MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wahern | 2025-04-17 18:05:59+00:00
LTO can be parallelized, both implicitly from the Makefile, and also within the compiler. GCC's -flto itself takes an optional argument to control the number of parallel threads/jobs. See also the -flto-partition option for selecting symbol partitioning strategies.

Rust/Cargo does this automagically, except the only control you have are the crate and module boundaries. The analogous approach for C is to (optionally) manually group compilation units into a smaller set of object files in your Makefile, LTO'ing each object file in parallel (make -j), and then (optionally) telling the compiler to partition and parallelize a second time on the backend. Which is what Rust does, basically, IIUC--a crate is nominally the LTO codegen unit, except to speed up compilation Rust has heuristics for partitioning crates internally for parallel LTO.
by babush | 2025-04-17 18:06:02+00:00
It's a bit hard to do comparisons without going into threat models and all that _fun_ stuff :shrug:

For example, JS runs in almost every browser on earth too, yet it took V8 devs 2 years to find out that `Math.expm1()` could return -0.0 (https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8.git/+/56f7dda67fdc97...). This is a cherry-picked example, and JS is clearly more complex than WASM, but still.

Just because stuff runs on a lot of devices doesn't mean it's more or less secure.

Linux runs on quite a few devices too, yet we still find bugs, people still don't ship updates to said bugs, yadda yadda yadda.

My point is just that lots of devs often skip the threat modeling and just think "I'll slap it in a WASM thingie an it'll be fine". Well good luck.
by UncleEntity | 2025-04-17 18:06:23+00:00
Yeah, I was working on this project to generate a python C-API module from the SVG schema and found when I generated one huge file (as opposed to one file per class) the compilation times were significantly faster. Or maybe it was generating the C++ SVG library, don't quite remember which one was super slow as I did both at around the same time since the code changes between the two were minimal.

Looks like I settled on the slower 'one class per file' compilation method for whatever reason, probably because generating a 200k+ file didn't seem like such a good idea.
by pmarreck | 2025-04-17 18:06:28+00:00
I love that in Guix, Guile is used as the configuration language all the way "from the metal" (the bootloader) to the declarative environment config in userspace.

I'm one of those folks that still can't do LISPs though. If there was a way to replace some or all of the parens with significant indentation instead (which I believe Racket makes possible... but that only works in Racket), I might reconsider it.
by GeorgeTirebiter | 2025-04-17 18:06:49+00:00
Mustafa Suleyman says AGI is when a (single) machine can perform every cognitive task better than the best humans. That is significantly different from OpenAIs definition (...when we make enough $$$$$, it's AGI).

Suleyman's book "The Coming Wave" talks about Artificial Capable Intelligence (ACI) - between today's LLMs (== "AI" now) and AGI. AI systems capable of handling a lot of complex tasks across various domains, yet not being fully general. Suleyman argues that ACI is here (2025) and will have huge implications for society. These systems could manage businesses, generate digital content, and even operate core government services -- as is happening on a small scale today.

He also opines that these ACIs give us plenty of frontier to be mined for amazing solutions. I agree, what we have already has not been tapped-out.

His definition, to me, is early ASI. If a program is better than the best humans, then we ask it how to improve itself. That's what ASI is.

The clearest thinker alive today on how to get to AGI is, I think, Yann LeCun. He said, paraphrasing: If you want to build an AGI, do NOT work on LLMs!

Good advice; and go (re-?) read Minsky's "Society of Mind".
by Izkata | 2025-04-17 18:06:53+00:00
This particular passage sticks out at me as the author not being able to examine their own bias:

> Walking across the street during a conference, a car pulled up intentionally fast and close to me and I hopped out of the way, scared. The men with me who did not jump roared with laughter, and this sparked a conversation (monologue) about innate personality differences (rather than, say, height differences). In that moment it was impossible for me to be a PhD who studies how we maintain beliefs about innate characteristics and generates empirical evidence around them and their impacts, even though I am. We are always constructing. In that street, my identity could not be made real against the identity that was offered out of the situation that aligned with a world they preferred, one in which some men could laugh at scared women.

Obviously I don't know these particular men, but from my experience "laugh at scared women" isn't what was happening in their minds. I think they would have laughed no matter the sex of the person who jumped, and if it was a man, he probably would have laughed at himself too - it was more like "laugh at reacting to a situation that didn't need that reaction". When stuff like this happens, men tend to use laughter as a bonding and tension-relief valve, not as ridicule.
by CivBase | 2025-04-17 18:06:55+00:00
Because unless you're talking about a single molecule of water, water is always covered in more water.

But that's beside the point.

Practically speaking, a person considers something "wet" if contacting it will make them wet. If a person contacts water, they will become wet. It's not about the technical definition of "wet" - it's about the practical implication of the word and the effect it has on people and things around it.

Just like how even if Google does not technically have a monopoly, their influence over the market is monopolistic in practice and has the same adverse effects as a monopoly.
by hamp95 | 2025-04-17 18:07:03+00:00
> On what planet is a loss of 70% of the resources to the matching process between buyers and sellers "incredibly efficient"?

One where the market maker is taking up the cost of providing a market. E.g. Steam takes a 30% cut for providing the infrastructure required to distribute games. Some people/companies can do it for less but it is the best option for a majority of sellers.

If the market maker did not the seller would get more revenue but would also eat the cost directly instead of paying someone else to do it.
by EliRivers | 2025-04-17 18:07:13+00:00
Would AGI be recognisable to us? When a human pushes over an anthill, what do the ants think happened? Do they even know the anthill is gone; did they have concept of the anthill as a huge edifice, or did they only know earth to squeeze through and some biological instinct.

If general intelligence arrived and did whatever general intelligence would do, would we even see it? Or would there just be things that happened that we just can't comprehend?
by crowcroft | 2025-04-17 18:07:53+00:00
In theory, I agree. In practice the whole system is rotten.

* Google unilaterally changing bid mechanics raising costs 15% https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-changed-ad-auctions-ra...

* Conversion attribution and cookie bombing fraud from both Criteo and Steelhouse https://finance.yahoo.com/news/criteo-versus-steelhouse-clic...

* Phunware click flooding fraud https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/17/ubers-l...

* A nearly unending list of different mobile ad frauds https://www.fraud0.com/resources/ad-fraud-cases-of-the-past-...

* Viewability fraud https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/31/procter-gamble-chief-markete...

* Session hijacking fraud https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/ad-indus...

This doesn't sound like a healthy and efficient industry. Not only do vendors clip the ticket aggressively, they divert dollars that advertisers are intending to go to quality media/real publishers, and siphon it off to fraudulent sites and apps where they generally take a higher margin.
by whizzter | 2025-04-17 18:08:12+00:00
There's a huge difference here, historically that was because many C codebases were vulnerable due to inherent C flaws and ssh daemons due to their age was C based. OpenBSD folks stances on coding and system design avoids pitfalls.

This is an Erlang daemon, thus written in a managed language without buffer overflows,etc, but it seems like someone left a huge gaping logic hole to drive a bus through. SSH or not, this could've equally well been a logic hole in a base webserver,etc.

I'd say this is more akin to the Log4j debacle, a perfectly safe language but bad design makes it vulnerable to something trivial.
by pmarreck | 2025-04-17 18:08:19+00:00
I guess we should distinguish "the shell environment" (which might stay Bash) with "the shell script language" (which could be any one of a number of options, just use the right hashbang header)

One that strove to do both WOULD have to do all the things you suggested as well (job management, stdout/stderr redirection etc.) So options like oil shell, nushell, fish etc.

I was just talking about "a commandline tooling language" in general, as far as use-cases. And for that, Lua (and Moonscript, which compiles to Lua but is way nicer and has been featured on HN a few times over the years) seems to fit the bill (1-based indexing aside, ugh)
by dayvigo | 2025-04-17 18:08:26+00:00
> The actual issue is parents wanting to (basically) anesthetize their kids so the parents can do something as if they didn't have the kids.

A good question to ask is why these people are making the decision to have children in the first place if this is how they treat them.

Maybe an order of magnitude or so less people should have children. People who want to have their cake and eat it too, raising their children largely passively, shouldn't be having kids at all. It's not something you "need" to do or should do without a very good reason and high confidence in your ability to do so effectively. Society should be strongly discouraging these kinds of people from having kids, but it's currently encouraging them.
by lrvick | 2025-04-17 18:08:48+00:00
To try to convince my employer at the time to drop Zoom, I decided to see how many security vulns I could find in 2-3 hours.

Found 12 confirmed bugs in that window using only binwalk and osint.

The worst was that I noticed the zoom.us godaddy account password reset email address was the personal gmail account of Eric S Yuan, the CEO.

So, I tried to do a password reset on his gmail account. No 2FA, and only needed to answer two reset questions. Hometown, and phone number. Got those from public data and got my reset link, and thus, the ability to control the zoom.us domain name.

They were unable to find a single English speaking security team member to explain these bugs to, and it took them 3 months to confirm them and pay me $800 in bug bounties, total, for all 12 bugs.

The one bright side is this did convince my employer to drop them.
by vaxman | 2025-04-17 18:09:14+00:00
DEC failed because Corporate America perceived that the Chief Architect of VMS had created a futuristic version for Microsoft that ran on commodity hardware.

He should have convinced Ken Olsen to let him port VMS to commodity hardware and gone back to DECWRL to try again later if Ken refused, but instead he built it for Billy and Balmy who were guaranteed to (and, in fact, did) use it to destroy the lives of every DEC employee and every industry worker that had specialized in DEC's proprietary (but incredible) systems, also setting back the progress of mankind a couple of decades because NT turned out really terrible compared to VMS, giving rise to Linus' science project born out of the pages of a book on operating system theory written by an academic with no real world experience compared to the Chief Architect of VMS, RSX11, RT11, etc. (If there is no Hell, he's home free. If we make hell on Earth, then for him, it must be knowing that WSL exists.)
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-04-17 18:09:30+00:00
The dependency costs seem to be self-evident but perhaps it would be enlightening to see a comparison of the energy costs, as well as the time costs and storage costs, of compiling Rust programs versus their C equivalents. For example, comparison might reveal that there is no difference and no trade-off or that any differences and trade-offs are small enough to be worth making in the interest of some higher purpose.
by thomasahle | 2025-04-17 18:09:32+00:00
> What the hell is general intelligence anyway?

OpenAI used to define it as "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work."

Now they used a Level 1-5 scale: https://briansolis.com/2024/08/ainsights-openai-defines-five...

So we can say AGI is "AI that can do the work of Organizations":

> These “Organizations” can manage and execute all functions of a business, surpassing traditional human-based operations in terms of efficiency and productivity. This stage represents the pinnacle of AI development, where AI can autonomously run complex organizational structures.
by StumpChunkman | 2025-04-17 18:09:37+00:00
> That is really hard because that was the interest of geek products like Synology to be like your own computer, that you can easily ticket and use whatever disk in whatever configuration that you wanted, even if at your own risk sometimes

Exactly that. My risk tolerance and multi-backup strategy means I use cheap old data center HDDs from Ebay for a fraction of the price. Now, if my NAS hardware itself goes kaput or I want to add new devices in the future, I may have to worry about the cost of my drives ramping up or risk potentially losing functionality.

The fact that they say "In addition, the migration of hard disks from existing Synology NAS to a new Plus model will continue to be possible without restrictions." to me means that this isn't due to a technical restriction, but just a desire to increase their HDD revenue stream.

Makes it very hard to recommend Synology going forward. This is not the first seemingly anti-consumer step they've taken recently.
by graycat | 2025-04-17 18:09:51+00:00
> What your wrote is ... not related to the topic of the article.

The article was: The Halting Problem is a terrible example of NP-Harder and I wrote:

> So, in this case can tell if the "program will stop" and, thus, solve "the halting problem".

> "Trivial"?

I never claimed the post was a significant contribution to computer science or complexity theory, and at most only a tiny fraction of posts at HN are such. Also, my post does not address the complexity theory question of P = NP.

If what I wrote was "new, correct, and significant", then I should have sent it to a good computer science journal. I've published enough papers in good math and computer science journals to notice that the checks take a long time to arrive. I'm not in academics and never wanted to be.

HN is not a journal of new, correct, and significant work in computer science.

From responses in this thread, the post has proven to be at least curious and interesting to some of the HN audience.
by dcchambers | 2025-04-17 18:12:08+00:00
adjective: novel

definition: new or unusual in an interesting way.

ChatGPT can create new things, sure, but it does so at your directive. It doesn't do that because it wants to which gets back to the other part of my answer.

When an LLM can create something without human prompting or directive, then we can call that intelligence.
by Liftyee | 2025-04-17 18:12:21+00:00
Always love to see an in-depth reverse engineering write-up. This one's particularly interesting since I'm currently designing a battery pack for my own project.

Interesting to see a microcontroller (and quite a classic one...) as well as an ASIC for battery management. I imagine it's for communication purposes. The battery management chips I've been looking at have built in I2C interfaces to let me avoid firmware.
by futuraperdita | 2025-04-17 18:13:17+00:00
> OAI is lying and Sam Altman in particular is extremely convincing

Sam is an excellent hype-man and is going to play to the strengths of the team and their accomplishments; every new product release is going to be hailed as a breakthrough until people become skeptical if it really is. In the middle of the hype cycle you keep your foot on the gas, because you can make it through a potential AI winter and if not invest in more products.

"AGI" is a shaky definition with moving goalposts. What it means to me might not be what it means to you. How it manifests in product is unlikely to be the science-fiction "one model that does everything". It also doesn't mean that the path to AGI is the path to ASI, or the path to catastrophic risks.

I personally believe that if OpenAI has dismantled the safety org, it is not just because it is in their short-term best interest, but also because they have found that many of the initial concerns around "catastrophic risk" (in the MIRI-type doomer style) from current systems are likely to be unlikely or invalid. As for the smaller safety risks, I'm not sure business has really ever cared about those unless the costs realized outweigh the profit.
by tasuki | 2025-04-17 18:13:23+00:00
Not the person you're replying to, but I'll bite:

I've written low thousands of lines of Haskell. Similar to mikojan, I love Haskell in theory, but ended up not enjoying it as much in practice.

1. The multitude of string-y types. I end up converting between String, Text, Lazy Text, ByteString, Lazy ByteString, and I forget what else. Each library wants me to pass in a specific string type, and each other library returns a different string type. LLMs are good at this, also for a while I had a ton of helper functions to convert between any two string types. Still, perhaps there's a better way?

2. The error messages. I come from Elm, so I'm spoiled. Yes, I understand a language with HKTs will never have as nice error messages. Yes, LLMs are pretty good at explaining GHC error messages.

3. The stdlib. Haskell gets a lot of credit for safety, but a `head` blows up instead of returning a `Maybe`. I know there are other - safer - preludes, but I don't know how to choose between them. I don't know how using a different prelude would impact my projects.

I feel like my next step is either towards Idris, with its polished standard library (and dependent types baked into the language!), or towards something simpler and more Elm-like (Gleam perhaps, or Roc). But if you can sell me on Haskell, I'm all ears!
by kelseyfrog | 2025-04-17 18:13:49+00:00
Pray to $DEITY is spot on. American's aren't censored overtly - instead every speech act is filtered through the prism of economics and markets and folks are making cost-benefit calculations on everything they say.

Have you ever felt like if you said how you really felt that your life would be ruined? Congrats, you experienced $DEITY enforcement and bent the knee.
by justanotheratom | 2025-04-17 18:14:09+00:00
Recently, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said,

"We have something called A-SWE, which is the Agentic Software Engineer. And this is where it starts to get really interesting because it’s not just about augmenting a developer, like a Copilot might do, but actually saying, ‘Hey, this thing can go off and build an app.’ It can do the pull request, it can do the QA, it can do the bug testing, it can write the documentation."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kzQM_BUe7E The relevant discussion about A-SWE begins around the 11:26 mark (686 seconds).
by fidotron | 2025-04-17 18:14:34+00:00
Exactly.

In the ad tech space the only winners are the people building and operating the adtech; everyone else is a sucker.

The only truly novel version of it which I have seen emerged from the Turkish hypercasual games space, where they managed to construct a giant audience everyone else thought was worthless, funnel them into their games, and then use the attention in the games to sell access to this apparently worthless audience.

Of course the audience actually were worthless, because all they were really interested in was new free hypercasual games, so the real suckers here were other devs that paid to access this audience but didn't have the adtech chops to make the most of it before the players moved on, and they funded their competition in the process.
by tmtvl | 2025-04-17 18:14:57+00:00
> * Identity providers who have lists of user IDs that belong to "high CTR" audiences (users more likely to click ads)

> * Geo providers who tell the bidders where the User's location is so that they can target locally-focused advertisements to them

> * User intent plugins, "abandoned cart" retargeting, product recommendation providers, etc. who look at user interaction events and build profiles of people who can be retargeted

That's horrible! In a better world such practices would be made illegal and those involved would be hung, drawn, and quartered.
by cj | 2025-04-17 18:15:42+00:00
> Even beginner bodybuilders know that taking steroids will crush their natural testosterone production.

Maybe beginner bodybuilders understand this. But I'd argue the average new steroid user is more likely the be un/mis-informed. The average person gets all their information from Instagram/Tiktok/Youtube/Reddit.

But my observation is a lot of people are jumping on gear for purely aesthetic reasons. They are ordering online from research chemical sites and they're almost always not working with a trainer/coach/doctor (vast majority of young people on gear are not doing it under any type of supervision, also means many skip basic necessities like regular bloodwork).

It's much more common for people to jump on gear, experience a negative effect, and then do research afterwards. Which is fine for substances that are relatively benign, but risky when you're messing with your hormones especially at a young age.
by 1659447091 | 2025-04-17 18:15:45+00:00
> Don't pretend that actual users would have any meaningful control over anything.

You do have control, you just don't like the option of control you have which is to forgo those social/porn sites altogether. You want to dictate to businesses and the government how to run their business or country laws that you want to use. And you can sometimes, if you get a large enough group to forgo their services over their policies, or to vote in the right people for your cause. You can also wail about it til the cows come home, or you can try and find working solutions that will BOTH guard privacy and allows a business to keep providing services by complying with laws that allow them to be in business in the first place. It's not black & white and it's not instant, it's incremental steps and it's slow and sometimes requires minor compromise that comes with being an Adult and finding Adult solutions. I'm not interested in dreaming about some fantasy of a libertarian Seasteading world. Been there done that got the t-shirt. I prefer finding solutions in the real world now.

> The false "need" to do age verification gets thrown on the trash heap where it belongs.

This is something you should send to your government that makes those rules. The businesses (that want to stay in compliance) follow the government rules given to them. The ones that ask for more are not forcing you against your will to be a part of it.

I get you don't like it, I don't care for it either; but again, you can throw a fit and pout about it - or try tofind workable solutions. This is what I choose to do even though I made the choice long ago to not use social media (except for this site and GitHub for work if you want to count those) porn sites or gambling or other nonsense. So all these things don't affect me since I don't go around signing up for or caring for all the time wasting brain rot(imo) things. But I am interested in solutions because I care about data privacy