MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dTal | 2025-05-26 21:14:09+00:00
Where are you getting all this (wrong) detail about the internals of the Chinese Room? The thought experiment merely says that the operator consults "books" and follows "instructions" (no doubt Turing-complete but otherwise unspecified) for manipulating symbols they they explicitly DO NOT understand - they do NOT have access to "symbolic and syntactical equivalences" - that is the POINT of the thought experiment. But the instructions in the books in a Chinese Room could perfectly well have an attention model. The details are irrelevant, because - I stress again - Searle's Chinese Room is not cognitively limited, by definition. Its hypothetical output is indistinguishable from a Chinese human.

I tend to agree that Chinese Rooms should be kept out of LLM discussions. In addition to it being a flawed thought experiment, of all the dozens of times I've seen them brought up, not a single example has demonstrated understanding of what a Chinese Room is anyway.
Show HN: Millau – self-configuring ingress proxy for Docker Swarm
by codelev | 2025-05-26 21:15:03+00:00
I still use Docker Swarm. It's simple, fast to set up, and easy to teach. But I got tired of managing routing to microservices. Nginx and HAProxy need config redeploys, Traefik is powerful, but its configuration via labels quickly becomes unmaintainable.

So I built Millau — a free ingress proxy and load balancer for Docker Swarm microservices. Add a few labels to the service, and traffic gets routed. No proxy restarts, no config files. Example: ``` # service deploy: labels: - "millau.enabled=true" - "millau.port=9000" ```

Millau listens to Docker events, discovers labeled services, and routes traffic using host and path matching. Unlike Traefik, Millau supports load balancing across services. I use it to deploy different versions e.g. Blue, Green, Red of the same microservice. If Red crashes, Millau routes to Blue or Green. If Blue slows down, Millau marks it inactive for 60s and routes to Green.

Millau supports TLS termination and mTLS. It exposes Prometheus metrics and ships with a prebuilt Grafana dashboard. It's in production, serving its own site and several side projects.

Let me know what you think, especially if you're still using Docker ecosystem in prod. Thanks.
by TheFreim | 2025-05-26 21:15:04+00:00
Punishing honest students by ensuring that they will fail unless they cheat is an absurd solution. In school I went to great lengths to do my work well and on my own. It was disheartening to see other students openly cheat and do well, but at least I knew that I was performing well on my own merits.

Under your system, I would have been actively punished for not cheating. What's the point of developing a cure that's worse than the disease?
by skydhash | 2025-05-26 21:15:09+00:00
That means that I take time to analyze the problem and come up with a convincing design (mostly research, and experience). After that I've just got a few parameters that I don't know much about. But that doesn't mean that I can't build the stuff. I just isolate them so that I can tweak them later. Why? Because they are often accidental complexities, not essential ones.
by DoctorOW | 2025-05-26 21:15:17+00:00
Anubis is a partial mitigant of DDOS attacks, since it's less resource intensive to serve the Anubis page than the origin[1].

Cloudflare's captchas are only convenient for a subset of users, I'll bet there'd be decent money in one of the competing CDNs (Fastly maybe?) including an Anubis-like captcha.

[1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864108
by cycomanic | 2025-05-26 21:15:36+00:00
They are doing 10 Gb/s over each fibre, to get to 10 Gb/s you have already undergone a parallel -> serial conversion in electronics (clock rates of your asics/fpgas are much lower), to increase the serial rate is in fact the bottleneck. Where the actual optimum serial rate is highly depends on the cost of each transceiver, e.g. long haul optical links operate at up to 1 Tb/s serial rates while datacenter interconnects are 10-25G serial AFAIK.
by the_snooze | 2025-05-26 21:17:15+00:00
The consumer model isn't all bad. But it can lead to wildly different outcomes based on self-selection and incentives.

Take gyms, for example. You have your cheap commodity convenience gyms like Planet Fitness, where a lot of people sign up (especially at the beginning of the year) but few actually stick to it to get any real gains. But you also have pricy fitness clubs with mandatory beginner classes, where the member base tends to be smaller but very committed to it.

I feel like students that are OK with just phoning it in with AI fall into the Planet Fitness mindset. If you're serious about gains (physically or intellectually), you'll listen to the instructors and persist through uncomfortable challenges.
by scottishbee | 2025-05-26 21:17:18+00:00
Build user-facing prototypes with your real data.

Every startup/company I work for I've had to jury rig ways to get new product ideas in front of users. Google sheets, Grafana boards, Chartio (RIP), etc all to go "SQL query" -> "user-accessible website". For some reason Retool doesn't have a "make externally available to these people".

So I'm playing around with how to build a generic interface between db and user access panel.
by nkrisc | 2025-05-26 21:17:49+00:00
If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees will be completely worthless.

If students using AI to cheat on homework are graduating with a degree, then it has lost all value as a certificate that the holder has completed some minimum level of education and learning. Institutions that award such degrees will be no different than degree mills of the past.

I’m just grateful my college degree has the year 2011 on it, for what it’s worth.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-26 21:18:44+00:00
First of all, to the extent controllers are "surprised" by any of those events, you're making my point for me.

Second, I wasn't referring to ATC AI in flight sims; as you suggest I have no experience with that. I doubt anyone ever put any serious effort into flight sim ATC AI compared with AI for realtime strategy or even FPS games. Years ago, a primitive neural net dragged a 9-dan Go master up and down the ban, so I imagine our current tech can handle a few planes.

I'm not paid to redesign the ATC system, or qualified to do so (although that won't stop Musk, I'm sure.) But as I've made clear, I believe it can and probably should be done. In practice it would probably look more like

if (AircrewOrEmployeesReportForeignObjectOnRunway) { closeRunwayAndRedirectTraffic(); alertFacilityPersonnel(); leaveRunWayClosedUntilSomeoneInAuthorityReopensIt(); }

So many of the things you mention are simply not in ATC's wheelhouse to begin with. Their job is to keep things moving (or not) while other people in authority deal with those situations. That part wouldn't change, as I see it.
by bicx | 2025-05-26 21:18:50+00:00
I spent a while in management, and what I learned about the review process was pretty eye-opening. Basically everyone was graded on the curve, and you couldn’t afford to have too many “exceeds expectations” ratings. That would mean they probably met expectations above their role, and they could make a strong case for promotion. If you can’t give out lots of promotions, then the top performers get pissed. So, just don’t let them all know how great they’re doing.

Performance reviews are a dumb system, and you shouldn’t be learning anything new from them anyway. Just give helpful feedback throughout the year, and give promotions to people strategically as you’re able.
by braaaahp | 2025-05-26 21:19:42+00:00
Yeh. Data driven model syncing machines will be what kills languages, software stacks.

All the chip world talk of single function machines and how tech is now energy constrained industry, means pruning the state we store; most software is software to deliver software.

Single function pipeline hardware platforms will act as little more than sync engines from models.

I mean it’s is 2025. Still write software like it’s the 1970s. So high tech.

Edit: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668

From LLMs to energy models that transform electromagnetic geometry. Saving what’s needed to recreate cat pics and emails to mom. Pruning the tail as interest dips with generational churn.
by elric | 2025-05-26 21:19:52+00:00
Because it usually is an issue of titration or mask fit.

There are some cases of people have complex sleep apnea, or having awfully non-compliant airways that require uncomfortably high pressures. But the vast majority of people can tolerate PAP just fine.

There are certainly improvements to be made. And thankfully some of them are being worked on (e.g. VCOM or KPAP). And some people could benefit from bilevel or even ASV, and it's a shame that those are often way harder to get. But even if we're being generous, the article's suggestion of 22% of patients who can get by on just the drugs is incredibly underwhelming compared to PAP.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-26 21:20:10+00:00
You're mistaking "know" with "care," since my experience has been that people know way more than they care

And I'm pretty certain that private repos are exempt from the platform's built-in secret scanners because they, too, erroneously think no one can read them without an invitation. Turns out Duo was apparently just silently invited to every repo : - \
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-05-26 21:20:53+00:00
I don't think that's accurate at all. It's true that rich people in Carnegie's day had more concern about organized violence against them, but most of them preferred to deal with it by getting the Pinkertons or the military to stop you from organizing anything against them. Late 1800s labor disputes killed a lot more workers than millionaires.
by Modified3019 | 2025-05-26 21:20:54+00:00
My recent experience being tech support for family and trying to make available some sort of digitized preservation of family photos/history, has been impressing upon me the need to get away from Rube Goldberg systems that only I could possibly understand and modify. My primary filesystem being ZFS already makes having my stuff be accessible to others after my death a bit unrealistic. (Part of my strategy, will be physical redundancy with archival disks and HDDs, and even paper for text information)

I’m forever intrigued by the promises of nix, but I have finally accepted that I am not the target audience for what they have built. The nix language is fundamentally at odds with general purpose usability. Even using the package manger on other distros is fraught with gotchas.

On an off topic note, I find it fascinating how both my father and grandfather, who are/were quite technically competent, seem to become increasingly and possibly willfully helpless about computers as they get older. I find myself wondering if at some point I will also experience exhaustion of whatever internal energy is needed to fuel technical fluency.
by watwut | 2025-05-26 21:21:18+00:00
It is kind of impossible for 2022 legislation to prevent something that was happening decades ago. Tho, America is actually producing more then ever.

Republican voters did not cared about any of that. They wanted to own the libs, they wanted the destruction of project 2025 and wanted to harm the people they look down at. They did not wanted to work in factories, they did not want industrial policy and they do not want USA to be a tech leader anymore. Conservatives are not making economical choice, they are just throwing concerns around when they want to bear democrats. They dont care a put putcomes when Republicans rule.

You complaining that legislature from 2022 did not traveled back in time to change something in 2010 is quite on point here. This is not about strategy, law nor economics.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-05-26 21:21:20+00:00
Maybe I have my search syntax wrong. Suppose I want to search for go projects with a flake.nix in the repo root. This finds nothing:

language:Go path:/flake.nix

I know they exist though, for instance here's one: github.com/joerdav/xc

Can you tell me where I've gone wrong?
by pessimizer | 2025-05-26 21:21:55+00:00
It seems like a combination of

1) extreme denial of the possibility of change anywhere ever (which is standard middle-class anxiety - your extremely specialized skills have been devalued, and now you're poor), and

2) cynicism is safe because most things fail. Cynicism is even safer when a bunch of people are trying to sell you something, because most of them are going to be con-men.

But I think the modern machine learning methods of the past few years are as important as the computer, and we're just starting the period between the computer and the transistor, during which time we're using vacuum tubes and giant iron rings to build them. When the AI-transistor comes along, it's going to be the engine of all human technological process for the next century.

edit: if there's anything that AI is going to be really, really good at, very soon, it's going to be teaching people languages. I don't have a problem with Duolingo going to AI; it wasn't exactly great before. It's just a brand and cartoons, not a method. Being that it wasn't great before, though, I have no idea what qualifies Duolingo to come up with language-teaching AI. I don't think gamification skills transfer.

If anything, they need to be furiously hiring extremely high level, extremely expensive AI people and second-language learning academics/linguists.

Duolingo lost its purpose as an app when it figured out that creating a translation army was pointless, and it lost most of its usefulness when it froze, then deleted the forums. Now it's just a cloud of IP. They might as well start selling a soda pop.
by LtWorf | 2025-05-26 21:22:30+00:00
I think this is a good starting point https://mentors.debian.net/

Also personally I'd avoid using git buildpackage at the beginning since it's rather complicated and not everyone uses it (although those who do are very vocal!)

You don't need git at all, but if you want something easier, create a repo on salsa and keep the debian/ directory there and that's it.
by cycomanic | 2025-05-26 21:22:33+00:00
Ah I missed the 10m reference there. I'm not sure it makes more sense though. Typical intra-datacenter connections are 10s-100s of meters and use VCSELs, so introducing microleds just for the very short links instead of just parallelising the VCSEL connections (which is being done already)? If they could actually replace the VCSEL I would sort of see the point.
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2025-05-26 21:23:48+00:00
For HN, replace M$ with Musk and you'll still see parallels. Although to be fair HN is much more even-keeled than most commenting systems, like Ars and Electrek.

Slashdot is struggling a bit these days. The lower the comment count, the worse the moderation, so it's a bit of a snowball effect. The UI could use some help; there are many who don't want it to change at all, but it would be nice if an alternate UI were available, hitting the same API.
by IshKebab | 2025-05-26 21:25:53+00:00
Yeah I think this is a big flaw of declarative systems. I see a Nix derivation that contains `foo: bar`. How do I know what this does? It's pretty much impossible to know without learning all of Nix, because anything can access it.

If it was a function call you could just go-to-definition.

Environment variables have a similar issue. It's often hard to know what they do because they could be used by basically anything at any time.
by cycomanic | 2025-05-26 21:26:17+00:00
The issue with optical neuromorphic computing is that the field has been doing the easy part, i.e. the matrix multiplication. We have known for decades that imaging/interference networks can do matrix operations in a massively parallel fashion. The problem is the nonlinear activation function between your layers. People have largely been ignoring this, or just converted back to electrical (now you are limited again by the cost/bandwidth of the electronics).
by DoctorOW | 2025-05-26 21:26:46+00:00
You seen to be implying that Cloudflare has been abusing this position of power, but then listing things it allows? Porn, of consenting adults, is actually a great example of business Cloudflare's right to take on. You may not care for it, but legal/ethical pornography is a matter only of taste. We'd be far worse off if Cloudflare was blocking content based off of personal preference.
The End of Finale
by hughperson | 2025-05-26 21:26:52+00:00
Some have written here that "no amount of commenting will change" Finale's refusal to release a cloud-based authoriuzation. Really? What is the soruce of that information? Comments - not to mention lawsuits - have changed software developers' policies in the past (see below). Why is the future comment-proof?

A version of Finale should be released where your serial number alone could be used to authorize Finale in perpetuity without internet access.

There's no need to depend on internet access which could be taken away at any point.

Someone made a Change.org petition for Finale to fix this mess:

https://www.change.org/p/urge-makemusic-to-continue-developing-finale-notation-software-or-open-source

A personal note: I have been with Finale since beta testing ver3 in the 90s for its owner, Coda. Very floppy disks for PC as I recall... I have long documented the many errors and unwanted changed importing XML from Finale to Finale creates. Recently some Finale techs have written that they see problems as well. Finale XML to Dorico or Sibelius is not likely better.

What is the cost in time or money hiring others to convert all the thousands of pages of work, or reconstruct them from PDF or MIDI? Layout problems, quirky Finale workarounds that have to be reworked in a new program, and of course RE-PROOFING EVERY PAGE YOU HAVE EVER FINISHED?? In addition, some portion of the 30 years of chops I developed using Finale will be lost.

All for no good reason. Bias' Peak and Opcode's Studio Vision Pro were freed of their copy protection after they were abandoned. I ask MakeMusic for far less - just remove the requirement for Internet authorization and allow serial number only installations. Then all I have to do is maintain the last OS Finale 27.4 runs well on! I can do that!
by hombre_fatal | 2025-05-26 21:27:19+00:00
That's a feature, though. If she's too disinterested in making other moves like reading books or the news, then at least she still has that base Duolingo momentum that might make the move possible in the future.

People always assume the alternative to Duolingo is that everyone will start a habit of reading BBC Mundo in Spanish or something, and it's obviously not true for many if not most people. And that's fine, some people are only going to scoot by with a dilettante level of interest until they take a real plunge.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-05-26 21:28:20+00:00
Male pattern baldness is a solved problem, if caught early enough; people just don't usually bother, because the cleanest solution (a 5α-RI) can interfere with sexual function, the "proper" fix for that (low-dose topical application) is time-consuming (so people normally just kludge it with Viagra), and the medicines involved can (indirectly) cause breast growth with prolonged use (unlikely to be a problem with low-dose topical application, and can also be mitigated, although overshooting that mitigation can cause osteoporosis) and are "don't even touch this if you're pregnant" class (they can interfere with fœtal development).
by account-5 | 2025-05-26 21:28:54+00:00
Police didn't arrest J.K. Rowling for her tweets about transwomen after the new Scottish law came into force, even when she asked them to. No muddling of the new law just police... Underreach? Or not doing their job? Depends who you ask.

Either way tit for tat examples help nothing.

Fact is, police are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Plus it's good to just blame them for things they aren't in control of.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-26 21:28:59+00:00
I don't really understand the point you're making.

It seems like you're suggesting that Politico didn't mention that the area already had pollution problems prior to xAI, but that's literally the very first sentence of the article:

> Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is belching smog-forming pollution into an area of South Memphis that already leads the state in emergency department visits for asthma.

It's restated in the 5th sentence:

> The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.

The power plant down the street is mentioned in the 6th sentence:

> The turbines spew nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx, at an estimated rate of 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year — far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or the oil refinery down the road.

So I have to deduce that your actual complaint is that the article didn't say something to the effect of, "xAI is adding a bunch of emissions, but don't worry because the people there were already well-abused by other nearby emission sources?"

> what I strongly disagree with in the politico article is that the datacenter is framed as a major polluter when the whole area is heavy industry,

The xAI data center is a major polluter. In fact it's a major polluter even in an area full of major polluters! It produces more NOx than the gigantic power plant that powers the region.
by notnullorvoid | 2025-05-26 21:29:35+00:00
AI summaries aren't the problem, they are a poor solution to a overwhelming amount of slop content. Search engine results have been getting worse and worse for over a decade, and with a rapidly increasing collection of content the web is getting too big to search. AI will be necessary, but it's not going to change the course, it will be deployed on both the solution and the problem front.

If I had to pick the biggest contributor to the problem it would be advertising. Which mainly means Google, and governments for allowing an ad and search monopoly under the same roof. People can make all the justifications they want about how ad revenue allowed businesses and individuals to prosper, and "free" access to content, but it was always borrowing against the future.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-26 21:30:17+00:00
Okay I think we're saying the same thing, but let me check that..

> This can be done by storing energy in the material itself (that's how desiccants work)

This is exactly where the energy goes. From the paper (in it's Materials and Methods section) -- All measurements were performed at 20° ± 0.2°C maintained by an air circulation system unless otherwise noted. The temperature of the films was controlled using a heating/cooling unit (THMS350V, Linkam Scientific Instruments, Salfords, UK) when necessary.

So the hypothesis is that the heat in the water vapor goes into the nano-pore material, which in their experiment they were actively maintaining at 20 degrees C. So yes, they are actively removing the heat created by the phase change.

One difference with desiccants is that once they are saturated you have to restore them through heating them up, but this stuff doesn't have that property. And while it may sound like nonsense it was reproduced in another lab[1].

Apparently capillary condensation is a thing, its the popping out of the liquid water that was unexpected.

[1] With a material that could potentially defy the laws of physics on their hands, Lee and Patel sent their design off to a collaborator to see if their results were replicable.
by elric | 2025-05-26 21:30:37+00:00
I think you might be living in a bubble of some sort? Spring, specifically Spring Boot, is extremely popular. Calling it unfashionable is simply wrong.

I agree that it is a cancer. Monocultures are rarely a good idea. And I strongly prefer explicit dependencies and/or compile time magic over runtime magic. But it is "convenient" and very much en vogue.