MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jonhohle | 2025-05-15 20:31:38+00:00
I’ve thought about this recently as well and I don’t know if I have a fully developed view. What is the moral responsibility of all people to pay for medical research or operations that would affect a small number of people. Is it ethical to compel others to pay for the research deemed valuable by some, but not by others. Who is the arbiter of that research’s value?

I could say I believe the government should fund research into fixing people who think cilantro tastes like soap because for most of us it is delicious and promotes healthy diets. Should I be able to compel (tax) you to pay for that research?

Where that line is drawn will always be wrong to someone. How research is prioritized will always be wrong to someone. Is there an ethical way to determine the best use of collective resources and what portion of one’s property must be taken from them to fund that research.
by mfcmatheus | 2025-05-15 20:32:16+00:00
Wrkspace is the ultimate productivity tool for developers, designed to simplify and supercharge your workflow. With a one-time setup for each project, Wrkspace automates the entire process of booting your local environment, so you can focus on what matters—coding.

With Wrkspace, switching between projects has never been easier. Experience a 300% improvement in startup time, streamline your workflow, and eliminate repetitive tasks. Integrate with Docker, launch your boot scripts, open with your editor, and launch your web pages with a single click.

Transform the way you manage your local development environments—Wrkspace is here to revolutionize your productivity.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-05-15 20:32:21+00:00
One of the things i suspect will happen very soon is that all languages will become as fast as each other and your reason to use one over the other for performance reasons might not exist. I know this sounds optimistic and wishful thinking but hear me out here;

Modern AIs are literal translation engines. That's their origin. The context that lets them do what they do was originally there to allow good translations. It doesn't matter if the translation is programming language output, or actual language output. I can today ask an AI to rewrite a chunk of Matlab code into Rust and it works! There's even code generators that will utilize the GPU where sensible.

We're really not that far off that we can write code in any language and transparently behind the scenes have it actually running on a more performant backend when needed. Ideally you keep the Matlab/Python frontend and the translation will be on the intermediate layers in a two way fashion so step through/debug works as expected.

Based on playing with the above steps manually with good results we're almost at the stage of just needing some glue to make it all work. Write in Matlab/Python, and run as fast as any LLVM backed language.
by theshackleford | 2025-05-15 20:32:44+00:00
> I have the 32” JVC D-series which

I would love one of these however I have never seen one in my country. Super jealous haha! The tubes they use apparently were an american made tube, with most of the JVCs that were released in my country using different tubes than those released in the US market.

That being said, I do own two JVC "broadcast" monitors that I love. A 17" and a 19". They are no D-series real "TV" but.
by K0balt | 2025-05-15 20:33:14+00:00
Certainly not for short hops, but if regular aviation is any indication, it’s more efficient even if you don’t even reach cruising altitude before beginning to descend, so I’d imagine any flight that currently is around 4 hours or more would potentially benefit. (Given full technology maturity) that said, we are a long, long way from having efficient engines for that wide of a speed envelope.
by os2warpman | 2025-05-15 20:33:21+00:00
>There's no evidence to support that gene therapy will ever be inexpensive.

My prediction is based on the number of efforts, too numerous to list here, being undertaken to develop lab equipment to automate the extremely labor-intensive workflow and the accumulation of vast libraries of CRISPR-Cas9 screens and dependency maps, the creation of which are also expensive and labor-intensive.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-05-15 20:33:29+00:00
TBH, as cool as TLA+ is, the biggest issue I generally see with trying to use formal methods in practice is that you need to keep the specification matching the actual implementation. Otherwise whatever you've formally verified doesn't match what actually got built.

So formal methods may be used for extremely critical parts of systems (eg; safety critical systems or in embedded where later fixes cannot be readily rolled out) but they fail to make inroads in most other development because it's a lot of extra work.
by drhagen | 2025-05-15 20:34:03+00:00
> Personally, I think np.einsum is one of the rare parts of NumPy that’s actually good.

einsum only being able to do multiplication makes it quite limited. If we leaned into the Einstein notation (e.g. [1]), we could make something that is both quite nice and quite performant.

[1] https://tensora.drhagen.com/
by sunrunner | 2025-05-15 20:34:29+00:00
Good points, although there's a level there where you're not directly opting in to those and are somewhat a passive consumer (if you ignore being conscious of being immersed in an ad-laden environment), while the Ad Buddy model seems to sit just before directly and simply paying for the service or product by having your balance topped up by opting in to as direct an ad as I could imagine that's not subliminal messaging.
by ignoramous | 2025-05-15 20:34:37+00:00
Hi Nate. Routinely your various networking-related FOSS tools. Surprising to see you now work in the AI infrastructure space let alone co-founding a startup funded by YC! Tinfoil looks über neat. All the best (:

> Maybe one day we'll have truly open hardware

At least the RoT/SE if nothing else: https://opentitan.org/
by jjcob | 2025-05-15 20:34:45+00:00
It's not a slippery slope. Fixing defects is rather straightforward, since it's usually a single gene that needs to be edited.

If you want make your baby smarter, taller, or more handsome, it's not so easy because these traits involve 1000s of genes.

For this reason I do not think that curying diseases will lead to designer babies.
by tim333 | 2025-05-15 20:34:55+00:00
I demoed it and thought it was cool but way to heavy on my face for me to want to use it. I get kind on annoyed by the weight of even regular glasses. Though funnily enough I don't mind wearing an open face crash helmet with a visor with the weight carried by the top of my head rather than my face. I thought that might be a better way to do it.
by vkou | 2025-05-15 20:36:47+00:00
> All because it may break someone. Even when I presented a real defect based on docs/comments and fixed it.

It's great that you found a bug and fixed it.

The problem is, how do you know that there are no other regressions?

Code is a liability. Once you check it in, the team that owns it is responsible for it. Untested code is a liability of unknown scope. It's quite understandable why they don't want to accept someone's contributions, when the contributor isn't the one who will ultimately be dealing with any of the consequences. If you think they are being mean and lazy, imagine if the tables were reversed.

I don't accept puppies or elephants as gifts for similar reasons.

It's unfortunate that existing test coverage sucks. In this case, the best way forward should be for the team in question to improve coverage, and for you to then submit your fix + a test for it. And if they don't have budget to do this, then that sucks, but that's their call to make, and that's a signal that the project in question is abandonware.

And it's fine for a large company to have a bunch of abandonware. If it works, and produces value, the optimal amount of ongoing development effort to invest into a piece of software may, depending on the circumstances, be near-zero.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-05-15 20:36:59+00:00
Strongly recommend this blog post too which is a much more detailed and persuasive version of the same point. The author actually goes and builds a coding agent from zero: https://ampcode.com/how-to-build-an-agent

It is indeed astonishing how well a loop with an LLM that can call tools works for all kinds of tasks now. Yes, sometimes they go off the rails, there is the problem of getting that last 10% of reliability, etc. etc., but if you're not at least a little bit amazed then I urge you go to and hack together something like this yourself, which will take you about 30 minutes. It's possible to have a sense of wonder about these things without giving up your healthy skepticism of whether AI is actually going to be effective for this or that use case.

This "unreasonable effectiveness" of putting the LLM in a loop also accounts for the enormous proliferation of coding agents out there now: Claude Code, Windsurf, Cursor, Cline, Copilot, Aider, Codex... and a ton of also-rans; as one HN poster put it the other day, it seems like everyone and their mother is writing one. The reason is that there is no secret sauce and 95% of the magic is in the LLM itself and how it's been fine-tuned to do tool calls. One of the lead developers of Claude Code candidly admits this in a recent interview.[0] Of course, a ton of work goes into making these tools work well, but ultimately they all have the same simple core.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDmW5hJPsvQ
by bilekas | 2025-05-15 20:37:05+00:00
> But KJ’s treatment — which built on decades of federally funded research — offers a new path for companies to develop personalized treatments without going through years of expensive development and testing.

Really incredible story and I'd love to know the process for receiving this, for example FDA approval etc. It's nice to see such in-your-face results from Federal funding programs. Without being political, it's sometimes hard for regular people to appreciate just how much good actually comes out of Federal Funding. There was another thread where someone even said something along the lines of : "Well during war things get done faster" . This simply isn't true. It might be done louder but Federal Funding never stopped pushing things forward.
by crawshaw | 2025-05-15 20:37:10+00:00
I'm curious about your experiences with Gemini Pro 2.5 tool calling. I have tried using it in agent loops (in fact, sketch has some rudimentary support I added), and compared with the Anthropic models I have had to actively reprompt Gemini regularly to make tool calls. Do you consider it equivalent to Sonnet 3.7? Has it required some prompt engineering?
by cuuupid | 2025-05-15 20:37:21+00:00
This is a great concept but I think "Enterprise-Ready Security" and your competitive comparison chart are kind of misleading. Yes, zero trust is huge. But, virtually everyone who has a use case for max privacy AI, has that use case because of compliance and IP concerns. Enterprise-Ready Security doesn't mean sigstore or zero trust, it means you have both the security at a technical level as well as certification by an auditor that you do.

You aren't enterprise ready because to address those concerns you need to get the laundry list of compliance certs: SOC 2:2, ISO 27k1/2 and 9k1, HIPPA, GDPR, CMMC, FedRAMP, NIST, etc.
by kccqzy | 2025-05-15 20:37:29+00:00
I have an unpopular opinion: I don't like numpy.einsum because it is too different from the rest of numpy. You label your axes with letters but none of the other regular numpy functions do that. I usually avoid using numpy.einsum in favor of using a combination of indexing notation with numpy.newaxis (None), broadcasting, and numpy.swapaxes.

And I learned from someone more senior than me that you should instead label your variables with single-letter axes names. This way, the reader reads regular non-einsum operations and they still have the axes information in their mental model. And when you use numpy.einsum these axes labeling information become duplicated.
by jsight | 2025-05-15 20:37:36+00:00
Yeah, IMO meetings without a discernible outcome are mostly pointless. It may not be a specific decision, but it should be "tangible". "students learned tech X" is tangible.

Two out of ten attendees talked for 30 minutes and didn't write anything down, really isn't.

For some reason, I'm seeing a lot more hesitance to record or document, and I don't think it is a good thing at all.
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-05-15 20:37:52+00:00
I decided to experiment with Claude Code this month. The other day it decided the best way to fix the spec was to add a conditional to the test that causes it to return true before getting to the thing that was actually supposed to be tested.

I’m finding it useful for really tedious stuff like doing complex, multi step terminal operations. For the coding… it’s not been great.
by J0nL | 2025-05-15 20:38:07+00:00
I'm having de ja vu here. If they only found out when they attempted to extort them does it mean they don't even bother to log employee access? Is there any means for accountability at all internally?

It would be so simple to have access tracking and flag or lock out rogue employees... I look forward to seeing what the golden parachutes look like.
by rkagerer | 2025-05-15 20:38:20+00:00
Coinbase seems to be going to great lengths to try and distance themselves from the so-called "rogue overseas support agents".

If they were Coinbase employees or contractors, that means the company basically sold its own data to hackers, who then turned around and demanded a ransom.

Reimbursing duped customers makes sense, as it seems like they would have a pretty straightforward case to make in court that Coinbase's actions led to their loss.

I'm more curious if someone who feels the need to move, change banks, change their email, hire a security detail etc. could successfully sue the company to recover some or all of those costs.
by sudoforge | 2025-05-15 20:38:36+00:00
i have no understanding, beyond that of a lexical nature, what a "magit module" is. i'm a (neo)vim user, and heavy terminal junkie, and if i wanted to build a vim plugin for git-bug, that plugin would likely be shelling out to the command line (as git-bug doesn't expose an independent API today -- it's only started when you start the web ui).

is a "magit module" roughly synonymous with a vim plugin? if so, then would shelling out to the CLI work?
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-15 20:38:49+00:00
Correct. Modern font rendering likely falls into that "more complex, but lightweight / useful" category.

My point was it's much more complex even though it does essentially the same thing (output character to screen).

>> There are many examples like the above

Death by a 1000 cuts! Probably much worse offenders out there that deserve being attacked.
by visarga | 2025-05-15 20:39:08+00:00
You should try Cursor or Windsurf, with Claude or Gemini model. Create a documentation file first. Generate tests for everything. The more the better. Then let it cycle 100 times until tests pass.

Normal programming is like walking, deliberate and sure. Vibe coding is like surfing, you can't control everything, just hit yes on auto. Trust the process, let it make mistakes and recover on its own.
by Balgair | 2025-05-15 20:39:12+00:00
No, it's only in the liver, from what I can tell from the science, not the gametes.

No, it would not depend on the sex of the baby, as the chromosomes that you're editing aren't X or Y.

Evolutionarily, the inheritance of genes is a far slower process than the medical advancements we make, so what I think we're seeing here is a chasing down of the low probability events. In that, most of the evolutionary pressure is coming from things like dirty water and bad food, but as we're solving those low hanging fruit, we have to go to lower probability events to make progress that feels equally important.

Also, if I am wrong here on the answers to the questions, please correct me!
by Teever | 2025-05-15 20:42:18+00:00
I suppose a downside (depending on your perspective) of this is that it will make people who are genetically modified in this fashion trivial to detect.

That's good if your goals are to detect genetic modification which may be considered cheating in competitive sports.

That's bad if your goals are to detect genetically modified people and discriminate against them.

I see a near future where the kind of people who loathe things like vaccines and genuinely believe that vaccines can spread illness to the non-vaccinated feel the same way about other things like genetic modification and use legal mechanisms to discriminate and persecute people who are genetically modified.
by jbellis | 2025-05-15 20:42:46+00:00
Confession time: litellm still doesn't support parallel tool calls with Gemini models [https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm/issues/9686] so we wrote our own "parallel tool calls" on top of Structured Output. It did take a few iterations on the prompt design but all of it was "yeah I can see why that was ambiguous" kinds of things, no real complaints.

GP2.5 does have a different flavor than S3.7 but it's hard to say that one is better or worse than the other [edit: at tool calling -- GP2.5 is definitely smarter in general]. GP2.5 is I would say a bit more aggressive at doing "speculative" tool execution in parallel with the architect, e.g. spawning multiple search agent calls at the same time, which for Brokk is generally a good thing but I could see use cases where you'd want to dial that back.
by dekhn | 2025-05-15 20:43:08+00:00
This system isn't really turing complete, but existing biology provides everything required to make a computer which is Turing complete (assuming non-infinite tape size).

True programmatic biology is still very underdeveloped. I have seen logic gates, memory, and state machines all implemented, but I don't think anybody has built somethign with a straightforward instruction set, program counter, addressable RAM, and registers that was useful enough to justify advanced research.
by zdevito | 2025-05-15 20:43:11+00:00
I tried to do something similar with 'first-class' dimension objects in PyTorch https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/main/functorch/dim/R... . For instance multi-head attention looks like:

from torchdim import softmax def multiheadattention(q, k, v, num_attention_heads, dropout_prob, use_positional_embedding): batch, query_sequence, key_sequence, heads, features = dims(5) heads.size = num_attention_heads # binding dimensions, and unflattening the heads from the feature dimension q = q[batch, query_sequence, [heads, features]] k = k[batch, key_sequence, [heads, features]] v = v[batch, key_sequence, [heads, features]] # einsum-style operators to calculate scores, attention_scores = (q*k).sum(features) * (features.size ** -0.5) # use first-class dim to specify dimension for softmax attention_probs = softmax(attention_scores, dim=key_sequence) # dropout work pointwise, following Rule #1 attention_probs = torch.nn.functional.dropout(attention_probs, p=dropout_prob) # another matrix product context_layer = (attention_probs*v).sum(key_sequence) # flatten heads back into features return context_layer.order(batch, query_sequence, [heads, features])

However, my impression trying to get a wider userbase is that while numpy-style APIs maybe are not as good as some better array language, they might not be the bottleneck for getting things done in PyTorch. However, other domains might suffer more, and I am very excited to see a better array language catch on.
by davidcbc | 2025-05-15 20:43:21+00:00
If only hardcore crypto enthusiasts who didn't want any fiat had cryptocurrency bitcoin would be worth a couple dollars a piece and 99% of other cryptocurrencies wouldn't exist. The vast vast majority of people who have crypto are doing it because they think they can get rich from it and that's why anytime it's talked about it's talked about in terms of fiat values
by ahelwer | 2025-05-15 20:43:30+00:00
Hillel Wayne wrote a post[0] about this issue recently, but on a practical level I think I want to address it by writing a "how-to" on trace validation & model-based testing. There are a lot of projects out there that have tried this, where you either get your formal model to generate events that push your system around the state space or you collect traces from your system and validate that they're a correct behavior of your specification. Unfortunately, there isn't a good guide out there on how to do this; everybody kind of rolls their own, presents the conference talk, rinse repeat.

But yeah, that's basically the answer to the conformance problem for these sort of lightweight formal methods. Trace validation or model-based testing.

[0] https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/requirements-chan...)
by ebolyen | 2025-05-15 20:44:16+00:00
If anyone is interested in a more formal descriptions of these control-loops, with more testable mechanisms, check out the concept of reward-taxis. Here are two neat papers that I think are more closely related than might initially appear:

"Is Human Behavior Just Running and Tumbling?": https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wzvn9_v1 (This used to be a blog post, but its down, so here's a essentially identical preprint.) A scale-invariant control-loop such as chemotaxis may still be the root algorithm we use, just adjusted for a dopamine gradient mediated by the prefrontal cortex.

"Give-up-itis: Neuropathology of extremis": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069... What happens when that dopamine gradient shuts down?
by nico | 2025-05-15 20:44:20+00:00
Cool tool. What format does it expect from the model?

I’ve been looking for something that can take “bare diffs” (unified diffs without line numbers), from the clipboard and then apply them directly on a buffer (an open file in vscode)

None of the paste diff extension for vscode work, as they expect a full unified diff/patch

I also tried a google-developed patch tool, but also wasn’t very good at taking in the bare diffs, and def couldn’t do clipboard
by mckn1ght | 2025-05-15 20:44:31+00:00
I think part of the problem is that “really good” and “really bad” are not universally accepted norms for any given ethical question. What you’re seeing is your own value system assumptions being checked.

It’s perfectly reasonable to say that while a technology has the propensity to be used for evil, it also has positive applications and that the real benefit now outweighs the potential downside in a hypothetical future.

Otherwise you will go down a rabbit hole at the bottom of which lies a future where we all just kinda dig in the dirt with our hands until we die because every technological innovation can be used in a variety of ways.

Like, it’s silly to me that I can’t bring a 1.5” blade keychain utility knife on a flight, and then they hand me a metal butter knife in first class. I could do way more damage with that. But they allow the butter knife because the utility has shown to far outweigh the potential downside that hasn’t manifested.

> I will slaughter a baby if I know for a fact that baby will grow up to be the next Hitler

This is one of those things that is easy to say precisely due to the impossibility of it ever actually becoming a real decision you have to make.
by ysofunny | 2025-05-15 20:45:08+00:00
it is an abstraction based on how our biological eyes work (this implies "knowledge" of physics)

so it is indirectly based on knowledge of how color works, it's simply not physics as we understand it but it's "physics" as the biology of the eye "understands" it.

red is an abstraction whose connection to how colors work is itself another abstraction, but of a much deeper complexity than 'red' which is a rather direct abstraction as far as abstraction can go nowadays