MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hosh | 2025-04-14 08:17:59+00:00
An invocation of a Nodejs async function is automatically tracked within the code as a locally-scoped promise. The runtime will track it, but unless you then register that Promise elsewhere, it can only be accessed within that local scope. You better hope that you immediately chain it with the success callback or capture errors from it.

Spawning a lightweight process in BEAM returns a first-class primitive called a pid. That pid is recorded by the scheduler, so even if it gets lost by the code, you can still find out if it has been taking up resources (when debugging problems live in production).

Supervisor behavior is written in a way so that any gen_server-behavior-complying processes will be linked. That means any crashes of the spawned process will notify the supervisor. That’s not something we are doing with Nodejs async — there is no mailbox to notify, just either awaiting completion, or make sure you add the error handling … which is where people write linters to check.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-14 08:18:26+00:00
> As mentioned by another comms ter, the solution could be to find a way to separate the command and data channels. The LLM only operates on a single channel, that being input of tokens.

It's not possible, period. Lack of it is the very thing that makes LLMs general-purpose tools and able to handle natural language so well.

Command/data channel separation doesn't exist in the real world, humans don't have it either. Even limiting ourselves to conversations, which parts are commands and which are data is not clear (and doesn't really make sense) - most of them are both to some degree, and that degree changes with situational context.

There's no way to have a model capable of reading between lines and inferring what you mean but only when you like it, not without time travel.
by m12k | 2025-04-14 08:18:39+00:00
> The vast majority of cases stock options end up worthless

Also, even if the company ends up worth a lot of money, there's no guarantee that a way to liquidate, such as an IPO, exit or secondary market, will become available in any reasonable time frame. And as a regular employee you have exceedingly little to say in bringing about such events. There's not much fun in having a winning lottery ticket that can't be cashed in, in fact it's highly stressful.
by bsder | 2025-04-14 08:18:59+00:00
Stealing my wallet is generally worth less than stealing my phone even before you take into account the value of the data and the grief and expense of replacing my phone.

The fact that parking systems won't install wireless credit card readers and instead will foist the externality onto me of 1) having a phone, 2) that is currently charged, 3) has a relatively high resolution camera, and 4) capable of high bandwidth internet access is the kind of thing that ticks me off.
by somerandomqaguy | 2025-04-14 08:19:47+00:00
In Canada in general either employer or employee can terminate without having to give reason. Typically it's either a few weeks of notice for termination but the employer can choose to require the employee to depart immediately and instead payout severance for equivalent time instead. There's nuance province to province though.

In the US it's similar but AFAIK it does vary state to state. To my knowledge there isn't any law that requires what you're describing in North America.
by ncruces | 2025-04-14 08:20:25+00:00
It's not about being fair to the individual, it's about producing a better outcome for society. In this case, saving money on welfare (that's also in great measured pooled across society, not an individual account).

Parents being able to take sick days to care for their kids, or 50yo being able to take leaves to take care of their dying 80yo parents are also unfair to kids in their 20s just starting out.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-14 08:20:26+00:00
> Sounds dreadful.

To people stuck in UNIX mindset, maybe.

> If you don't know Oberon or Acme then there's no point in talking to you about them. I still don't know what you're trying to tell me, and I'm beginning to think you don't either.

Oh boy, I definitely know Oberon.

Here is my detailed explaination.

You write the REPL like code you feel like on a pane, you can the use the sigils that map if the command (loaded dynamically as instances from Oberon commands in modules), refers to existing text, selected wigdet on another pane, or requests user for additional infortmation, mouse select the command and execute it.
by ignoramous | 2025-04-14 08:20:31+00:00
> I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today.

The problem is, before the layoffs, the employee may have felt they had an obligation to do right by the company. Once they're fired, it may no longer be the case. Some may very well become spiteful, act on their vengeance, & seek immediate retribution.

The risk posed by an employee going rouge is what most CEOs are playing for, especially as in GP's case, for a company as large as Google, where they need to plan for all possible failures and scenarios, some of which may or may not have happened before hand.
by bubblyworld | 2025-04-14 08:21:02+00:00
I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th century. If you look at any thinker on the edge of human understanding you'll find something similar (e.g. I was reading Michael Levin's stuff on bioelectricity recently and it also has a heavy dose of philosophy).

I don't really have an issue with any of the points you raised - why do they bother you?

The interesting stuff is the discussion about "functional information" later in the paper, which is their proposed quantitative measure for understanding the evolution of complexity (although it seems like early stages for the theory).

It's "just" a slight generalisation of the ideas of evolution but it applies to nonbiological systems and they can make quantitative predictions. If it turns out to be true then (for me) that is a pretty radical discovery.

I'm looking forward to seeing what can be demonstrated experimentally (the quanta article suggests there is some evidence now, but I haven't yet dug into it).
by zurfer | 2025-04-14 08:21:12+00:00
This is cool and actually useful. However I would love the opposite as well, to draw a vision of how the idea might work and what it might become.

dog walking marketplace -> act 1 - you start in SF, where people love dogs as much as kids (and think that's ok), after some cold start issues you get to 100k WAU WAU

act 2 - people don't just use your app to coordinate about dogs, they also start renting each others stuff and use your payment features for convenience

act 3 - expanding in major US cities was harder than anticipated, but investors love the idea (networks effects baby) and so you can buy a super bowl ad and reach 100M dog owners and walkers in one afternoon. You're engineers did a good job and you can sign everybody up with not issues...
by lolc | 2025-04-14 08:21:24+00:00
Fun thing to study and read about. The differences are quite small though. Wouldn't the error bars dwarf the differences? I'd assume you could tweak various assumptions and easily arrive at another conclusion.

I know that the Romans were good at record keeping for their time. But I understand the best population estimates for the Roman empire are based on economic metrics like agricultural modeling which in turn must make assumptions about wealth distribution. As for the Han, I don't think they've left us a complete census either.

To quote "How Many People? Ancient Demography" [0]:

> We generally estimate uncounted women, children and elderly males by using demographic modeling based on model life tables – data tables which project mortality simulations based on real-world populations. But how do you know what tables to use? The answer here has typically been that you comb the evidence you have (grave inscriptions, fragmentary census records that survive in Egypt) to create a statistical snapshot of your population and then try to match that, as best you can, to one of the extant models that ‘best fits.’ [...]

> That leaves the question of how many enslaved persons and those too poor to be counted in some of our figures.

[0] https://acoup.blog/2023/12/22/collections-how-many-people-an...
by namaria | 2025-04-14 08:21:54+00:00
When using low traction languages and claiming LLMs are a boon, I often wonder if one doesn't end up with an even lower traction language by trying to figure out how to phrase things in English.

In my experience, the solution to low traction languages and frameworks with lots of boilerplate and busy work coding is to use higher traction languages. I much prefer to grapple the problem with my brain in a tighter way than to attempt shaping a loose language with a looser one...
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-04-14 08:23:11+00:00
-30% is a big deal.

But in 2008 we saw the S&P-500 decline 50%. And the Nasdaq-100 30%.

In 2000 the S&P-500 and the Nasdaq-100 both declined 80%.

In dollar terms.

To me it seems that the 2000 dotcom decline and the 2008 financial crisis were once in a decade events and now we are witnessing a once in a lifetime event.
by lnrd | 2025-04-14 08:23:23+00:00
Google "headless macbook", there is a community of people making macbooks without displays.

The idea started from recovering macs with a broken display and using them like a mac mini. It's possible to find "broken macs" for cheap in second hand market and if the problem is only the display you can go for the headless approach and have macOS with Apple Silicon for very cheap.

Apple Silicon has outstanding battery life, without a screen I would think even more.
by ben_w | 2025-04-14 08:23:29+00:00
The institutions, plural, of marriage varied wildly over that time.

Dowries vs. free, monogamy vs. polygamy, common law marriage vs. ceremony, wives being property vs. independent people, self-determined vs. marriages arranged by parents, and this biblical passage:

"Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him" (NIV, Matt 22:24)

And it's not like no country has implemented mandatory childcare payments outside wedlock.
by beloch | 2025-04-14 08:24:39+00:00
Roman elites were more like mafia bosses from "The Godfather" than princes. They typically started their day by hearing the petitions of those who were dependent on them. Roman elites were expected to compete with one another to produce public works, give handouts, and put on extravagant games. They were expected to serve in a sequence of public, military, and religious offices. Failure to do so could get their whole family drummed out of elite circles.

Roman elites made themselves wealthy through service to the empire, but they were expected to use that wealth to serve the public. Individuals who exploited the system to an extreme degree to amass wealth (e.g. Marcus Licinius Crassus) could tarnish their reputation. However, even Crassus died in military service trying (very dumbly) to attain the military glory that was expected of roman elites.

In the modern world, pretty much all responsibilities that the Roman elite served now rest on governments. Billionaires are free to amass obscene wealth with almost no social responsibility. There is no expectation, for example, that a billionaire should provide welfare or build a stadium out of his own pocket and provide free entertainment to the masses. Today's system works only if the rich pay their taxes and governments regulate them to prevent excesses on the level Crassus was famous for.

The rich in many countries are no longer paying much in the way of taxes and are subverting government power to free themselves of regulations. In the case of some countries, the rich are even seizing the reigns of power and undermining fundamental state institutions.

It's a recipe for revolution.
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-14 08:26:24+00:00
I don't think that's an accurate way to look at how LLMs work, there is no possible separation between data and control given the fundamental nature of LLMs. LLMs are essentially a plain text execution engine. Their fundamental design is to take arbitrary human language as input, and produce output that matches that input in some way. I think the most accurate way to look at them from a traditional security model perspective is as a script engine that can execute arbitrary text data.

So, just like there is no realsitics hope of securely executing an attacker-controllers bash script, there is no realistic way to provide attacker controlled input to an LLM and still trust the output. In this sense, I completely agree with Google and Microsoft's decision for these discolosures: a bug report of the form "if I sneak a malicious prompt, the LLM returns a malicious answer" is as useless as a bug report in Bash that says that if you find a way to feed a malicious shell script to bash, it will execute it and produce malicious results.

So, the real problem is if people are not treating LLM control files as arbitrary scripts, or if tools don't help you detect attempts at inserting malicious content in said scripts. After all, I can also control your code base if you let me insert malicious instructions in your Makefile.
by trhway | 2025-04-14 08:27:12+00:00
> it is still just a reduction in equity prices of 30%.

quantity has a quality of its own. Systems react to large changes. 30% drop without good reason for the drop, just because of a political will of small group (as even the wide field of the Trump supporters seem to be surprised by the scale of the action), is large. And given how fast it happened, the system is only starting to react. Even some Republicans started to move about stripping tariff power from President. The Republicans are going to be judged on the tariff effect in 1.5 years - too little time for any good, if any at all supposed to come, effects, more than enough for the bad ones. And Trump is wiggling and backtracking too. People have always been saying that the Big Money rule the politics. We seem to be testing that theory right now as the Big Money got seriously hit, and we're going to see how much power they have.
by encom | 2025-04-14 08:27:39+00:00
The only two features I use of my car app (which is also a Leaf), is to remote start the heater, and check the charge level. This car is the first one I've owned with remote heating. Is it essential? No. But after scraping ice off my car manually for 20 years, I don't ever want to go back. But that's all I use the remote heater for - de-icing.

As for battery charge level, I don't know why the various charger apps can't read that info off the car as it charges, but I'm sure there's some incredibly dumb reason for that.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-14 08:28:52+00:00
> Roman elites made themselves wealthy through service to the empire, but they were expected to use that wealth to serve the public

Roman elites made their big bucks through governorships (corruption) and campaign (conquest).

> There is no expectation, for example, that a billionaire should provide welfare or build a stadium out of his own pocket and provide free entertainment to the masses

Philanthropy is absolutely an expectation, though I agree the noblesse oblige8 has decayed.

> rich in many countries are no longer paying much in the way of taxes*

Relatively, yes. In aggregate, the rich pay the lion’s share of taxes in the West.

> It's a recipe for revolution

To the extent we are, it’s towards an imperial transition where the elites take a greater share.
by 0xEF | 2025-04-14 08:30:06+00:00
Can we stop making new -ishing words for scams? This weird lingo is part of what turns the less savvy users off from paying much attention to their personal security. Just say a [type of] scam such as "a QR code scam" or "text message scams," etc.

We do not need to coin a new term for each one of these things and nobody is winning any prizes for adding more layers of abstraction to fight through when trying to communicate security concepts to the people who really need to listen to it.
by iainmerrick | 2025-04-14 08:30:22+00:00
lots of people who are upset and probably feel mistreated [...] people like OP feel like their identity and way of life is threatened

But they feel like that because they're being ghosted by the company! Suddenly cut off, with no way to tie up loose ends and say goodbye to people on the way out. That's the mistreatment. If you don't mistreat them like that, maybe people won't feel mistreated or threatened.

I don't have tons of experience with layoffs. In the case where people in my team were directly affected, the company did not summarily cut off access overnight (they couldn't legally, as this was in the UK). It was completely fine and everybody was friendly and civil. It helps that the severance package was very generous, and admittedly the job market was good at the time so people would have been less worried about finding their next job.
by 0wis | 2025-04-14 08:30:36+00:00
I love it ! Thanks for sharing here !

I have to build a project for data analysis with ML (and optionally AI) for a course and certification I am passing, this is a great inspiration. I will probably do something simpler on European stocks.

You say it was a year long effort, was it full time ? Do you have an estimation of how many hours you spent on it ? Did you do it alone ?
by delusional | 2025-04-14 08:30:43+00:00
It might be fun if it didn't seem dishonest. The report tries to highlight a divide between employee curiosity and employer encouragement, undercut by their own analysis that most have tried them anyway.

The article MISREPRESENTS that statistic to imply universal utility. That professional developers find it so useful that they universally chose to make daily use of it. It implies that Copilot is somehow more useful than an IDE without itself making that ridiculous claim.
by JimDabell | 2025-04-14 08:31:15+00:00
They are referring to the dispute between Matt Mullenweg / Automattic vs WP Engine.

Mullenweg has been demanding 8% of WP Engine’s revenue, access to their books, and the ability to direct their staff on what to work on. For context, Mullenweg is maintainer of WordPress and WordPress.org, and CEO of WP Engine’s direct competitor, Automattic. The dispute has turned very nasty and included a lot of unhinged behaviour from Mullenweg. WP Engine is currently suing him for a bunch of things, including extortion.

davidandgoliath is basically saying that if Mullenweg thinks he is owed 8% of WP Engine’s revenue, presumably Mullenweg is donating 8% of Automattic’s revenue to the PHP Foundation, making their revenue only ~$5MM/yr. Obviously Automatic’s revenues are vastly higher than that and this is just a tongue in cheek way of pointing out hypocrisy.
by kazinator | 2025-04-14 08:32:08+00:00
Yes, rejecting must-be-zero-reserved-bits due to being nonzero is obviously incorrect.

"Must be zero" means that when the datum is being constructed, they must be initialized to zero, not that when the datum is being consumed, they must also be validated to be zero.

Violating either rule will cause that implementation not to interoperate properly when it is still found deployed in a future in which the bits have now been put to use.

Rejecting must-be-initialized-to-zero fields for not being zero is not an example of a flaw caused by neglecting to be "liberal in what you accept". It's an example of failing to accept what is required: the requirement is to accept the datum regardless of what is in those reserved bits. It is arguably an instance of failing to "be conservative in what you do". If you are conservative, you stay away from reserved bits. You don't look at them, until such a time as when they have a meaning, accompanied by required (or perhaps optional) processing rules.

Now, I see the point that reading Postel's law might steer some designer away from putting in that harmful check for zero, specifically due to the "be liberal" part of it. But that's just a case of two wrongs accidentally making right. That same designer might refer to "be liberal" again in some other work, and do something stupid in that context.

The only thing that will really help is clear specs which spells out requirements like "the implementation shall not examine these bits for any purpose, including validating their value".
by foldr | 2025-04-14 08:32:56+00:00
>The UK soldiers abusing a prisoner. [...] To my knowledge no-one claimed the photo was staged, just that it was misrepresenting the situation.

These photos were staged AFAIK. I don't think anyone believes them to show real instances of abuse.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/dec/09/iraqandthemedi...

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sorry-we-were-hoaxed-5...
by bruce511 | 2025-04-14 08:33:50+00:00
... all presuposing of course that the authors of that code are still around, and still want to make the effort of updating it.

In the enterprise world lots of software is more than a decade old, and no one is prepared to "update" it. The mindset in that space is for things to have longevity.

It's more of a mindset I think. Microsoft is clearly very focused on keeping things running. Apple (as a contrast example) is happy to change architecture, remove 32 bit support, and so on.
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-14 08:33:51+00:00
Windows has always been terrible. At this point, I honestly think the anomalously good Windows 2000 was an accident rather than anything deliberate.

In fact I'd go further and say everything Microsoft touches turns to slop. Windows CE was garbage. 9x was garbage (as was everything that preceded it). Even Microsoft BASIC was garbage.

I suspect the only reason people hold Windows 7 in such high regard is a combination of:

- them being too young to have used Windows 2000. 7 might be terrible but it's the least worst Windows OS in over a 20-year time span. So younger professionals today wouldn't have had the luxury of using Windows 2000

- Stockholm syndrome, where they're forced into using Windows for work so don't know any better.

The problem we have today is that there isn't anything particularly good around either. macOS is slop. Linux is probably the least worst of current desktop operating systems but Linux is still terrible for a plethora of reasons and a whole lot of use cases. It's no wonder the general populous find smartphone/tablet OSs more convenient than laptops for casual stuff. I think I would too if my options were Windows or Android/iOS.
by jeswin | 2025-04-14 08:33:57+00:00
> Give MCP agents access to what they need but not more.

My view is that you should give them (Agents) a computer, with a complete but minimal Linux installation - as a VM or Containerized. This has given me better results, because now it can say fetch information from the internet, or do whatever it wants (but still in the sandbox). Of course, depending on what you're working on, you might decide that internet access is a bad idea, or that it should just see the working copy, or allow only certain websites.
by geoffpado | 2025-04-14 08:34:14+00:00
(Not the person you’re replying to) I’ve never had a car with an automatic trunk motor, so I can’t answer that one, but back when I lived in the Midwest, if my ability to remote start the car to power climate control (particularly of the windshield defrost) stopped working, that definitely would have been in the “I’m willing to pay thousands to fix this” realm. In some cases, that would absolutely limit the ability for the car to get me places; you’re not going very far with a quarter inch of ice on the windshield.

In the summer, it gets closer to “gimmick” territory, but there are also totally times when interior surfaces of the car were too hot to touch, and that affects driving in its own right if you can’t grab the steering wheel.