MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by austin-cheney | 2025-05-24 23:39:29+00:00
This seems unnecessary. Authoritarianism is a name for centralized control.

The solution then is fighting centralization as aggressively as possible. The most opposite of centralization is point-to-point communication by identity of preshared hashes.

You aren’t going to fight authoritarianism using social media or web servers. Those are points of centrality.
by adriand | 2025-05-24 23:40:17+00:00
In the first paragraph, he writes, ”I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.” So he does indeed make the claim you say he doesn’t make.

The essay itself lacks anything novel, despite the rather breathless framing: “So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true.” These ideas are a couple of hundred years old at least. Kant: “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good”. This is classic Age of Enlightenment stuff, repackaged in classic Silicon Valley VC style.
by eqvinox | 2025-05-24 23:41:18+00:00
Anyone else feel like this is a best case application for LLMs?

You could in theory automate the entire process, treat the LLM as a very advanced fuzzer. Run it against your target in one or more VMs. If the VM crashes or otherwise exhibits anomalous behavior, you've found something. (Most exploits like this will crash the machine initially, before you refine them.)

On one hand: great application for LLMs.

On the other hand: conversely implies that demonstrating this doesn't mean that much.
by avianlyric | 2025-05-24 23:41:37+00:00
> Engineering principles are probably the best we've got when it comes to trying to work with a poorly understood system?

At its heart that all engineering principles exist to do. Allow us to extract useful value, and hopefully predictable outcomes from systems that are either poorly understood, or too expensive to economically characterise. Engineering is more-or-less the science of “good enough”.

There’s a reason why computer science, and software engineering are two different disciplines.
by remram | 2025-05-24 23:41:43+00:00
Interestingly pstore has other backends (although not necessarily on your embedded platform) such as ACPI and UEFI variables. Pretty nifty. It's one of those things you never need until it's the only thing that can save you. Definitely worth knowing the name.

I recently had to troubleshoot an issue where machines would reboot randomly in our cluster and I would never have been able to read the kernel panic logs without pstore (I assumed a power issue but it turned out to be a Ceph bug).
by ruraljuror | 2025-05-24 23:42:29+00:00
AI can be used as a tool, sure, but it is distinct from other technologies in that it is an agent, that is: it has or operates with agency.

There are many prominent people out there who are saying that AI will replace SWEs--not just saying that AI will be a tool added to th SWE tool belt.

Although it seems like you agree with the conclusion of the article you are criticizing, the context is much more complex than AI is a tool like a hammer.
by jozvolskyef | 2025-05-24 23:42:55+00:00
This accent is common among Czech people who learnt English by reading without much exposure to English audio. Some of Danyk's apparent pronunciation idiosyncrasies used to be common among English teachers in Czechia. I presume they learnt English pronunciation from written descriptions of it. It is fairly rare today thanks to internet streaming. Danyk's blog is older than YouTube.
by inhumantsar | 2025-05-24 23:43:13+00:00
My sister has four kids, a gamer husband, and a Meta Quest 3. The VR stuff is in regular rotation for the older of the kids, though it seems like everyone prefers the Switch or PlayStation.

A former coworker is car crazed and uses a quest 2 in his racing sim setup. Compared to using 1 ultrawide or 3 16:9 monitors it's a no brainer. Much cheaper and more immersive. Plus even small racing sim setups take up a good amount of space in an apartment. Adding monitors to that adds to that a bit but also makes them a lot more visually imposing. It's easier to ignore a weird looking chair than it is to ignore a cockpit with three big monitors an arm's length from the seat.
by light_hue_1 | 2025-05-24 23:44:04+00:00
Except that basically none of these insanely rich people fund any science.

Altman does nothing for science. Neither does OpenAI. Google does a pittance for very applied things. Same as MS.

Doubling the funding for basic science in the US would be a rounding error for these places. But they don't do anything.
by whstl | 2025-05-24 23:44:07+00:00
> don't necessarily force your crappy square wheel onto your dev team when better wheels exist

I would agree about this 15 or 20 years ago, where I saw some monstrosities by people who didn't knew that frameworks or ORMs existed, but the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction today.

The "crappy square wheels" of 2025 are libraries that don't fully solve problems and are forced upon others by developers who are hostile to any approach that doesn't involve reaching out to a 20 github stars library from their package manager.

And this has become extremely difficult to discuss because the discussion has also become binary with people treating any criticism as a sign of NIH.
by sureglymop | 2025-05-24 23:44:14+00:00
When you write and compile code, there is a phase called "linking". For example, one could compile pieces of code and then link them together into one binary.

A common challenge is decompiling and reverse engineering a compiled program, e.g. a game. The author realized that it's an interesting approach to do a sort of reverse-linking (or I guess unlinking) process of a program into pieces and then focusing on reverse engineering or reimplementing those pieces instead of the whole.

When it comes to decompiling games, enthusiasts in that hobby want to be able to reproduce/obtain source code that compiles to exactly the same instructions as the original game. I think there is usually also a differentiation between instruction matching and byte for byte matching reproduction. But it definitely seems like a simpler and better approach to do this piece by piece and be able to test with each new piece of progress.

That's my layman understanding of it having only dabbled in decompiling stuff.
by i80and | 2025-05-24 23:44:17+00:00
If I'm reading the user right, and I'm not positive I am, they're more framing the people who support the administration's (reprehensible) agenda as being on a revenge kick for losing a small amount of their original privileged status.

I think it's a fine argument to make, and I'd even agree -- it's just put really obliquely.
by saghm | 2025-05-24 23:46:43+00:00
> the rhythm of writing has to match the ideas in it

It's hard for me to tell what the point of the author was from just the part you quoted, but why does this have to be the case? I don't have trouble believing that many complex ideas require complex language to describe them, but the idea that it's literally a requirement in order for the writing to be "good" rather than just a usual circumstance isn't obvious to me. If anything, the complexity of this quote just seems to hide the dubious premise.
by abetusk | 2025-05-24 23:47:02+00:00
"Pointless" because it's trying to solve/make progress on "beggar-my-neighbor" which Conway called an anti-Hilbert problem [0]?

Looks like infinite games have been found for Beggar my Neighbor [1] [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggar-my-neighbour#Game_theor...

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13855

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42457359
by II2II | 2025-05-24 23:48:41+00:00
For most people, the point is to have limited functionality. They could care less what the underlying operating system is. The companies developing the phones are most likely concerned about the development costs, since it is probably a safe bet that the market is so small that saving a few dollars per unit on manufacturing would not amount to much. In other words, they don't care about the operating system either.
by ack_complete | 2025-05-24 23:50:59+00:00
Sure, if an application uses an elevated installer -- but as you note, not all do. It does look like WER may support options being set in HKCU (per-user) as well as HKLM (machine-wide), which would be a way of handling local installs.

I wouldn't characterize Steam's world-writable folder strategy as smart, compared to a more secure model using an elevated downloader and installer.

I fail to see what Office's title bar rendering has to do with its exception handling strategy. As for path length handling, Office also hosts a large in-process plugin ecosystem, so it has to be conservative with such application-level policy changes.
by 0xdde | 2025-05-24 23:51:13+00:00
So no acknowledgement of the fact that your questions are answered even before the paywall? The conferences (and organizers thereof) listed also include International Society for Research on Aggression (ISRA), the International Conference on Comparative Cognition, and then the article goes on to add

"The International Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has cancelled its conference, originally planned for August 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee, because cuts to federal funding meant it was “no longer financially viable”. The 2026 Cities on Volcanoes conference in Bend, Oregon, has been postponed to 2030 or 2032. The International X-ray Absorption Society cancelled its upcoming 19th conference in Chicago, Illinois, which was scheduled for July this year. “

Your argument that there is an agenda is not compelling.
by tracerbulletx | 2025-05-24 23:52:25+00:00
My main feeling is that its great as long as I constrain it to working in a conceptual boundary that I can reason about, like a single system component where I am telling it the API. That way each piece that gets built up I have an understanding of it. If you try to let it go to wide it starts to make mistakes and I lose my mental model.
by mark_undoio | 2025-05-24 23:53:34+00:00
What's limiting us is that Undo does need a Linux kernel - so traditional embedded programming wouldn't be a fit. Embedded Linux could work and we do support ARM64.

I've thought I bit about how you might support time travel on bare metal embedded - but actually there are hardware-assisted solutions (Lauterbach's Trace32 was one we came across) there sometimes.
by boricj | 2025-05-24 23:53:57+00:00
I did not actually invent delinking, there was some scant evidence of prior art online before I did my stuff. I did however come up with it independently from first principles.

As for the reinvention part, I was referencing the wheel of video game decompilation specifically. By that point Super Mario 64 was already fully decompiled and several other projects were well underway. The established wheel was matching decompilation (either instruction or byte level) and the community was producing tooling for this sole purpose.

In a sense, I did reinvent the wheel of video game decompilation in stark contrast to everything else that was out there at the time. It just turned out horribly right, because before I knew it I was making chimeras executables made out of bits of programs coming from different platforms.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-05-24 23:53:58+00:00
You read it correctly. In an attempt to appear less partisan, I made the writing too oblique. My apologies.

A revised version would read:

Over the past half-century, shaped by civil-rights gains, demographic shifts, and the dollar’s reserve-currency burdens, one once-dominant segment of the population has felt its social standing erode. Its members still remember when the political, social, and economic order tilted decisively in their favor.

Politics now orbits the "status wound" this group carries. To soothe it, they cast blame outward, at elites, newcomers, or any symbol of the new order. Each target offers momentary relief, but none can restore what was lost.
by lolinder | 2025-05-24 23:54:37+00:00
> in the last few months after recently becoming a father ... I decided to build an iOS App for me and others ... I uploaded the app on the app store for free and no ads

OP wrote an app to solve their own problem and made it available for free for others to use if they find it helpful. It should shock no one and certainly should not trigger any judgement or attacks from anyone that they chose to write the app for the platform which they themselves use.
by bigbuppo | 2025-05-24 23:54:59+00:00
Thinks you can click on should look like things you can click on. This is why the hamburger menu is bad. Even people that have been in tech for decades often don't realize that's the menu they're supposed to click on. This is why it was bad all those years ago when "UX" suddenly became a thing and designers inserted their craft into everything as if they were in marketing or something.

There is a happy medium between something written by a ham radio operator in 1997 and what counts as "good ui design" today.

Though you probably shouldn't listen to me. I still prefer the look of the Windows 3.1 GUI.
by gfalcao | 2025-05-24 23:55:11+00:00
Thanks for sharing that article.

A great friend of mine once told me the following quote from an unknown author: "Reinvent the wheel, not because we need more wheels but because we need more inventors." That quote has brought my mind and heart to some modicum of tranquility at various occasions when I wanted to learn some concept and resolved to write my own "toy version" of a software library, framework et cetera. Later on, when I learned about Feynman's quote “What I cannot create, I do not understand”, amalgamated the sentiment that it is okay to build something in order to learn one concept. I have thus far learned that in every new journey to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, often led me to paths where my intuitions about the initial concept got stronger and beyond that, I learned several other concepts.
by csallen | 2025-05-24 23:55:20+00:00
The article is literally titled, "AI can't even fix a simple bug," reinforces the claim that "the technology can’t understand a simple bug" multiple times, and willfully ignores all the good that it can do. Anyone who read this article without having experienced AI coding themselves would be grossly misled.

Sure, the article makes other good points, too.

But those points could be made without hyperbolic claims about what AI can and can't do, by everyone, not just this author
by beloch | 2025-05-24 23:56:17+00:00
One of the chief arguments for low taxes on the 1% is that governments do dumb things with money. Billionaires are more likely to invest it in beneficial research, enterprise, etc.. If left to their own devices and not stripped of their resources, good billionaires will do great things for society. Or so the claim goes.

The problem is, although much potential for good may exist in billionaires, the average billionaire spends next to nothing on philanthropy or research. It's only highly unusual exceptions who do. Next to nothing, even when well invested, accomplishes next to nothing.

If billionaires won't open their purses to support the society that has provided them with opportunity, that's what taxes are for. If billionaires aren't lining up to fund research institutes, that's what tax-funded government research is for.
by lolinder | 2025-05-24 23:56:19+00:00
They didn't want it to be a website, and if they did make it a website they'd have to deal with the inevitable entitled whining on their Show HN wondering why everything has to be a website these days.

If there's one thing I've learned from a few decades on the internet it's that the only way to avoid entitled whining is to never, ever release anything, especially not for free.
by whstl | 2025-05-24 23:56:49+00:00
The problem is that I work at a wheel design factory and get paid for it, unlike the hobbyists who make 95% of the wheels on Github.

I'm all for reusing frameworks, standard libraries, crypto. Sure, those are things we don't want to recklessly reinvent.

But there's a limit. There should be way more pushback against things like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39019001
by GiorgioG | 2025-05-24 23:58:18+00:00
I'm so sick of this hype. My (college-aged) teenage daughter works at a grocery store. Their new "AI" enabled cash-registers are supposed to show them which scanned items go together in a bag. It suggested: 4 packs of hamburger buns should go together in a plastic bag with 2 soda can boxes. Next it suggested a dozen eggs should go together with a gallon of milk.
by pants2 | 2025-05-24 23:58:50+00:00
Agreed - let's say your employees cost $100/yr and your revenue is $150/yr, with a $50/yr profit. Now your employees suddenly become 2X more productive because of AI. Do you...

A) Fire half your staff, now earning $100 profit? ($50/yr to employees, $150/yr revenue)

B) Attempt to double your business, now earning $200 profit? ($100 emp, $300 rev)

C) Double your headcount and earn $400 profit?

If companies are profit-seeking, B and C should be more common than A!
by swyx | 2025-05-24 23:59:01+00:00
> That last point indicates an interesting capability that diffusion models have: you get a kind of built-in quality knob. If you want fast inference at the cost of quality, you can just run the model for less time and end up with more noise in the final output2. If you want high quality and you’re happy to take your time getting there, you can keep running the model until it’s finished removing noise.

not quite right... anyone who has run models for >100 steps knows that you can go too far. whts the explanation of that?
by johnb231 | 2025-05-25 00:00:22+00:00
From the article:

"Many new games come and go, and oftentimes nowadays the servers are pulled leaving the games unplayable or crippled. Most notably, this has led to a “stop killing games” campaign in the EU and other countries; where people get tired of buying games only for them to be unplayable when the developer yanks the servers leaving no way to play this game anymore."
by Bender | 2025-05-25 00:01:17+00:00
For most people, the point is to have limited functionality. They could care less what the underlying operating system is.

I believe it. In this case instead of dumb phone it should be called minimized UI phone. I believe that saying it is a dumb phone is disingenuous as some will believe the Google tracking isn't there. If they entirely de-googled the phone they could call it a de-googled mini-UI phone. A proper dumb phone could run on standby for weeks especially with modern batteries and would not be dialing home to the Google mother ship or any other third parties. The original dumb phones could boot up in milliseconds not counting network negotiation time. FWIW some of us old timers do care what the OS and firmware are doing and just want a phone that does it's job of being a phone. I acknowledge that the SS7 network needed to be deprecated and replaced ages ago but Google and Apple are not what I had in mind. RCS should have been the job of wireless providers in my opinion given so much data already goes to them such as real time spell check.
by boricj | 2025-05-25 00:01:45+00:00
This comment has made my day in ways words cannot express.

But yeah, one recurring problem is that without literature on this esoteric and complex topic, any discussion remotely technical about it (especially without prior context) quickly bogs down, as it needs to be bootstrapped from first principles in order to make any sense.

I've been meaning to write the Necronomicon of delinking to at least be able to point people to a document that contains everything they need to know in order to understand or at least decently grasp this. At the very least it should make for a good horror bed time story for linker developers.
by saghm | 2025-05-25 00:02:04+00:00
I think this is something that easily gets lost in discussions about feelings/emotions. There's a difference between how you feel and how you act based on it; feeling an emotion is a natural response that you can't control, but that doesn't determine how you act based on that emotion, even if it does bias you towards certain actions. In my experience, being able to maintain a distinction between those things is hugely important in being able to consistently choose how to act independent of that bias.

The key for me is understanding that the emotion itself isn't a choice, and therefore isn't something I need to try to control it feel guilty about. Feeling angry or jealous or sad is unavoidable, but feeling those emotions without acting in ways that fuels them without any other reason often ends up making people feel worse for longer. I don't want to make it seem like I don't struggle with this as much as anyone else, but the times when I've been able to follow my own advice about this pretty much universally have ended up better for me than the times when I let my emotions dictate my actions.
by adwf | 2025-05-25 00:02:09+00:00
Not agreeing or disagreeing with your point, just adding info for context:

Fortnite: July 25, 2017 (Battle Royale mode launched September 26, 2017)

Apex Legends: February 4, 2019

Valorant: June 2, 2020

Overwatch: May 24, 2016

Call of Duty: 2003, Annual release

League of Legends: October 27, 2009

Dota 2: July 9, 2013

Roblox: 2006 (initially as DynaBlocks, rebranded to Roblox the same year)

Blame Claude 4 if any date is wrong...
by sroussey | 2025-05-25 00:02:19+00:00
Yeah, I built a library to run tasks based on a directed a-cyclical graph (DAG) and each task can optionally belong to a queue.

So I had to write a simple queue, but since I wanted demos to work in the browser it has a IndexedDB backend, and I wanted demos it to work in an Electron app, so there is a SQLite backend, and I’ll likely want a multi-user server based one so there is a Postgres backend.

And I wanted to use it for rate limiting, etc, so limiters were needed.

And then there is the graph stuff, and the task stuff.

There are a lot of wheels to-create actually, if you don’t want any dependencies.

I do have a branch that uses TypeBox to make and validate the input and output json schemas for the tasks, so may not be dependency free for the core eventually.
by ijk | 2025-05-25 00:03:00+00:00
It would look very different from current research, I think, because the way things are optimized now it's far more efficient and effective to have one person dedicate their entire life to basic research versus lots of people spending a little time on it. We already have an attention span issue; it's hard to fund the really long-running projects that are essential for making progress in a lot of areas. And from an industry standpoint, being an academic researcher is a personal sacrifice: more prestigious, sometimes, but often a lot less lucrative than if you'd have spent that time climbing the ladder at a major tech company or developing skills that were more immediately job-relevant.

So it'd have to look significantly different than what we currently have, including something to mitigate the income hit that a 40-something professional would take for spending a couple of years doing research. Might be worth building that society, but we'd have to figure out how to get there.
by birkey | 2025-05-25 00:03:41+00:00
Hope this helps someone to understand: 1. How MCP works as standalone client and server 2. How MCP works with LLM (Claude to be exact, others should be the same) I made each commit atomic so you can review the code to see how it works. The chat cli demo commit actually mimics interacting with LLMs so you can play with it without having Anthropic API key.
by layer8 | 2025-05-25 00:03:48+00:00
Frameworks are clearly worse, that's true. But there are also kitchen-sink libraries that are too shallow in relation to their API surface, or libraries that perform certain background work or modify some external global state in a way that is unnecessary for your use case, or libraries that pull in transitive dependencies of that sort. You really want to minimize the code that executes in order to fulfill your use case, and also minimize the temptation to depend on additional, tangential functions of a library that you wouldn’t have added for those functions alone.