MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aorloff | 2025-05-17 05:54:54+00:00
There is a Borges short story written in the 1930s about "the Library" a supposed collection of all possible permutations of language, even misspellings and gibberish. In many ways, it is extremely prescient of AI.

To cut it short, in the end what Borges proposed is that the meaning comes from the stories, and that all the stories are really repetitions and permutations of the same set of humans stories (the Order) and that is what makes meaning.

So all a successful literary AI needs to do is figure out how to retell the same stories we have been telling but in a different context that is resonant today.

Simple right ?
by globnomulous | 2025-05-17 05:56:36+00:00
> Using the word "like" is not as bad as it seems, and it's been quite common in language for longer than we think

The word has many, many uses: filler/pause, oral punctuation, discourse marker, hedging, qualifier. It also serves an important social function, in that it can reduce perceived severity or seriousness. Young women seem to use it assure peers that they are sweet and not threatening.

I hate it. It's not uncommon to hear it more than four or five times in a single sentence.

The implied expectations are odious: eloquence is a faux pas; directness is rude; a fifth-grade vocabulary is welcoming.
by duncangh | 2025-05-17 05:57:39+00:00
Thanks for this. This is going to be a nice Wikipedia walk trailhead :)

I'm drawn to randomness as it's elegant, simple and wholesome. By the people for the people and being judged by a jury of peers in court also seemed to suggest a comfort in vesting power to ordinary citizens briefly as needed.

What really sold me is how this would obviate the need for election season polling and the tired prediction estimation and pontification for all those months leading up to elections.

Power and elected office almost certainly corrupts as well. Having brief and rare opportunities to perform this as an honor and duty would bring out the best in people and surface voices and considerations that would better reflect the concerns of the common people.

Idk it just seems like a nicer idea every time i come back to it. Most people here are good people. Yet we're governed by a consortium of the absolute worst (ironically this appears to be completely bipartisan).

Anyways thanks for sharing sortition and it's history here :) this is exactly what I was hoping to find in the discussion and why I enjoy HN
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-17 06:00:08+00:00
> This whole line of thought is sort of funny.

This line of thought was exacerbated by that one paper that was then parroted (hah!) by every influencer / negativist in the space. It didn't matter that the paper was badly executed, their setup was flawed and that it got rendered moot by the existence of LLama3 models. People still quote that, or the "articles" stemming from it.
by parodysbird | 2025-05-17 06:03:22+00:00
To emphasize again part of the post above: "The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation".

When I write a poem in a birthday card for my wife to give her on her birthday, very little of the "meaning" that will be communicated to (and more importantly with) her is really from some generic semantic interpretation of the tokens. Instead, almost all of the meaning will come from it being an actual personal expression in a shared social context.

If I didn't grasp that second part, I might actually think that asking ChatGPT to write the poem and then copying it in my handwriting to give to her is about the same thing as if the same tokens written but from genuine personal creation. Over prolonged interaction, it could lead to a shared social context in which she generally treats certain things I say as little different than if ChatGPT returned them as output. Thus the shared social context and relationship is then degenerated and fairly inhuman (or "robotic" as the above post calls it).
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-17 06:03:58+00:00
i think you'd find lots of people disagree. Were there some great BBC shows in the 70s and 80s? Sure.

I think you'd find lots pf people who find some relatively recent streaming shows to be amazing. You may not like them but there are many fans of shows like Stranger Things, The Crown, The Handmaid's Tale, The Queen's Gambit, Silo, Severance, Succession, ....
by verisimi | 2025-05-17 06:04:16+00:00
I hope it doesn't survive. But I'm sure it will.

It is a propaganda outfit (and was from inception). It has special legislation to force TV owners to pay - this tax is called the 'license fee'. In the past only people who had been 'cleared' could work there.

While people think that the UK's recent legislation is dystopian, the reality is it was ever thus as we see with the bbc. I would be very glad to see it go, but that won't happen because - it's utility as a megaphone to the governance system remains very high.

Here is the bbc admitting it lied for -50-, sorry, 70 (!) years, to members of parliament even, about the vetting: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43754737

I certainly suspect this is only a partial disclosure - not only political outlooks would be considered.

Simply a lying, propagandising institution.
by proc0 | 2025-05-17 06:04:19+00:00
> People get hired to fill a role.

Why should the employee care deeply about the company if the company just treats the employee like an asset in return?

I'm just pointing out the double standard. I'm ok with caring about the company and product but there needs to be some reciprocation there. If I'm just an asset then I also want to not give two shits about the product, just do my tasks and go home (and it should be perfectly fine and not affect my reviews).
by epistasis | 2025-05-17 06:04:21+00:00
> But even after a few hours of reading about what MCP is and working through an example , it can be confusing to follow exactly what is happening when and where. What does the LLM do? What does the MCP server do? What does the MCP client do? Where does data flow, and where are choices made?

Yeah MCP is the worst documented technology I have ever encountered. I understand APIs for calling LLMs, I understand tool calling APIs. Yet I have read so much about MCP and have zero fucking clue except vague marketing speak. Or code that has zero explanation. What an amateur effort.

I've given up, I don't care about MCP. I'll use tool calling APIs as I currently do.
by jemmyw | 2025-05-17 06:05:41+00:00
It has already pretty much died, and I don't think it was by the hand of streaming. It was whatever process put a stop to new shows in the template of the really great shows we had in the past. At some point the risk taking stopped and everything just became the same drudge. Of course, there was always plenty of drudge.

It was the comedies that were particularly good and very British. Some were very unusual and bizarre, the late night shows. But they were also where writers and comedians got a break and then became mainstream. I would guess that kind of thing is now made for the internet, and its a shame to see everything go so niche.

An article I came across a couple of years ago (wish I could find it!) talked about how there was this period of time when British TV started to diversify the source of talent, around the 80s and 90s. You got shows like Red Dwarf where the cast were not all from the same small set of drama schools. But it has now reverted and that kind of low budget, take a chance show doesn't get shown on the main channels.
by inkyoto | 2025-05-17 06:06:14+00:00
> My employer has hired recently and the flood of resumes after posting for a relatively low level position was nuts.

I am utterly perplexed with the current situation on the job market, which seems to be a global phenomenon that is not constrained to a particular country or region. Late last year, I was hiring for two junior software engineering positions and (through an external recruitment partner) we received over 400 job applications for two junior positions. We, however, scrambled to narrow the number of candidates down to ten, out of which eight turned out to be lemons and two ended up being exceptionally good. 390 other applicants ended up being pure white noise.

Colleagues in a neighbouring business unit reported receiving over 600 submissions for a single position.

I have approached a few headhunters in the last couple of months with informal questions about what has been happening. They are under constant duress, receiving hundreds upon hundreds of applications for pretty much any position. The feedback is that when most people see a job ad, they put their resume through GenAI and submit whatever garbage comes out of it without even looking at the output. The vast majority of people can't even be bothered to write a simple cover letter, which could have been used as a shibboleth for the hiring manager / recruiter: «I am an intelligent human being, and I am real».

Naturally, the headhunters have responded with GenAI-assisted tools to sift through piles of putrid trash. The side effect is that such good, qualified applicants do not usually get a chance to get screened in.

The situation does not seem to be changing, and the only way out seems to be applying through a professional network or connections. People abusing GenAI are hurting themselves (ironically, GenAI has become pretty good at recognising GenAI-generated content), and they are also hurting pretty much everyone else in the process, and they do not care.
by benwills | 2025-05-17 06:07:02+00:00
I don't know you're experience with hash functions, so you may already know what I'm about to say.

This is a minor example, but since you asked...

https://github.com/Cyan4973/xxHash/blob/dev/xxhash.h#L6432

That's an example of a fair number of accumulators that are stored as XXHash goes through its input buffer.

Many modern hash functions store more state/accumulators than they used to. Previous generations of hash functions would often just have one or two accumulators and run through the data. Many modern hash functions might even store multiple wider SIMD variables for better mixing.

And if you're storing enough state that it doesn't fit in your registers, the CPU will put it into the data cache.
by slickQ | 2025-05-17 06:07:33+00:00
The model is fed a few samplings of previous attempts and their evaluations during the optimization of the current algorithm. Using that information, the model is able to combine components of previous attempts into the current attempt at will. That is because all of this is fed into a single prompt, which the LLM can reference arbitrarily. So recombination is well represented here, bringing it closer to a genetic algorithm. In essence, it combines elements from hill climbing, beam search, and genetic algorithms by virtue of its unbounded nature as an LLM.
by Thorrez | 2025-05-17 06:08:24+00:00
Your request to https://spacejam.com is redirected to https://www.spacejam.com/ .

Your request to http://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net is redirected to https://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/ .

You never tried making a request to https://www.spacejam.com/ .

Go to https://reqbin.com/ and enter https://spacejam.com . It gives 1 redirect (to https://www.spacejam.com/ ) then HTML.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-17 06:09:32+00:00
How is buying land a consession and building on it a consession? Any normal private company can by land and build on it. Are you sure you're not considering it a consession because you're used to "public" transporation (in which case it would be a consession) and not just the normal things any private company can do (in which case it's not a consession)

Even if they are consessions I think they are a positive. They provide a positive feedback loop for the train companies. Better trains = more customers for their other interests and visa versa. If the trains start to suck people don't want to be on that line and choose a different line for their businesses, houses

Compared to public transporation where it's just politians who decide budgets and with few exceptions (Netherlands for example) they almost never decide well.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-05-17 06:09:54+00:00
> And if you're storing enough state that it doesn't fit in your registers, the CPU will put it into the data cache.

And there's 150+ registers in the actual chip.

But my argument is more that there isn't really an efficient or inefficient way to use L1. So unless you have an enormous amount of state, the question is moot. And if you have so much state you're spilling to L2, that's not when you worry about good or bad cache use, that's a weird bloat problem.
by baobun | 2025-05-17 06:10:20+00:00
It's a valuable observation but not necessarily the right or only conclusion. Seeing reality in new light is one thing. What you do with it is another. When a new insight you get into The Game triggers a reevaluation of your strategies and tactics, it's also a good time to reevaluate your direction and goals.

One could identify and might be able to join organizations with better aligned incentives. One might be able to shift the decision-making in another org. Selling out and optimizing for your own financial return is not the only way. Blackpill kills your soul over time.
by ghostagw | 2025-05-17 06:12:49+00:00
The Microsoft Store is not included as a component in Windows 10 LTSC 2019. This is because the LTSC branch is designed for specialized use cases rather than general-purpose computing. While LTSC 2019 maintains support until 2029, the Microsoft Store remains external to this ecosystem and is fundamentally unrelated to the LTSC version.
by malthaus | 2025-05-17 06:14:17+00:00
in writing good sql code? i definitely would

ai is not going to replace the senior sql expert with 20 years of battle experience in the short-term but support me who last dug into sql 15 years ago and needs to get a working sql query in a project. and ai usually does a better job than me copy pasting googled code in between quickly browsing through tutorials.
by energy123 | 2025-05-17 06:15:05+00:00
They rolled out a new model a week ago which has a "bug" where in long chats it forgets to emit the tokens required for the UI to detect that it's reasoning. You can remind it that it needs to emit these tokens, which helps, or accept that it will sometimes fail to do it. I don't notice a deterioration in performance because it is still reasoning (you can tell by the nature of the output), it's just that those tokens aren't in <think> tags or whatever's required by the UI to display it as such.
by Too | 2025-05-17 06:15:36+00:00
Hello world without -O2 -Werror? I've done several compiler toolchain updates on larger code bases and every new version of Clang, GCC or glibc will trip up new compiler warnings. Worse, occasionally taking advantage of some UB laying around leading to runtime bugs.

I'm not complaining, the new stricter warnings are usually for the better, what I'm saying is that the bedrock of that world isn't as stable as it's sometimes portraited.
by Towaway69 | 2025-05-17 06:16:07+00:00
> I think Node-RED is also not for heavy computational workload

That is correct, Node-RED is designed for routing many thoughts of smallish data packets through some computational units. Each computational unit is basically a node with a message queue and each message is handled and then passed on.

This means that if a node takes too long, its queue will potentially overflow causing failure. However if there are fewer messages than nodes can take longer - there is nothing ingrained in Node-RED that prevents having long running processes and fewer messages.

As long as message queues don't overflow or messages get too large causing massive memory usage, then Node-RED will happily just work.

NodeREDs many use cases are controlling many small devices (home automation) and (I)IoT - collecting datapoints from 100s or 1000s of devices and routing that around to whereever the data is needed.
by rurban | 2025-05-17 06:17:02+00:00
I tried to install it on a raspi 4 with touchscreen for my wife. The raspi worked fine with Debian, esp. it's installer asks for the wifi and ssh keys, and therefore you can trivially connect to it.

Not so with the homeassistant installer. No wifi setup, no ssh access at all. You really need to cable it, nmap the new IP, and then I got stuck because the web server doesn't show up. Attaching the keyboard brought me into a restricted ha> prompt, where I cannot fix anything.

So far it's horrible
by rdtsc | 2025-05-17 06:18:03+00:00
A scarier thought is that people will "talk" so much with these AIs that they'll start talking like ChatGPT. So we may still end up with some AI enshittification fixed point in the future but, one of the feedback paths will be human brains become enshittified.

Imagine you time travel 20 years in the future and find out everyone around you talks the same and they all like ChatGPT.
by smallnix | 2025-05-17 06:21:29+00:00
> Celia Kirwan, a close friend of Orwell, who had just started working as Robert Conquest's assistant at the IRD, visited Orwell in March 1949, at a sanatorium where he was being treated for tuberculosis. Orwell wrote a list of names of people he considered sympathetic to Stalinism and therefore unsuitable as writers for the Department, and enclosed it in a letter to Kirwan.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list
by baobun | 2025-05-17 06:23:51+00:00
> Larchevêque said the last 12 months saw 50 attacks around the world targeting people involved in cryptocurrency. Of those, 14 were in France, he said.

I'm personally aware of more than one successful "crypto-robbery" (meatspace, physical violance or credible-threat-of) not included in those numbers and not in the news. Be careful out there, everyone.
by stevoski | 2025-05-17 06:24:12+00:00
I find this really interesting, and meets my (limited) Rails experience and (extensive) Java experience:

I found it hard taking over an existing Rails project - it felt frail to me, that any small change might have unexpected consequences.

Whereas when I've taken over Java projects - or come in late to an existing team - I felt quite confident getting started, even if it is a bit of a mess.
by red_trumpet | 2025-05-17 06:24:42+00:00
I'd guess the term "elliptic" has more to do with elliptic operators[1] than with ellipses. Of course, ultimately elliptic operators are named after ellipses, but the association is not as direct as you might imagine[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_operator

[2] https://mathoverflow.net/a/359723/111897
by baq | 2025-05-17 06:25:10+00:00
> why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?

Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.
by kevlened | 2025-05-17 06:25:28+00:00
The opt-out email was a path, but today the docs appear to say the new setting is equal to the old path.

"I previously opted out of model training by writing to the support team. Will you continue to honor my opt-out?

Yes. If you opted out by contacting support or using our privacy form, your account will represent that request."

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7730893-data-controls-fa...
by radanskoric | 2025-05-17 06:26:04+00:00
Author here. The part about coding agents that wasn't clear to me was how much of the "magic" is in the underlying LLM and how much in the code around it making it into an agent.

When I realised that it's mostly in the LLM I found that a bit surprising. Also, since I'm not an AI Engineer, I was happy to realise that my "regular programming" skills would be enough if I wanted to build a coding agent.

It sounds like you were aware of that for a while now, but I and a lot of other people weren't. :)

That was my motivation for writing the article.
by Onavo | 2025-05-17 06:26:18+00:00
Committing to a bundler in JavaScript is a lot easier than dealing with clojurescript. JS bundlers are mostly standardized with minor differences; a complex application running on yarn can almost always be swapped out for pnpm with no or few configuration changes. On the other hand for clojurescript you have to understand the clojurescript runtime, the the JS runtime, various clojurescript and JS idiosyncrasies (clojurescript specifically blurs the line between compile time and runtime, and something as simple as reading a file into a global variable at runtime would require a lot of hacks to get working reliably) if you want to truly make the setup work for you.
by nicbou | 2025-05-17 06:26:51+00:00
I run an informative website for a living. If the trend continues, I will lose my job to AI trained on my content.

I get the feeling of pointlessness, but not because AI is making me obsolete. AI still needs me, because it still needs human beings to experience the real world and report on it. It need to copy someone's homework. It just destroys the economics of doing that homework.

But there is not the faintest chance of AI doing that sort of work itself. It might repeat what it knows, but it can't survey an audience, shake hands with industry experts, empathize with users, feel friction, or knock on doors.

These are still jobs for thinking humans.
by SparkyMcUnicorn | 2025-05-17 06:27:25+00:00
I did this a few months ago for a test home assistant setup and had the opposite experience. I forget exactly what I did, but it involved editing a file with the wifi settings and dropping my public ssh key on the SD card before installation.

If you use ethernet, no editing required. Web interface goes into setup mode automatically.

Worth noting that ha cli[0] (ha>) does have a `network` command to configure this as well.

[0] https://github.com/home-assistant/cli
by pjmlp | 2025-05-17 06:29:30+00:00
That is why Valhala is on a decade now, sadly.

The core design goal is how to add value type semantics, including existing classes like Optional, while not breaking existing libraries, those JARs should work as much as possible on values aware JVM.

This is how do we add Perl 6 like features to Perl 5, without requiring people to migrate to Roku, as example.
by meta_ai_x | 2025-05-17 06:29:54+00:00
A junior engineer can always become a senior engineer by using Gemini/ChatGPT to build full systems and literally asking chatGPT, a series of Why questions to every output.

In fact not being bottle necked by senior engineers or not having to drawe the luck of a bad senior engineer/mentor, there will be a new stars of Junior engineers.

What you should be worried is Senior Engineers who hate AI
by radanskoric | 2025-05-17 06:30:11+00:00
Author here. The code I made took me 3 hours (including getting up to speed on RubyLLM). I also intentionally DIDN'T use a coding assistant to write it (although I use Windsurf in my regular work). :D

It's clearly not a full featured agent but the code is here and it's a nice starting point for a prototype: https://github.com/radanskoric/coding_agent

My best hope for it is that people will use it to experiment with their own ideas. So if you like it, please feel free to fork it. :)