MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chriswarbo | 2025-05-21 14:56:47+00:00
> I would love to used PBT more, but many tests I write have only one answer per input. Think sum like aggregations.

Not quite sure what you mean by "only one answer per input" (that it's a function, i.e. a 1:1 mapping?), but there are of lots of properties that aggregations might typically need to satisfy, e.g. off the top of my head:

# Identity element forAll(pre, post) { assertEqual( agg(pre ++ [agg([])] ++ post), agg(pre ++ post) ) } # Invariant to order forAll(elems, seed) { assertEqual( agg(elems), agg(permute(elems, seed)) ) } # Left-associative forAll(xs, ys, zs) { assertEqual( agg([agg(xs ++ ys)] ++ zs), agg(xs ++ ys ++ zs) ) } # Right-associative forAll(xs, ys, zs) { assertEqual( agg(xs ++ [agg(yz ++ zs)]), agg(xs ++ ys ++ zs) ) }

(FYI these typical properties of a (commutative) monoid, which is an algebraic structure that describes many "aggregation-like" operations)
by salawat | 2025-05-21 14:56:48+00:00
Never met him, but the Gentle person's guide to forum spies on cryptome blew open my worldview in terms of expanding my awareness to include the fact that manipulating the apparent through technological means was an organizationally feasible means of manipulation.

I've not been sure whether to hate having stumbled upon it, or be grateful. I'm probably not as healthy as I could be for having crossed paths with his post; I can't deny that lessons I took from that has served me well over the past decade, and allowed me to punch up for knowing what was going on. So requiescat in pace, J. Young. I'll do my damnedest to keep the signal alive.
by IanCal | 2025-05-21 14:57:05+00:00
Good lord.

I think the change here will be something we've seen with the other modalities. Text was interestingly syntactically correct but nonsense sentences. Then paragraphs but the end of the article would go off the rails. Then the article. Now it's that the creativity of the children's story in question.

Pictures were awful fever dreams filled with eyes but you could kind of see a dog. Then you could see what it was, then decent

Videos were fun that they kind of worked, then surprising it took a few seconds for the panda to turn into spaghetti, then it kept the general style for a decent time.

I see this moving towards the creativity being the major thing, or it having a few general styles (softly lit background for example).

This has mostly all shifted in a very short space of time and as someone who put RBMs on GPUs possibly for the first time (I'm gonna claim it) this is absolutely wild.

Had I seen some of this, say, 6 months ago I'd not have guessed at all bits weren't real.
by Flamentono2 | 2025-05-21 14:57:34+00:00
We don't have an energy problem on earth. We have a capitalism problem.

Renewable energy is easily able to provide enough energy sustainable. Batteries can be recycled. Solar panels are glas/plastic and silicium.

Nuclear is feasable, fusion will happen in 50 years one way or the other.

Existens is what it is. If it means being able to watch cat videos, so be it. We are not watching them for nothing, we watch them for happiness.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-21 14:57:44+00:00
If the lotteries are regular the number of people that would need to be bribed increases as does the risk of exposure. At some point it stops being worth the risk. On the spectrum of centralization such that only one person decides to the other end with complete devolution such that each person decides there is a trade off on how much it cost to bribe the ‘politician’ and how much gain could be obtained from the bribe. In the extreme case of everyone deciding you’d have to bribe everyone and it would be impossible for the value extraction to be greater than the bribe. It would be hard to do worse than entrenched political parties and who tend to have lifetime and even hereditary tenures.
by static_void | 2025-05-21 14:57:55+00:00
LLMs are terrible at writing hip-hop because they can only move forward.

Hip-hop is just natural language with extra constraints like rhythm and rhyme. It requires the ability to edit.

Similarly, types and PL syntax have more constraints than English.

Until transformers can move backward and change what they've already autocompleted, the problem you've identified will continue.
by danielvaughn | 2025-05-21 14:58:08+00:00
When I lived in NYC I applied to work there several times. Never got an interview but would’ve been an incredible experience, since I was an artist prior to becoming an engineer.

Also the Met is just incredible. It’s my favorite thing to do in the city. I’m not sure if this exhibit is the same one that I saw, but I remember seeing an exhibit of old instruments, like guitars from the 19th century and even older than that iirc.

There’s also an amazing weapons exhibit that I believe is permanent. Some eccentric rich dude collected them over a century ago, and when he died it was donated to the museum. Everything from royal armor to samurai swords. Very cool.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-21 14:58:21+00:00
Tests should be optimized to find bugs. Tests that you have already run have a lower chance of doing that (they only find regressions); tests with novel inputs are preferred. And since writing tests manually is so expensive, this means automatic test input generation. How do you determine if such tests pass? Properties.

In practice, property based testing fails because the organization is not actually interested in delivering correct code. "This bug will never happen in practice so we won't fix it." "If we fix this, we may change some incorrect behavior some customer is depending on." And once that happens, PBT is useless, because it will keep finding that "don't fix" bug over and over.
by atoav | 2025-05-21 14:59:01+00:00
That was my point. I play a US Strat, that now costs more than 1200 Euros. The guitar I got for my family member plays just as good. And that isn't because my Strat plays bad, I play that instrument since 15 years and it is setup correctly etc.

That is because the new cheap guitars can be (depending on the manufacturer) really good nowadays. I have to admit I felt a bit of envy with my family member, because during my youth this was a fucking struggle, with weird Squires that had all kind of problems and twisty necks and whatnot.

Of course the cheap guitar doesn't add the placebo effect of having a guitar with the real Fender logo to it. And if you're struggling to get out good sounds you might feel that the only thing that will make you sound better is that Fender logo. Probably everybody goes through that stage at some point during their instrument-playing. But as of now I am good enough of a guitar/bass player that I stopped caring about brands for the most part. There is big brands with shit products and small brands with good stuff. Brands do not matter nearly as much as the press or guitar snobs say.
by GenshoTikamura | 2025-05-21 14:59:02+00:00
Some people haven't overcome their childhood desire to die or suffer so as to make the parents regret their decision not to buy that candy or take the puppy home. They imagine dismal future as a glorified way to suffer. Talk about cyberpunk - there's that sweet alluring promise to spend a whole life eating instant ramen sitting next to a window with a blinking neon sign and endless rain behind it, coding routinely to a lofi soundtrack, or lurking lonesomely about the techno-slum neighbourhood hiding their faces from CCTV behind masks
by jerkstate | 2025-05-21 14:59:03+00:00
It’s fallacious that manufacturing can’t be done competitively in the US, it absolutely can, but policy allows business owners to make slightly more profit by offshoring production, so that’s what happens.

Regarding fixing the infrastructure, I like that idea too, but the government is pretty incompetent and full of grifters so I don’t really think that’s an efficient way to get money to poor uneducated people - most of the money will go to consultants and non-profit directors and so on.
by bluGill | 2025-05-21 14:59:25+00:00
That is the one thing about PBT that worries me. I can write code and all tests pass, then next week the edge case I missed randomly is hit by a coworker who now has to figure out why their change broke my code (it didn't).

I can tell you from experience that random failures cause loss of trust. People learn to ignore failures and just keep hitting rebuild until the tests pass. People will not investigate test failures in code that they don't understand.
by ehnto | 2025-05-21 14:59:27+00:00
I don't believe it will remain static, in fact it's done nothing but change every year for my entire career.

I do like the idea of smaller programs fitting smaller needs being easy to access for everyone, and in my post history you would see me advocate for bringing software wages down so that even small businesses can have software capabilities in house. Software has so much to give to society outside of big VC flips and tech monoliths. Maybe AI is how we get there in the end.

But I think that supplanting humans with an AI workforce in the very near future might be stretching the projection of its capabilities too far. LLMs will be augmenting how businesses operate from now and into the future, but I am seeing clear roadblocks that make an autonomous AI agent unviable, and it seems to be fundamental limitations of LLMs, eg continuity and context. Advances recently seem to be from supplemental systems that try to patch those limitations. That suggests those limits are tricky, and until a new approach shows up, that is what drives my lack of faith in an AI agent revolution.

But it is clear to me that I could be wrong, and it could be a spectacular miscalculation. Maybe the robots will make me eat my hat.
by sofixa | 2025-05-21 14:59:44+00:00
> Google is making money hosting these videos

This isn't certain. Google do not break out Youtube revenues nor costs. Hosting this amount of videos, globally, redundantly, the vast majority of which are basically never watched, cannot be cheap.

It's entirely plausible that Google's wider benefit from Youtube (such as training video generation algorithms and better behaviour tracking for better targeted ads across the internet) are enough to compensate for Youtube in particular losing money.
by teeray | 2025-05-21 15:00:15+00:00
> so people wouldn't have to quit their jobs

You would have to work out corruption of the common Joe here. Employers hold massive sway over their employees, and by nature of employing lots of people would have a pretty good chance of employing some fraction of the government. It would need to be possible for these randomly-selected individuals to enact policies that work counter to the interests of their employers without them fearing for their livelihood after their term. Otherwise, we just make lobbying cheap or free: “all of you—vote for this or else.” I think, at minimum, companies should be unable to terminate such individuals for some cooldown period after their term.
by the-lazy-guy | 2025-05-21 15:00:24+00:00
This is Stephen Toub, who is the lead of many important .NET projects. I don't think he is worried about losing job anytime soon.

I think, we should not read too much into it. He is honestly exploring how much this tool can help him to resolve trivial issues. Maybe he was asked to do so by some of his bosses, but unlikely to fear the tool replacing him in the near future.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-21 15:00:43+00:00
Not just a network provider preference. It is an OS-level preference in most consumer hardware today. (The "Happy Eyeballs" protocol, among other things. OSes will send IPv6 first, then after a delay send IPv4 and after that favor whichever one is "quickest"/"healthiest".) It's also a natural preference over things like STUN/"UPnP" to avoid NATs, especially CGNATs.
by mxfh | 2025-05-21 15:00:50+00:00
My go-to example is when some EU initiatives proposed labeling mobile phones by energy use. It completely missed the forest for the trees, as a prime example of overoptimization if your goal is carbon emissions reduction.

Nearly any other daily activity of a consumer in the developed world uses orders of magnitude more energy and resources than scrolling TikTok on a phone.

Examples?

– Driving to work: commuting burns far more fuel in a week than your phone uses in a year.

– Gym sessions: heated, lit, air-conditioned spaces plus transit add up quickly.

– Gaming or watching TV: bigger screens, bigger compute easily 100x and higher power needs vs phone gaming.

– Casually cooking at home: using a metric ton of appliances (oven, stove, fridge, pans) powered like twice a week, replaced every ~10 years.

– Reading print media: a daily newspaper or weekly book involves pulp, ink, shipping, and disposal.

– Streaming on a laptop or smart TV: even this draws more power than your phone.

– Taking a shower: the hot water energy use alone dwarfs your daily phone charge.

Of couse not doing any sports or culture is also not what societies want, but energy wise a sedentary passive tiktok lifestyle is as eco friendly as it get's vs. any other real world example.

Phones are basically the least resource-intensive tool we use regularly. Externalities, context, and limited human time effects matter a lot more than what one phone uses vs the other.

Even e-readers already break even with books after 36 paper equivalents

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/25/1252930557/book-e-reader-kind...
by subpixel | 2025-05-21 15:01:11+00:00
I grew up upper middle-class and graduated from the ivy league. I will not list out how antithetical my own experience is to yours, but I promise you your financial education was highly abnormal.

I'd wager walking down Main Street USA and asking people in their 30s and 40s what stocks they own and what an ETF is would be get you a lot of blank stares.
by candiddevmike | 2025-05-21 15:01:18+00:00
> Usernames are replaced with consistent pseudonyms generated by the mimesis library, ensuring that identifiers remain unique and contextually meaningful across records. Similarly, user IDs and message IDs are hashed using the SHA-256 algorithm and truncated to 12 characters. This deterministic hashing approach maintains linkage between related records while effectively masking the original identifiers. The global name field, deemed unnecessary for analysis, is entirely removed. Additionally, user IDs embedded within the content field are identified via regular expressions and replaced with their corresponding hash values.

Seems pretty thorough, though this is may end up being a good lesson for GenZ/A not to post things in public spaces on the internet.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-21 15:01:19+00:00
Last night my girlfriend asked me why I kept watching the same bland sounding videos again and again. She came over and watched for a bit, gave a sort of confused laugh of solidarity to something, like "Uhh, why is he so into this? But, ok, I guess..." and then walked away.

It wasn't until I was able to get my jaw off the ground that I told her it was AI. No, not AI like special effects, completely AI.
by testthetest | 2025-05-21 15:01:24+00:00
Yes! We use a version of this in our end-to-end Playwright scripts as well, because we want our tests to be both:

1) lightweight, because most of our test suites run on production infrastructure and can’t afford to run them constantly

2) "creative", to find bugs we hadn’t considered before

Probabilistic test scenarios allow us to increase the surface we're testing without needing to exhaustively test every scenario.
by terts | 2025-05-21 15:01:38+00:00
It depends. I'd love to make a prototype using Bevy with Roto. What I'm trying to say is that if you only want something to make Rust compile faster, then Rust might the better option. If you want something that behaves more like a scripting language and you don't mind that is compiled at startup, then Roto might be good for that purpose (with the caveat that there are missing features of course).
by atoav | 2025-05-21 15:01:48+00:00
The channel I mentioned measured the internal cabling of an 60s Les Paul and it had a WILD capacitance swing changing with humidity (more than 100% of the orignal value). Meaning the capacitance-induceed resonant frequency of the guitar would shift strongly over the course of a gig.

Needless to say, this is probably not a thing anybody is looking for.
by icedchai | 2025-05-21 15:01:53+00:00
Yeah, as you mentioned before, the chipset just didn't keep up. I had an A3000 for a while (68030 25mhz) You could do faster blits with the CPU. I remember running a utility called "cpublit" that accelerated window scrolling. It was noticeably faster. This was 1991 or so. ECS was long in the tooth.
by yfractal | 2025-05-21 15:02:10+00:00
I am the author of this article. Sorry for the misleading article.

First, I admitted I didn't describe the problem clearly. And now, I'd like to have some explanation.

In the intro, the issue with rbspy is that it reads invalid addresses, see this https://github.com/rbspy/rbspy/blob/8d501946f75335154c493473....

Data race refers to incorrect data, not an invalid address error.

And the citations, they are 2, one is the Ruby memory model(the third ref), and then a MIT course. I referred to this because it supposes 64-bit aligned memory reading is atomic, but I can't find other sources. And if you read the MIT course reference, you will see it's about RCU, and the RCU is valid only when 64-bit memory operations are atomic.

Yeah, sometimes, the compiler may compile a 64-bit memory access into two instructions, such as Rust, but it's not Ruby. It should be fine not consider this.
by carlosjobim | 2025-05-21 15:02:11+00:00
I use these DeepL and Kagi Translate to sell products and do complicated deals with people whose language I don't understand. None of them have ever said anything to indicate that the writing is sub-par, and we sometimes have very long e-mail chains to iron out details.

I have in fact had professional translators look extensively at AI translated material, and their verdict was that the translations are perfectly fine but maybe that the AI sometimes expresses itself in a funny or strange way. Well, that's what people do as well.

Maybe it's not indistinguishable from native, but it's indistinguishable from a person who is fluent in the language, and that's the only thing which matters. Because the purpose is to communicate.

The trick is to first write in your native language in a way that is extremely clear and devoid of any risks of the receiver misunderstanding any part. This works best, whether the reader is another human or an AI translator.
by oldpersonintx2 | 2025-05-21 15:02:19+00:00
its an experiment, it could be rolled back in a year

but, I do think in the future, these "premium" agent accounts will be like the Amex Centurion...when your "premium" agent wants to arrange a table at French Laundry, it jumps the line etc

we are definitely headed towards a future where some agents get priority over others, this happens in any services market
by sofixa | 2025-05-21 15:02:33+00:00
I read their comment as meaning that Nvidia should prioritise a specific kind of consumer/prosumer hardware.

Nobody is running H100s at home, nor are most video companies running ones. So the choice for them is to "rent" them from Google, or... invest a lot in almost impossible to obtain Nvidia hardware? One has lower initial cost, and is available now.
by marcosdumay | 2025-05-21 15:03:16+00:00
> It's like the 2025 version not not using an IDE.

That's right on the mark. It will save you a little bit of work on tasks that aren't the bottleneck on your productivity, and disrupt some random tasks that may or may not be important.

It's makes so little difference that plenty of people in 2025 don't use an IDE, and looking at their performance from the outside one just can't tell.

Except that LLMs have less potential to improve your tasks and more potential to be disruptive.
by motohagiography | 2025-05-21 15:03:33+00:00
in the era the film was influential I knew a few people who were like this Viv character and it seems like it's been long enough that the archetype bears some eulogizing. there's no romance in that kind of failure anymore.

the movie is the most literal romance of any character in a film ever. By any objective criteria, Withnail was a horrible person. Richard E. Grant's ability to be a living cartoon made it hilarious and charming and he let you suspend your disbelief in Withnail's grandeur and go along for the absurd ride. the important idea is that romance is seeing things as greater or more significant, (or just generally other) than they are. That's what Withnail and I was about.

He was harmless and funny because his manipulations were so low-stakes and geared to just getting alcohol for free, but you could see he drank and destroyed himself for the same reasons anyone does, because he knew all he had were the tools of a monster and just didn't know any other way to be.

The archetype is extinct today because the relationships it needed to survive are outmoded. someone being from your school or neighbourhood doesn't figure in our ideas of identity where you'd tolerate a loser with charming delusions because they were a fixture in your own story. Nobody's wives or girlfriends would tolerate them anyway, and I think we're all too mercenary now.

to me the sadness of the story is that it's a meditation on romance itself. it ends where you see Withnail as the volatile addicted animal he is, and he (or really, we as the audience) is slightly redeemed by his hamlet speech so as to be reminded that there was at least some truth to what we believed in about him, and that we ("I") weren't just decieved and manipulated. his grandeur dignified or at least rendered harmless our abuse. the original script doesn't provide that final bit of comfort, however.

maybe there's a version of that story for today, but I don't think a Withnail character could actually survive long enough socially to become interesting enough for anyone to find them romantic enough to tolerate.
by Akronymus | 2025-05-21 15:04:16+00:00
That's a fair concern. I can only really suggest upping the amount of test cases that are ran when merging so that you get a much more extensive run for that time, and later dial it back. Along with having the seed included in the failure case, so that you can bisect to check what actually broke that test. Also, implementing a standard test alongside the property based on, for all bugs you encounter over time (basically "hard coding" one of the failure cases)

But yeah, probabilistic testing isn't perfect.
by oytis | 2025-05-21 15:04:25+00:00
Sorry, but it's a typical German detached from reality attitude. We are going to find some magical niches that no one else will dare to touch allowing us to live quietly in a village and print money just like that (not a lot of money of course, we don't want to be TOO unrealistic, just enough for a comfortable life).

Not going to work in an innovative digital economy. We can see how resilient Mittelstand is by the current wave of bankruptcies and the general state of economy.