MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by concerndc1tizen | 2025-04-30 09:20:23+00:00
I agree about data diodes, but how do you handle data egress? One solution is to have strict data checks on egress, but leaks are still possible. Data diodes also still suffer from the ability to inject malware that can execute DOS attacks.

I agree about capability-based security, but strictly speaking, the capabilities of current OS are just primitive, i.e. checking file permissions. What capability checks do you mean?

My understanding is that the biggest threat is not capability checking, but capability escalation, i.e. bypassing checks, and hardware hacking, e.g. spectre/meltdown-type attacks that can read arbitrary memory.
by MawKKe | 2025-04-30 09:20:25+00:00
Was the need for optimization work something that was on your mind the whole time? Like a nagging feeling in the back of the head that the code is not working as well as it _should_ be working? i.e. stress.

And when you finally "fixed" the issue through optimization, your mind allowed itself to let go of these open loops (borrowing the GTD terminology), leading to relaxation?
by saagarjha | 2025-04-30 09:20:58+00:00
This is of course a personal choice but I really can't understand people's insistence that a train that takes a single minute longer than a plane ride is inferior. I actually like planes, especially going down the California coast, which is pretty much every day of the year. But plane seats are cramped, and half the time you can't use your computer even if you wanted to. I usually fly from SJC if I want to go to LAX, and I think SFO and SJC are two of my favorite airports, but even then it's a bunch of walking to get to your terminal, and you're still going to be going through security. They're nothing like LAX, which is miserable in comparison, but an airport can only be so good.

But if we're going to talk about time: I don't agree with your numbers. SFO to LAX is like 50-60 minutes in the air. I feel like your 90 is a reasonable number for gate-to-gate. Arriving 30 minutes before departure at SFO will probably just get you to do your gate on time for last call on boarding. Add another 15 minutes to get out of LAX. Then, on both sides, whatever transportation you need to get to and from the airports, which I think is reasonable to cancel out when compared to the train.

For a train they're targeting a little over 2.5 hours for the journey. I can be outside in 5 minutes, and I can also feel comfortable arriving five minutes early. Let's be generous and say it takes 3 hours, curb to curb. The plane does the same in like 2-2.5 hours. I don't really see this being significantly different.
by HenryBemis | 2025-04-30 09:21:56+00:00
I wonder if/when (going from N to S) Canada, US, Mexico will form a "North American Union" (in the spirit of the European Union). 50 years? 100 years? never?

Current politics aside, I think: Canada and US have 'very much' in common (I'd risk saying (imho) 85% common 'stuff'). Canada, US and Mexico have 'plenty' in common (mostly Christian, capitalism/consumerism, way of life) (I'd risk saying (imho) 70% common 'stuff'). Once Mexico sorts out this 'minor' (cough-damn!!!-cough) problem (mass graves, decapitated and/or missing students, murder of anyone that doesn't want uncontrolled drug trafficking, etc.) this idea could start becoming a reality.
by GianFabien | 2025-04-30 09:22:45+00:00
Had a look at your website. Ok, I'm not a marketing person. But my questions are:

What problem are you solving?

Who are the companies that have that problem?

What are they willing to pay for your solution?

Seems to me that you have made some assumptions and haven't tested them with real, potentially paying customers. Although folks on HN are very knowledgeable, I think you should be asking marketing professionals not techies.
by wongarsu | 2025-04-30 09:23:12+00:00
No, he doesn't say that. He said that "maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software". A guy like Nadella doesn't accidentally say software instead of AI. He knows exactly what he is saying.

Considering that most of their software has been developed for decades and AI assistants have only started becoming useful in the last ~4 years it would be very surprising if 30% of their code is AI written. I doubt they even touched 30% of their code in the last 4 years. But what is perfectly plausible is that 30% of their code is written by code generators. Microsoft has a lot of interface code. All the windows DLLs that are just thin syscall interfaces, the COM and OLE interfaces in their office suite and everywhere else, whatever Office uses nowadays for interoperability to allow you to embed content of one product in another, whatever APIs their online products use, etc. In the leaked Windows XP source code it can be difficult to find the actual source code in between the boilerplate files containing repeated definitions, and in the decades since then the world has only leaned more into code generation.
by jajko | 2025-04-30 09:24:01+00:00
WTF does this primitive incorrect argument that "banks were given hundreds of billions" - you make your whole post irrelevant when clearly unfamiliar with basic facts on topic you so furiously discuss.

Those money were loaned and were returned back with interest, so US government actually earned some good money. Do you understand each word in that sentence and its overall meaning?

I am not defending banks and their too greedy and frankly idiotic behavior in any way, but if people keep ignoring absolutely basic facts about topics they so desperately want to discuss this has no bigger meaning than ie evolution vs creationism discussions with religious fanatics.
by nebula8804 | 2025-04-30 09:24:08+00:00
That will only last as long as their current generation is not in retirement age (10-20 years left). They have among the worst replacement rates in the world. Its too late to fix that. Afterwards China either becomes fully automated in an extreme fashion or they exit from the world stage as a manufacturing powerhouse. If they become robotic everyone else can as well.

Also on that note Robots are going to have to become real cheap, I suspect the reason they are so good at everything is because there is so much competition from 1+ billion people its that cutthroat

Robots will have to become cheaper than all these people assembling a generic bluetooth speaker or the price will go up eventually tariffs or not...go ahead count the number of people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U
by DimitriBouriez | 2025-04-30 09:24:29+00:00
One thing to consider: we don’t know if these LLMs are wrapped with server-side logic that injects randomness (e.g. using actual code or external RNG). The outputs might not come purely from the model's token probabilities, but from some opaque post-processing layer. That’s a major blind spot in this kind of testing.
by timeninja | 2025-04-30 09:25:11+00:00
The "syntax extension" thing is precisely the reason I have an interest in (and advocacy for) Common Lisp.

Be that as it may, for C++, Eric Neibler's [Boost.Proto](https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_84_0/doc/html/proto.html) could likely help conveniently connect syntax to implementation to achieve something similar to what the author is taking about.
by pentamassiv | 2025-04-30 09:25:19+00:00
There are a lot of people who cannot calculate what 10% more equals to. You mentioned that's an estimate and often not correct, so even if you do the calculation, there's a good chance it's wrong. A lot of people are on a budget and what is a rounding error to you, could be the difference between being able to afford it or not for them.

In Germany different tax rates apply to items that you need to survive such as food and other goods. It can be difficult to know which rate applies to a product. The good thing is you don't need to know because the total price is displayed
by voidspark | 2025-04-30 09:25:22+00:00
> This is just that scaled up

An LLM is not a Markov process. They are fundamentally different. An LLM conditions the next token prediction on the entire context window (via the attention mechanism), not just the previous token. Besides the token history window it also maintains a cache of neural activations which is updated at every step.

Otherwise you could use the same reasoning to argue that a human is a Markov process, which is absurd, but vacuously true if "state" means the quantum level configuration of every atom in the body.
A Painful Problem in Sales
by danielmorales12 | 2025-04-30 09:25:27+00:00
I'm a software engineer with an entrepreneurial spirit, looking to solve a painful problem in the Sales industry, but I'm not sure what to build because I'm not an expert in the sales space, despite my passion for it.

I know how to build tech products and solve complex technical problems, but I'm not a business-savvy person, so I'm worried about building something nobody wants.

I would love to hear from people in the sales industry: is there a painful problem you're dealing with right now that you’d love to have a tool for, but it doesn't exist yet? If so, can you share some details?

Thanks for your help!
by panick21_ | 2025-04-30 09:26:16+00:00
Something like that happened to me, but I'm European, and I never had many illusions about much American libertarianism. It was clearly funded by people who were just using the movement to get favorable regulation. And that was reflected in the issues they were talking about. I think there is no contradiction between a small government and one that can fine or arrest people aggressively when they break the rules.

In addition to that, it always had a strong southern "state rights" dog whistle. Personally I never liked Murray Rothbard. And the Rothbardian full on appropriation of Mises. Plus they often welcomed 'libertarians' that had very bad ideas, like Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

In terms of Austrian economics, I always much prefer the George Mason people. I think the economics fundamentals of Austrianism were very forward thinking and they produced a lot of great stuff and people, both directly and in the larger bubble of associated researchers.

> I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.

I think American Libertarianism basically went way to far into hyper-individualism and total freedom of action and defense of historical privileges and laws. While different classical liberal philosophies would focus way more on the cost of those actions and negotiation a balance between individual freedom and society.

Classical liberal philosophy was never supposed to mean that you can park your car anywhere and throw garbage out of the window or that you can carry your gun everywhere.

Also I think there is a huge difference between restricting government on a federal level and on a local level. I don't think any philosophical school has really figured out this issue. Both centralizing and localizing have lots of problems.

I'm at the point where I am not really have a clear 'movement' that I can point to. I still agree with much of the criticism of communism, socialism and many typically left ideas. I disagree even more strongly with the far-right.

In Europe we have central parties, but those often are socially conservative and have sub-optimal economic policy and bad local politics. So like many others I have to end up voting center-left even if I don't agree in principle with their philosophy.

On thing that helped me is not to think of absolutes and end-states, and only think of incrementalism. Even if I disagree with the something in principle. As current laws exist I might support things I wouldn't in a different situation.

In Swizterland where I life, at least we can often vote on specific issues. And that can cut across parties. And the consensus based federal government is globally unique and works pretty well for stability and consistency.
by dvrp | 2025-04-30 09:27:28+00:00
seems like it's not a new 671 B behemoth, just the V3 MoE engine with long-context RoPE + FA2, retargeted at theorem proving. see [1,2]:

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14333

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08152
by libertine | 2025-04-30 09:28:13+00:00
Have you seen the current US administration?

It's a prime example of corruption, nepotism, subordination, people being jailed, and extradited without prosecution... It's not looking good.

You have a new "deep state" out in the open, composed of billionaires, some of whom got rich through taxpayers' money, you have the President dropping crypto dumps, allowing him to get an influx of cash from undisclosed sources... and isn't he still doing fundraising? For what?
by surgical_fire | 2025-04-30 09:30:04+00:00
This is sort of the correct answer. But it also doesn't matter.

AI can replace devs or they can't. And it is sort of weird that people think about how many lines of code they output.

It is weird, because it has been a very long time that writing lines of code is far from being my main activity, even if it is the part of the job I like the most. I wonder where exactly people work where this is their main activity if they are not junior developers anymore.

Yeah, LLMs are sort of useful at spitting out code, if you know how to code. It can output code faster than you, and if you have good domain knowledge you can proofread it for the inevitable bullshit/bugs.

That's about it. Even to write decent prompts to guide it you need to understand well the domain to get it working.
by kurkku | 2025-04-30 09:30:24+00:00
I use the en-dash (Alt+0150) instead of the em.

The en-dash and the em-dash are interchangeable in Finnish. The shorter form has more "inoffensive" look-and-feel and maybe that's why it's used more often here.

Now that I think of it, I don't seem to remember the alt code of the em-dash...
by francesc_holly | 2025-04-30 09:30:38+00:00
Chrome extensions let you execute JS on certain sites, so we can querySelect all target textareas and insert the toolbar anywhere. And yes! That includes dynamically loaded elements like the PR review window. We can even apply light/dark themes that match GitHub's ;)

If you want specifics you can check out the open-source repo here: https://github.com/pullpo-io/conventional-comments

I suggest looking at `content.js`, constant `TARGET_TEXTAREA_SELECTORS` and function `initializeToolbarForTextarea`.
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-30 09:31:39+00:00
I think this reflects a shift towards all software depending on a remote database, more than some change in programmer attitudes or bad software in general.

Win 9x era software relied entirely on files for sharing, and there was no real notion of conflict resolution or collaboration beyond that. If you were lucky the program would hold a Windows file lock on a shared drive exported over a LAN using SMB and so anyone else who tried to edit a file whilst you'd gone to lunch would get a locking error. Reference data was updated every couple of years when you bought a new version of the app.

This was unworkable for anything but the simplest and tiniest of apps, hence the continued popularity of mainframe terminals well into this era. And the meaning of "app" was different: it almost always meant productivity app on Win 9x, whereas today it almost always means a frontend to a business service.

Performance of apps over the network can be astoundingly great when some care is taken, but it will never be as snappy as something that's running purely locally, written in C++ and which doesn't care about portability, bug count or feature velocity.

There are ways to make things faster and win back some of that performance, in particular with better DALs on the server side, but we can't go backwards to the Win 9x way of doing things.
by latexr | 2025-04-30 09:32:42+00:00
> If there is perhaps just _one_ thing that we can all admit that LLM's are good at, it should be bash one-liners for common tasks.

Sorry to disappoint, but no can do on that agreement. The web is full of bad advice for shell scripting one liners, because too many people fumble their way to a semi-workable inefficient solution for their specific problem, then instead of attempting to refine it and make it better by removing extraneous options they publish it as is to a blog post or gist. The result is that LLMs ingest a lot of subpar commands.

I’ve tested this many times. It is rare that an LLM returns me a one-liner that I can’t immediately see how to improve.
by saltcured | 2025-04-30 09:33:35+00:00
I use the profile manager and have dedicated (and isolated) profiles for some sticky web apps that I need to keep open through a work shift, e.g. Slack and G-Suite. My G-Suite one might even have a dozen tabs that I'll have it keep and restore on restart, holding documents that are part of a weeks or months long project. The Slack one would just be one tab per Slack org at the times when I've had to juggle a few, as I found that easier than using the Slack UI's internal way of switching orgs.

I guess it's my old school way to have isolated containers for these 1st party sites I am forced to use. I'll even cut and paste 3rd party URLs from those back into a general profile, rather than browse off to other content from those "apps".

In the general browsing profile, I don't really leave anything logged in or open in tabs for more than an hour or two, often much less. When I get up to take a break, I generally have exited the browser too. So, I may close it tens of times per day, and have it set to clear history and cookies on exit.

It's partly my defiant personality wanting to throw a monkeywrench into the tracking and personalization miasma. But it is also just more comfortable for my mind to be coming back to a cleanly reset workspace than some sedimentary remains of the past.
by bestest | 2025-04-30 09:34:23+00:00
I would suggest them to repeat the experiment while including sets from answers to "choose heads or tails" AND "choose tails or heads", ditto for numbers or rephrase the question to not include a "choice" (choose from 0 to 9 (btw, they're asking to choose from 0 to 10 inclusive, which is inherently wrong as the even subset is bigger in this case)), but rather "choose a random integer".
by no_time | 2025-04-30 09:34:45+00:00
I can’t think of an solution that preserves the open and anonymous nature that we enjoy now. I think most open internet forums will go one of the following routes:

- ID/proof of human verification. Scan your ID, give me your phone number, rotate your head around while holding up a piece of paper etc. note that some sites already do this by proxy when they whitelist like 5 big email providers they accept for a new account.

- Going invite only. Self explanatory and works quite well to prevent spam, but limits growth. lobste.rs and private trackers come to mind as an example.

- Playing a whack-a-mole with spammers (and losing eventually). 4chan does this by requiring you to solve a captcha and requires you to pass the cloudflare turnstile that may or may not do some browser fingerprinting/bot detection. CF is probably pretty good at deanonimizing you through this process too.

All options sound pretty grim to me. Im not looking forward to the AI spam era of the internet.
by jansan | 2025-04-30 09:35:20+00:00
What I find more important is the ability to get reproducible results for testing.

I do not know about other LLMs, but Cohere allows setting a seed value. When setting the same seed value it will always give you the same result for a specific prompt (of course unless the LLM gets an update).

OTOH I would guess that they normally simply generate a random seed value on the server side when processing a prompt, and it depends on their random number generator how random that really is.
by ta1243 | 2025-04-30 09:37:53+00:00
The headline doesn't say that

Any vehicle at 85% is exempt

Any vehicle at 84.999% or less pays a tarrif

That tarrif may be 1 cent or $100,000, the headline doesn't say anything about that.

Given the need for transparency though it would be best if every item bought in america highlights the exact cost of the tarrif, same as it highlights sales tax. Indeed America is fairly unique in advertising pre tax prices (buy a can of coke for $1, it comes to $1.07 at the store), it would make sense if prices were also advertised pre tarrif too, in terms of transparency. I wonder how the administration could encourage that.
by Ugohcet | 2025-04-30 09:38:00+00:00
Why use squashfs when you can do the same OP did and serve a compressed version, so that the client is overwhelmed by both the uncompression and the DOM depth:

yes "<div>"|dd bs=1M count=10240 iflag=fullblock|gzip | pv > zipdiv.gz

Resulting file is about 15 mib long and uncompresses into a 10 gib monstrosity containing 1789569706 unclosed nested divs
by schnitzelstoat | 2025-04-30 09:38:24+00:00
I probably don't understand the modern, complex models. But doesn't it basically predict the next token given the context and the better models use more training data and can consider a larger context, and have more parameters to better retain information from the training data etc.

But the fundamental way they operate is the same - predicting the next token given previous tokens. Where/how does reasoning happen here?
by Alex-Programs | 2025-04-30 09:41:17+00:00
Thanks for letting me know. The front page items are translated with DeepL, which is used for text that's currently visible. My benchmark claims that it's actually pretty good at French (I haven't got data for Danish) - one of the reasons I'm currently remaking it!

I hadn't heard of Kagi Translate; I'll add it to the benchmarking I do. And I'll see about adding Furigana there.
by xk_id | 2025-04-30 09:41:43+00:00
VCs just need to make sure there is enough hype by the time AI startups IPO, so that they can cash out. It's part of a bigger trend in finance, arguably caused by quantitative easing. It's why Uber could IPO, while they had never made a profit; but because of the hype, their stock price did great on day 1.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-30 09:42:12+00:00
The thing that really blows minds is the fact Linux does not do name resolution at all. Getting rid of glibc breaks a lot of stuff because everyone depends on glibc to do it.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Domain_name_resolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_Service_Switch

https://man.archlinux.org/man/getaddrinfo.3
by panick21_ | 2025-04-30 09:42:14+00:00
What would happen is that representatives are more locally focused on their districts and would vote in larger 'sub'-parties.

In a single seat district system, increase in seats its also proven to improve representation for minorities.

I don't think the expansion by itself is a fix-all solution.

One of the issues is that you have many single issue districts and those that get elected can vote whatever they want on everything else. That is both good and bad in some situations.

> They get 20 minutes a year to speak assuming a 2000 hour working year.

Congress isn't about making public speeches, its about legislating in congress. Turning congress into a TV show is part of the issue in the first place.
by firtoz | 2025-04-30 09:42:30+00:00
I like that there are so many different approaches to generate worlds. One, few, or eventually all of them will stick.

We have been playing around with something similar at Greybox too, where we ask Claude 3.7 to create Lua scripts to define the scenes with primitives (cubes, spheres, etc) that you can then move around. It's not perfect but did better than we expected!

https://greybox.app/blog/articles/introducing-greybox-ai-cre... has a video at the top that shows what it looks like at the moment.

We saw that Meta, Krea are working on "compose the scene from 3d model generations or imports as individual components", we'll give that a try too, soon.