limit it to the site itself, just using it as a keyword) but then it switches to giving you other sites.
by 9rx | 2025-04-03 21:15:47+00:00
> My impression is that most people working in manufacturing

You believe it is only the people currently working in manufacturing that want to see America create more manufacturing jobs? Surely any desire they might have to work in manufacturing is already fulfilled?

That has certainly never been my impression. As far as I can see it is those who dream of working in manufacturing who make the case for the need for manufacturing jobs. They are tired of flipping burgers and want something else – something they think will be fulfilling. As such, it is unlikely that they are in-tune with the realities of it.
by mcv | 2025-04-03 21:16:00+00:00
I normally do too, but in this case I did want to work there. And apparently I do again.

I negotiated my ass off, made a lot of good arguments, and everybody understood where I was coming from, but still wouldn't budge an inch. Maybe I should have walked away. In fact, I did, a couple of months later. But now I'm coming back again.

We'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll succeed at opening up higher pay scales for programmers, maybe I'll leave again after a year or so, or maybe I'll actually find happiness doing something I enjoy.
by dgunay | 2025-04-03 21:16:11+00:00
I think the point is that for a lot of them there are endless possible alternatives to the character design, but it still generates one with the exact same design. Why can't, for example, the image of Tomb Raider have a different colored tank top? Why is she wearing a tank top and not a shirt? Why does she have to have a gun? Why is she a busty, attractive brunette? These are all things that could be different but the dominance of Lara Croft's image and strong association with the words "tomb raider" in popular culture clearly influences the model's output.
by techpineapple | 2025-04-03 21:16:26+00:00
We're definitely in the golden age of AI plan pricing, and I suspect we'll see plans for consumers scale similarly to the way we've seen streaming. There's no way $20/month is profitable, but I don't know much I would actually pay for it as a consumer. $30 sure, $40 may be pushing it. Will my business have to pay like $200/head? Maybe more?
by JohnFen | 2025-04-03 21:16:37+00:00
I don't think it's that simple. First, the US economy was supercharged by virtue of being the only economy left humming along after WW2.

Also, in the mid 20th century, the top income tax rate was 91%. Now it's 37%. Capital gains taxes were also much higher. The wealthy were taxed much more heavily during our economic boom times than now. It's not hard to think that having a more equitable distribution of wealth, not taxes, might have something to do with it.
by mmooss | 2025-04-03 21:16:43+00:00
> If you were a German with a hypothetical burning desire to flip burgers at In-N-Out Burger, what are the chances of you getting a work visa? I would say effectively nil. So you're not going to see those people even if they would arrive in a world without borders.

That's a great point. Legal immigration (to somewhere desireable) is not an option for much of the population. What interest do they have in preserving it?
by gavmor | 2025-04-03 21:16:57+00:00
> Not worth it to compute the embedding for Indy

If IP holders submit embeddings for their IP, how can image generators "warp" the latent space around a set of embeddings so that future inferences slide around and avoid them--not perfectly, or literally, but as a function of distance, say, following a power curve?

Maybe by "Finding non-linear RBF paths in GAN latent space"[0] to create smooth detours around protected regions.

0. https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/ICCV2021/papers/Tzelep...
by ein0p | 2025-04-03 21:17:01+00:00
So, giving even more taxpayer money to the education cartel, then. Got it. Good luck with that. Over the past several decades staffing in administrative positions has exponentially ballooned all across the education system, starting with grade schools, while academic metrics moved in the opposite direction. Now the question is, do we continue setting even more taxpayer money on fire, or is there a better way?
by davesmylie | 2025-04-03 21:17:10+00:00
I was actually surprised to see that there's been a release in the last 12 months - I had thought it was dead.

I used it extensively in the late 90's early 00's and really liked it. As a newb sysadmin at the time, the built-in versioning on the fs saved me from more than one self-inflicted fsck up.

I can't imagine there would be any green-field deployments in the last 10 years or so - I'm guessing it's just supporting legacy environments.
by gizzlon | 2025-04-03 21:17:33+00:00
Are there problems? Sure! But "fixes" that just makes everyone* worse of helps.. nobody.

> Enough of that, and a lot of people rightly stop caring if things can get worse

I get the feeling, but it's still dumb: "My neighbor is playing loud music, so I'm going to burn down the block. Ok, so I don't have an apartment anymore, but at least hes not plying loud music anymore!! Win!!"

* well, not the rich. They will be fine, at least in the short to medium term
by fuhsnn | 2025-04-03 21:17:56+00:00
Zig and Odin compiler may implicitly pass variables by references[1][2], creating hidden aliasing, that's one thing unacceptable for me coming from C, I haven't read about C3 doing this, hopefully it doesn't and not planned in the future.

[1] https://www.1a-insec.net/blog/25-zig-reference-semantics/ [2] https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/issues/2971
by jonstewart | 2025-04-03 21:18:00+00:00
I had a job at a place in college, back 1997–2000, that was run by a big DEC Alpha server running VMS. VMS was dying then.

I was just a lowly kid programmer working on a side project, so I can't tell you whether it's still uniquely good at something to justify its usage today. It worked. But it was weird and arcane (not that Unix isn't, but Unix won) and using it today for a new project would come with a lot of friction.
by amalcon | 2025-04-03 21:18:07+00:00
This is a thing, yes. Statistical cheat-detection methods are more or less required for online chess, for example, because anyone can run Stockfish. A lot of that came out of academia, so you can just find papers like this: https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/papers/pdf/RBZ14aaai.pdf

The techniques they use will always be a little secret-sauce, though, because anti-cheat is adversarial. The best public anti-cheat mechanisms I know of are not technical anyway:

- Play with friends or a small community that you trust not to cheat

- Structure the game to remove incentives for cheating. This is the entirety of how daily games like Wordle prevent cheating, but limits how competitive your game can be

- Closely control and monitor the environment in which the game is played. This is sometimes done at the ultra high end of competitive esports: "We provide the computer you will use. You don't have the unsupervised access necessary to install a cheat." The most common version of this, however, is in casinos.
by techpineapple | 2025-04-03 21:18:08+00:00
I'm curious if we're going to see a rapid decline of the cross-borders internet. I don't know if there's a European substitute for a lot of this stuff yet, but I imagine any leverage these companies had with try to attack European social media regulation are gone. Though, I have to say, if on the total end of cross-borders; I won't be sad if it's the end of corporate social media and the like.
by aubanel | 2025-04-03 21:18:32+00:00
Djikstra's clarity of expression and thoguht is indeed impressive. One nuance : he seems to completely equate ease of language with ability to do undetectable mistakes. I disagree: I know people whose language is extremely efficient at producing analogies that can shortcut for the listener many pages of painful mathematical proofs: for instance, convenu the emergence of complexity for many simple processes by a "swarming"
by phire | 2025-04-03 21:19:08+00:00
One of the earliest examples of "Artificial Intelligence" was a program that played tic-tac-toe. Much of the early research into AI was just playing more and more complex strategy games until they solved chess and then go.

So LLMs clearly fit inside the computer science definition of "Artificial Intelligence".

It's just that the general public have a significantly different definition "AI" that's strongly influenced by science fiction. And it's really problematic to call LLMs AI under that definition.
by johnea | 2025-04-03 21:19:12+00:00
I'm with you on that. I bought a used car recently, on which I got a great deal (as an EV in San Diego, I'm expecting the car to pay for itself in 5 years via gasoline savings), but it's dark grey 8-(

I'm thinking of spending another 1 or 2 $K to have it painted. The economy of the purchase is diminished by that, but hey, I have to l.ook at it everyday, and it's boring (and hard to find in parking lots, as you mention)...
by semiquaver | 2025-04-03 21:19:35+00:00
LLMs are completely deterministic. Their fundamental output is a vector representing a probability distribution of the next token given the model weights and context. Given the same inputs an identical output vector will be produced 100% of the time.

This fact is relied upon by for example https://bellard.org/ts_zip/ a lossless compression system that would not work if LLMs were nondeterministic.

In practice most LLM systems use this distribution (along with a “temperature” multiplier) to make a weighted random choice among the tokens, giving the illusion of nondeterminism. But there’s no fundamental reason you couldn’t for example always choose the most likely token, yielding totally deterministic output.

This is an excellent and accessible series going over how transformer systems work if you want to learn more. https://youtu.be/wjZofJX0v4M
by palata | 2025-04-03 21:19:41+00:00
That's an interesting point of view: in a way he "doesn't know me anymore", so why would he trust me? And he has to trust me because if he doesn't understand why I am better in this specific topic (maths), then the only thing left is his belief...

I once heard flat-earthers in a train. One was saying "It's like school, e.g. physics: they purposely make it such that we don't understand it to confuse us. Because we're not worse than anybody else, so we should understand, right? If nobody understands, that's because they bullshit us!". I really wanted to say "counter-example: I could understand physics at school :-)".
by eesmith | 2025-04-03 21:20:58+00:00
From what I can tell, all that does is send money to campaigns. While not getting junk mail is great, it doesn't build long-term grass roots organizations or resiliency. It doesn't support active protests, or get politicians to vigorously oppose what's happening to the US.

I don't like how you can't see their recommendations for previous elections. That would help others judge if their "algorithm" is effective.
by lerno | 2025-04-03 21:21:24+00:00
Other than C3, there is Jai, Odin, Zig and Hare which are the ones that have any traction right now that I know of. Many interesting projects have been started but ultimately later abandoned.

Going to C++ competitors there is obviously Rust, but also Nim, Crystal, Beef and a lot of others. (And Jai is a C++ competitor too)