MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aziaziazi | 2025-05-15 06:02:41+00:00
1. Ok welcome here then. I’ll encourage you to read the guidelines linked at the bottom at the page if you didn’t do it yet, but you probably already know them if you’ve been around as a reader. I read your previous message as snarky and that’s not a productive way to have an argumentation. I didn’t "assume good faith" on your account creation, apologies.

2. > someone who managed to remain a lifelong vegan doesn't crave meat

I see how my phrasing was ambiguous : my totally subjective experience is that there’s a tendency to crave if try to stop eating/doing something you had for a good while (until ~20?). Some old vegans do crave for meat but learned how to handle that feeling. The ones that stoped early and don’t have as much deep memories association with meat, will usually don’t feel the same.

We observe the same with tobacco (nicotine isn’t a really strong drug, the hard part is psychological), cheese for the French and chicken in South Africa.

Habits are stronger that most people think. Ask any psychiatrist/psychotherapist.
by loeg | 2025-05-15 06:02:53+00:00
From a practical perspective, passkeys are mostly identical to passwords where (1) secret generation is guaranteed to be strong, random, and unique; (2) they're tied to a specific site, so they can't be phished; and (3) filling is standardized and therefore ergonomic. If your passwords have those properties, passkeys aren't really an improvement for you. The main benefit to savvy consumers is that websites can trust that your passkeys are actually high quality and treat them as a primary authentication mechanism, instead of only a weak factor in an MFA system. And of course the huge huge benefit to most (unsavvy) consumers is that, you know, they're actually secure/unique and phishing-resistant.
by josecodea | 2025-05-15 06:03:15+00:00
I am sorry to hear that. It is high time that us engineers learn the lesson and refuse to work with any company that asks for unpaid work. There is no other way, but this only works if we are brave enough to act as activists, so that other engineers become aware of the abuse and circumvent it successfully.

The few that benefit from the abuse also benefit from keeping it hush hush. This is no different from obscuring the pay-bands for employees so that they can get away with underpaying the most vulnerable workers.
by thephyber | 2025-05-15 06:05:01+00:00
I was super interested in genetic programming for a long time. It is similarly non-deterministically generated.

The utility lies in having the proper framework for a fitness function (how to choose if the generated code is healthy or needs iterations). I used whether it threw any interpretation-time errors, run-time errors, and whether it passed all of the unit tests as a fitness function.

That said, I think programming will largely evolve into the senior programmer defining a strategy and LLM agents or an intern/junior dev implementing the tactics.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-15 06:07:42+00:00
> Non-deterministic behavior will never be trusted by default, as it's simply not trustable.

Never is a long time...

If you have a task that is easily benchmarkable (i.e. matrix multiplication or algorithm speedup) you can totally "trust" that a system can non-deterministically work the problem until the results are "better" (speed, memory, etc).
by roenxi | 2025-05-15 06:08:00+00:00
The issue there is that if we are capable of doing something it is hard to say whether or not it is part of our determined nature. For example, maybe we have an evolutionary adaption to famine where elderly people are biologically tweaked to be OK with starving themselves to death. That'd be pretty gruesome and I doubt they'd be excited at the prospect even if a mechanism does exist, but it is the sort of thing that evolution is perfectly capable of encoding into us.

It is less direct to the examples you give; but I'm confident that parents are psychologically designed to sacrifice themselves in the event it helps their children and many men, famously, are built to go to the frontlines and sacrifice themselves for family and community. Hard to make an assessment of whether those sort of choices is free will or determined nature.
by silisili | 2025-05-15 06:08:01+00:00
Yes! Deepseek does this to me all the time.

I had 20 something files I wanted it to check and change something. The first 5 or so it did, then the sixth it rightly said everything is correct moving on. It said that for the rest of the 20, the same text over and over.

I checked, and file 6 was the only correct one. It like, learned to just repeat itself after that and did nothing.
by hgomersall | 2025-05-15 06:08:22+00:00
Obviously it depends on the municipality, but in the UK for example, there's a (IMO deeply misguided) view that public transport should be cost neutral. That is, the bus services in a city, say, should not be subsidised. This is to the point that it is actually illegal for city councils to run a bus services. The private contractors are consistently pushing against their minimal service obligations in areas that are less profitable.
by kazinator | 2025-05-15 06:09:33+00:00
CSE doens't only identify; it eliminates (hence the E!). It refers to the complete solution.

I don't think you necessarily have to compute the dominance relation because it can pop out implicitly.

If CSE is done on intermediate code, the dominance relation will pop out from thedirecton in which the instructions are followed around the basic blocks.

E.g. simple case: we see t3 <= t2 + t1. So we make a note in some CSE hash table that we had a t2 + t1, and that the result is cached in t3. Then if we see t2 + t1 again in the same basic block, we can replace that with t3. The dominance relation is that earlier instructions in the basic block dominate later ones, but we don't have to explicitly calculate it.
by irjustin | 2025-05-15 06:10:42+00:00
The parent comment has the end bit in a nut shell. For the "energy gradients" part:

Anthropic principal says we find ourselves in a universe that is just right for life (self observing) because of the right universal constants.

Combine this with the very slight differences but general uniformity (Cosmic Microwave Background) of the "big bang" this leads to localized differences in energy (on a universe scale). Energy differences allow "work to be done". If you have the right constants but no energy difference, you can't do work nor vice versa. No work == no life.

But you have both of those, and bunch more steps - you get life.

Which is a whole lot of mental leaps packed into one sentence.

[Edit]

I basically know nothing. I just watch PBS Space Time.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-15 06:11:17+00:00
> That said, I think programming will largely evolve into the senior programmer defining a strategy and LLM agents or an intern/junior dev implementing the tactics.

That's basically what goog wants alphaevolve to be. Basically have domain experts give out tasks that "search a space of ideas" and come up with either novel things, improved algorithms or limits / constraints on the problem space. They say that they imagine a world where you "give it some tasks", come back later, and check on what it has produced.

As long as you can have a definition of a broad idea and some quantifiable way to sort results, this might work.
by pests | 2025-05-15 06:11:18+00:00
> Geocities had an interactive 2D map, allowing users to navigate through these virtual spaces. (1994)

I got online around ~10 years old in ~1998 and got into web dev soon after. I remember using Geocities and Angelfire and FortuneWeb and all that but I do not remember this interactive 2D map. I do remember the various "communities" or neighborhoods but not this. Was it gone by this point or was I just so focused on the free hosting I never noticed?

It took me a long time to realize the web was so new back when I started out, less then a decade old itself. Pretty surreal to see where its gone.
by jumploops | 2025-05-15 06:15:06+00:00
It's amazing that branching/forking isn't a core aspect of the main chat tools.

You can edit responses, sure, but then a bunch of other context is lost.

My flow is basically:

1. plan

2. build

3. branch (into some feature/esoteric dependency issue)

4. goto #2

Prompt pruning/branching should be a first-class tool for any LLM usage.
by fragmede | 2025-05-15 06:16:25+00:00
I've read that three times, and it doesn't seem to prohibit running it on a LinuxVM, as long as the hypervisor is also macOS. Specifically, you'd use macOS as the hypervisor, run a Linux guest, then use nested virtualization (which is supported recently on M3+ mac's) to run macOS on top of that Linux guest.

Why you might ask? Because your existing tooling is already on Linux, so it's easier to manage (for whatever reason) with a semi-homogeneous control plane.
by Yulenka | 2025-05-15 06:16:42+00:00
Bitwarden's registration flow didn’t work for me — so I did what any rational, well-meaning user would do: wrote a GitHub-hosted comedy set.

This isn’t a bug report, it’s a performance. With a banner. And a gentle reminder that UX is part of security.

No hard feelings — just markdown, screenshots, and a touch of despair wrapped in humor.
by listenallyall | 2025-05-15 06:17:27+00:00
New York State already has a major toll road (NY Thruway) and tolls to enter New York City. So do New Jersey and Connecticut, the other states you must drive through to enter New York City. The congestion pricing is a new charge on top of longstanding toll roads and bridge/tunnel tolls, so it feels like a new category and the start of something new, rather than being equated to "usage fees" as you state, at least in the minds of many drivers.
by evanelias | 2025-05-15 06:17:44+00:00
Not an article, and I have no direct knowledge of this either way, but I would strongly suspect that Instagram migrated off Postgres a while back. Probably to fb-mysql + myrocks, or some other RocksDB based solution.

The compression level is vastly superior to any available Postgres-based solution, and at Instagram’s scale it amounts to extremely compelling hardware cost savings.

Also if they were still primarily on pg, it would be one of the largest pg deployments in existence, and there would be obvious signs of the eng impact of that (conference talks, FOSS contributions, etc).

Bigger-picture: Postgres is an amazing database, and it’s often the right choice, but nothing in tech is always the best choice 100% of the time. There’s always trade-offs somewhere.
by bluecoconut | 2025-05-15 06:18:31+00:00
I've been working on something very similar as a tool for my own AI research -- though I don't have the success they claim. Mine often plateaus on the optimization metric. I think there's secret sauce in the meta-prompting and meta-heuristic comments from the paper that are quite vague, but it makes sense -- it changes the dynamics of the search space and helps the LLM get out of ruts. I'm now going to try to integrate some ideas based off of my interpretation of their work to see how it goes.

If it goes well, I could open source it.

What are the things you would want to optimize with such a framework? (So far I've been focusing on optimizing ML training and architecture search itself). Hearing other ideas would help motivate me to open source if there's real demand for something like this.
by kbrkbr | 2025-05-15 06:18:40+00:00
Schopenhauer would disagree. In his world model the Will with capital W is probably best described as the driving force behind all movement. While abstract, it has concrete species (think color vs red, where color is will, and red is your concrete human will, that you can feel concretely by pinching your finger). About freedom of the will Schopenhauer also has a clear opinion: will is free in the sense of uncaused, random. That does not help humans though, because while they can do what they want, they cannot want what they want. I'm not saying that this is a good model, but it's quite concrete. Nietzsche build on it, Einstein had a portrait of him in his Berlin study alongside Faraday and Maxwell, and while Freud denied any influence, there are a lot of topics in common between them.
by neom | 2025-05-15 06:19:30+00:00
Much discussed today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43986742 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43988696 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43988953 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987266 (flagged)
by Animats | 2025-05-15 06:19:47+00:00
They need to look at another number - mean time job lasted after move. The cost, both financial and non-financial, of a move is considerable. Moving for a job with questionable job security is high risk. The decline in length of employment affects willingness to move.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has job tenure data back to 2014.[1] Down 16% over that period. I wonder if there's data going further back.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.t06.htm
by retlim | 2025-05-15 06:19:56+00:00
I'm referring specifically to the root package.

https://getcomposer.org/doc/03-cli.md#create-project

Composer can install a project initially using "composer create-project", but that's a one-time setup. After that, the root package becomes just a static local project, not something Composer tracks, updates, or upgrades as a package.

https://valvoid.com/registry/packages/1/fusion-php-package-m...

Fusion handles everything as a modular package, including the root project. If the root package's metadata file includes the root package itself as a recursive dependency, "fusion build" can update and upgrade it just like any other package. Fusion builds the entire existing project, not just its dependencies.
by roenxi | 2025-05-15 06:21:17+00:00
I expect the conclusion is correct, but the argument isn't really valid. Our knowledge of cells tells us only and precisely about our knowledge of cells. We have some gaping holes in our fundamental knowledge of the universe (what is it, how did it happen, etc) and nobody can claim with any certainty to understand how any of the basic things happen. It is a mystery of such epic proportions it is hard to even articulate what an answer could look like, let alone how we would work it out. That hasn't stopped the development of a bunch of useful models and theories of physics that explain a lot of local observations really well.
by shakna | 2025-05-15 06:21:56+00:00
> One final thing the Celts did that can give the impression of crudeness is that they sometimes created dies that were larger than the flans they used. This means that the full design would never appear on any one coin, and this can make it look like they just didn’t know what they were doing. However, the Celts produced the flans with very tightly controlled weights and alloy compositions, so the idea that they could do this but not get the dies the correct size is absurd.

The tooling was improving, becoming more detailed and complex over time. Nothing was staying the same over the generations. The coins changed in the midst of technological revolution.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-15 06:22:01+00:00
With traffic, Tacoma isn’t very viable. Also I have a relative who commuted to his job in Tacoma from…west Seattle (granted they bought in the late 80s). It was an easy reverse commute (so close to actually 30 minutes?), going the other way is hard and you can only win with the train (sounder) or maybe bus. Link is making its way down to federal way soon (or already?) but that assumes you work near a station or it quickly becomes not competitive with driving.

My mom commuted to Redmond from Bothell when I was in high school, horrible traffic…and that was early 90s. You don’t want to do anything on 405 during rush hour.

You can also head west if you dare. I have a coworker commuting in from Vashon Island. I don’t think prices are that great on the islands though, maybe 30-20% less than Seattle, but you live by the ferry schedule and if you want something near the ferry dock you’ll pay a lot more for that walk on convenience.
by friederrr | 2025-05-15 06:22:09+00:00
One of the researchers quoted in Nature link here... in the past, when DeepMind published "AlphaTensor" [1][2] in October 2022, it took a single day (!!), see [3], for improvements to the AlphaTensor-based scheme to be discovered. This was then a few months later generalized into a significantly more comprehensive scheme [4]. I do not know whether the more general scheme that was discovered in [4] made its way back to some improved version of AlphaTensor - but this nonetheless shows that AlphaEvolve may also change, as it becomes absorbed by the community.

[1] Blog: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/discovering-novel-algo...

[2] Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05172-4

[3] arxiv.org/pdf/2210.04045

[4] arxiv.org/abs/2212.01175 Flip graphs for matrix multiplication

(Reposted from here, where I made a mini deep-dive into this: https://x.com/friederrrr/status/1922846803420119410?t=7jZ34P...)
by lazide | 2025-05-15 06:24:30+00:00
which part? your timelines seem pretty off if you think ‘weeks’ was a remotely possible timeline at the time either.

There was no electronic communication of any sort (electricity was barely understood at the time), and best case transit time was around 6 weeks each way, often 8-12 if possible at all. It was also highly seasonal, and still very dangerous.

So the absolute fastest turn around time was 12 weeks/3 months, and more realistically 4-6 months. With some decent odds that one of the legs of the trip might sink, losing all hands.

It’s why a literal founding father (and one of the most influential ones) was the ambassador. No one else could be trusted.

[https://www.history.com/articles/benjamin-franklin-france]
by trilbyglens | 2025-05-15 06:24:57+00:00
The culture that I live in here in the Czech Republic would paint your statement as pretty false. The police here are extremely laid-back and it's pretty easy to get away with petty thievery, yet crime is exceptionally low because people are not desperate enough to risk even the low chance of getting in trouble. You only take chances when you have nothing to lose and you only have nothing to lose when you have been completely excluded from society.
by choeger | 2025-05-15 06:26:39+00:00
I wonder if this will eventually lead to increased density and if that then leads to congested bike lanes. Will the cities of tomorrow regulate traffic between individual buildings?

Make no mistake, bikes are much, much, better for urban centers than cars. But the overall problem isn't cars, it's individual traffic in densely populated areas.

Certain policy here in Europe simply assumes that people stay in their surroundings ("15 minute city") and rarely, if ever, visit parts that are farther away individually.

Public transportation, however, is naturally biased. It can be much quicker to get 10km north-south than 5km east-west, or the other way around, depending on the city. And, of course, public transportation is often lacking quality compared to individual traffic. (Taking a bike across a bicycle road vs. getting into a crammed subway train in July, for instance.)
by hgomersall | 2025-05-15 06:27:05+00:00
It's not just classist. It's deeply obnoxious looking down on your fellow man. Shame on you. People that have views like yours do not deserve to live in a society where all the shit jobs are done by lowly paid other people. You should have to clean your own sewers and repair your own roads and look after your own public parks, and all the thousand and one jobs that just happen by those people that might end up smelly as a result.
by Saigonautica | 2025-05-15 06:27:24+00:00
I was thinking something similar, but much earlier along this timeline: what if the consultants that work for lobby groups that propose certain bills already use AI to write proposed laws? E.g. to make long, omnibus-style laws that very few of the people voting on it (or the public) actually read?

How will that erode laws that are undesirable to AI companies? Does AI take over, only because we no longer want to spend the effort governing ourselves?

Will AI companies (for example) end up providing/certifying these 'human representatives'? Will it be useful, or just a new form of rent-seeking? Who watches the watchmen, etc ?

I think it would make an interesting short story or novel!
by wnc3141 | 2025-05-15 06:27:29+00:00
I think what's at play here is the unusually palpable crowding out effects of tourism compared to any other industry. That is, when local stores get replaced by tourism shops, Landmarks etc. become more important than everyday amenities and the town becomes a sort of museum of itself.

Of course tourism can pipe in money and help a place invest in high quality services and amentaties compared to catering to industry.

However tourism often has a tremendous income distribution problem (see Hawaii or Colorado living conditions of service workers). This remains a fundamentally political problem to guarantee income distribution through living wage guarantees etc.
by graealex | 2025-05-15 06:27:45+00:00
It's not like PostgreSQL hasn't been in development for close to 30 years, covering basically every use case imaginable just through millions of deployments.

In addition, SQL in itself is a proven technology. The reality is that most problems you might think about solving with specialized databases (Big Data TM etc) could probably easily be solved with your run-of-the-mill RDBMS anyway, if more than five minutes are spent on designing the schema. It's extremely versatile, despite just being one layer above key-value storage.
by rawling | 2025-05-15 06:27:52+00:00
Not sure if joking, but presumably that then just wouldn't trigger this behaviour:

> If you happen to pronounce the name “Dave and Buster’s” as someone would normally pronounce it, almost like it’s a single word, the transcription engine on iOS will recognize¹ the brand name and correctly write it as “Dave & Buster’s” (with an ampersand).
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-15 06:28:45+00:00
An interesting piece this for a few reasons:

1. Ian Hislop, who wrote this review, later became very well known in the UK as editor of Private Eye magazine, but also a permanent team captain on Have I Got News For You. Fascinating to me that his acidic wit is present even in 1985.

2. Edward de Bono is obviously revered for this books about how to think, but I didn’t know he’d written this, and now I wonder if his other books are as equally shallow and nonsensical - do they too pretend to show something they don’t?

3. The author and reviewer both seem to think that the key to success is either to be born into it or luck (what we’d now call survivorship bias, maybe).

What’s changed? Does anybody think any of the captains of industry from Altman to Zuckerberg, Gates to Musk, Bezos to Thiel, has real, extraordinary talent?

The more I read about success - even this review from a 40 year old book - the more I think talent has less to do with it. Privilege, yes. Hard-won skill? I’m less sure.
by ithkuil | 2025-05-15 06:29:06+00:00
"Every problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection."

One could argue that the attention mechanism in transformers is already designed to do that.

But you need to train it more specifically with that in mind if you want it to be better at damping attention to parts that are deemed irrelevant by the subsequent evolution of the conversation.

And that requires the black art of ML training.

While thinking of doing this as a hack on top of the chat product feels more like engineering and we're more familiar with that as a field.
by SamPatt | 2025-05-15 06:29:24+00:00
I always felt the derision around the term "prompt engineering" was partially due to people overestimating the importance of the initial prompt and underestimating the importance of managing the ongoing context.

You develop a knack for how to steer the models or start a new conversation through experience. The system or initial prompt are important, but nothing will save you if you naively keep a conversation going too long.