MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kazinator | 2025-05-05 19:23:34+00:00
> Finally, an off-the-shelf device! But why is it only rated for 25MHz?

Because that's more than enough for scanning a screen-width's-worth of samples from the analog CCD snapshot.

In a digital camara, the CCD columns basically capture the image instantaneously. It has an infinite sample rate!

Then the data is shifted out the CCD some rate that basically doesn't matter, as long as it isn't so slow that it takes seconds.
by manquer | 2025-05-05 19:23:43+00:00
Progress is not just a function of technical possibility( even if it exists) it is also economics.

It has taken tens to hundred of billions of dollars without equivalent economic justification(yet) before to reach here. I am not saying economic justification doesn't exist or wont come in the future, just that the upfront investment and risk is already in order of magnitude of what the largest tech companies can expend.

If the the next generation requires hundreds of billions or trillions [2] upfront and a very long time to make returns, no one company (or even country) could allocate that kind of resources.

Many cases of such economically limited innovations[1], nuclear fusion is the classic always 20 years away example. Another close one is anything space related, we cannot replicate in next 5 years what we already achieved from 50 years ago of say landing on the moon and so on.

From a just a economic perspective it is a definitely a "If", without even going into the technology challenges.

[1]Innovations in cost of key components can reshape economics equation, it does happen (as with spaceX) but it also not guaranteed like in fusion.

[2] The next gen may not be close enough to AGI. AGI could require 2-3 more generations ( and equivalent orders of magnitude of resources), which is something the world is unlikely to expend resources on even if it had them.
by elmerfud | 2025-05-05 19:24:12+00:00
Do not believe what the DHS quote says. This is absolutely not for undocumented or illegal immigrants. The article takes that quote and just accepts it at face value without doing any research, Even though outside of that quote it just calls the migrants. Most of the news media accepts that what is happening is largely undocumented or illegal immigrants, or is at least accepting the quotes from the government officials without question. That is factually untrue. I personally know people who are documented who have been picked up by immigration and are being detained by them and they are attempting to be coerced into signing papers for voluntary deportation.

If you look around you can find where the government has just arbitrarily withdrawn the asylum applications from tens of thousands of people and scheduled them for deportation. If you have applied for asylum you are not an undocumented immigrant. You are in fact a documented immigrant. The ice detention facilities are backlogged six days just processing people into the facility. This means they are waiting without proper food medical care or sleep for six plus days.

Most of these people that they're picking up are documented. They have papers that allow them to be here they have work permits they have jobs and they are legal to stay here while waiting for the slow government process.

So absolutely this is not at all for undocumented and illegal immigrants. This is people who are documented who came here legally according to the process at the time. How else do you think they will be able to vet them in the system to make sure that they can get their $1,000 paid out?
by simonw | 2025-05-05 19:24:17+00:00
Matt Levine on OpenAI's weird capped return structure in November 2023:

And the investors wailed and gnashed their teeth but it’s true, that is what they agreed to, and they had no legal recourse. And OpenAI’s new CEO, and its nonprofit board, cut them a check for their capped return and said “bye” and went back to running OpenAI for the benefit of humanity. It turned out that a benign, carefully governed artificial superintelligence is really good for humanity, and OpenAI quickly solved all of humanity’s problems and ushered in an age of peace and abundance in which nobody wanted for anything or needed any Microsoft products. And capitalism came to an end.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-co...
by colanderman | 2025-05-05 19:24:33+00:00
You are conflating levels of trust.

The trust level required with Signal is, "do I trust the people in this chat not to share the specific communications I am sending to them with some other party whom I do not want to have a copy".

There are many many situations where this level of trust applies that "trust" in the general sense does not apply. It is a useful property.

And if you don't have that level of trust, don't put it in writing.

TM SGNL changes the trust required to, "do I also trust this 3rd party not to share the contents of any of my communications, possibly inadvertently due to poor security practices".

This is a categorical and demonstrably material difference in security model. I do not understand why so many are claiming it is not.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-05-05 19:24:53+00:00
The safety instinct complex likely has components shaped in pre-human and even pre-ape and perhaps even pre-mammal ancestors.

Pressure comes from duration as well as frequency of encounter. A feature encountered infrequently but consistently across many millions of years can exert a pressure equivalent to a feature encountered more consistently for a shorter period.

Also note that the effect size to be explained here is not that large - just a nudge towards relaxation in what seems to be a subpopulation of humans.

What do you think about that?
by xandrius | 2025-05-05 19:25:19+00:00
Just about the point about the prohibitive infrastructure at scale, why does it need to be at scale?

Over few years, we went from literally impossible to being able to run a 72B model locally on a laptop. Give it 5-10 years and we might not need to have any infrastructure at all, all served locally with switchable (and different sized) open source models.
by bhouston | 2025-05-05 19:25:27+00:00
I don't have to imagine. There are various US bills trying to achieve this ban. Here is one of them:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/us_senator_download_c...

One of them will eventually pass given that OpenAI is also pushing for protection:

https://futurism.com/openai-ban-chinese-ai-deepseek
by alasano | 2025-05-05 19:25:36+00:00
Even with proper tool call descriptions, I've had quite a few occasions where the LLM didn't know how to use the tool.

The tools provided by the MCP server were definitely in context and there were only two or three servers with a small amount of tools enabled.

It feels too model dependant at the moment, this was Gemini 2.5 Pro which is normally state of the art but has lots of quirks for tool use it seems.

Agreed on hoping models are going to be trained to be better at using MCP.
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-05 19:26:17+00:00
> I don't understand how anybody expects to convince LLM users this doesn't work; it obviously does work.

This is really one of the hugest divides I've seen in the discourse about this: anti-LLM people saying very obviously untrue things, which is uh, kind of hilarious in a meta way.

https://bsky.app/profile/caseynewton.bsky.social/post/3lo4td... is an instance of this from a few days ago.

I am still trying to sort out why experiences are so divergent. I've had much more positive LLM experiences while coding than many other people seem to, even as someone who's deeply skeptical of what's being promised about them. I don't know how to reconcile the two.
by chrisdhal | 2025-05-05 19:26:51+00:00
If it's self hosted, you shouldn't care if it costs money. Let the person/org decide if they want to use it, just provide an interface for it. There are tons of free, self hosted apps that have tons of notification methods available. Radarr alone has 26 methods for notifications, none enabled by default. They include generic webhook, "custom script", and then there a number of specific ones where you put in the URL, API key, etc. and as the person hosting it things would go against my API count/bill. There's no need for you to be specific about Twilio, just have a notification framework with Twilio being one of the providers.
by dgfitz | 2025-05-05 19:27:28+00:00
It made me smirk a little, I've been doing almost exactly this line of work at $dayjob for the past few weeks/months, trying to prove out a concept as a solution to solve a problem. Actually really enjoyed the work, it has been a neat problem to solve.

Sadly, the program I was supporting just had all of its funding yanked, I expect to get laid off tomorrow.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-05 19:28:46+00:00
I think it is important to acknowledge that it takes much longer to train juniors in systems software today than a couple decades ago because the nature of the problems have changed. It now takes several years to get someone to an acceptable level for a lot of systems software work. In many cases that’s longer than the entire development cycle — a junior would never really be productive on the project. And yes, this is creating a vicious feedback loop where we are no longer producing many new people with these skills despite a lot of demand.

The minimum level of sophistication required to be effective in systems software has increased dramatically since the 1990s, when I first started doing systems software. The kinds of systems software we were putting in production in back then would be considered a trivial toy today. This shift has placed an enormous amount of upward pressure on the minimum level of experience and skill that would allow someone to become productive within a useful amount of time.

It is no longer feasible in many cases to have companies effectively subsidize the development of highly skilled systems software people. The training time has become so long that companies will never recoup the investment. It is easy to see how the incentives have created the current situation and it is not clear how to address the shortage. Even before the current situation, it was widely noted that most systems software developers were self-taught over many years rather than trained up in a structured environment.
by danenania | 2025-05-05 19:28:48+00:00
I think the two biggest issues are probably:

1. Giving the model too many choices. If you have a lot of options (like a bunch of MCP servers) what you often see in practice is that it's like a dice roll which option is chosen, even if the best choice is pretty obvious to a human. This is even tough when you just have a single branch in the prompt where the model has to choose path A or B. It's hard to get it to choose intelligently vs. randomly.

2. Global scope. The prompts related to each MCP all get mixed together in the system prompt, along with the prompting for the tool that's integrating them. They can easily be modifying each other's behavior in unpredictable ways.
by etruong42 | 2025-05-05 19:29:24+00:00
The intro sounds awfully familiar...

> Sam’s Letter to Employees.

> OpenAI is not a normal company and never will be.

Where did I hear something like that before...

> Founders' IPO Letter

> Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.

I wonder if it's intentional or perhaps some AI-assisted regurgitation prompted by "write me a successful letter to introduce a new corporate structure of a tech company".
by lotharcable | 2025-05-05 19:30:07+00:00
Probably useful for sharing stuff with services that already have access to redis, but you don't want to add SQL client dependencies for and/or don't want to give access to your database.

But you want to be able to store/have single source of authority and update them using a SQL database.

This would then eliminate the need to maintain a separate lambda or cron job or something like that to keep them in sync.
by blagie | 2025-05-05 19:30:27+00:00
No, this only happens if:

1) You're successful.

2) You mess up checks-and-balances at the beginning.

OpenAI did both.

Personally, I think at some point, the AGs ought to take over and push it back into a non-profit format. OAI undermines the concept of a non-profit.
by sshine | 2025-05-05 19:30:32+00:00
It's not a lot when you consider what you get:

Globally visible transaction permanence.

When you pay the 1.5% visa transaction, you don't get that.

And you don't need that for buying a coffee, or almost anything.

Microtransactions are just not a good use-case for the Bitcoin network.

The drawback with anything beyond Bitcoin is that in order to buy those currencies, you need Bitcoin. There is an extreme correlation with the price of Bitcoin and every other cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin's current hashrate is 95 Petahashes/second, while Litecoin is 2.35 PH/s.

I suppose both are big enough that one does not have to worry about the network being easily hijacked.

But when you get below a certain point, the price for taking over the head of the chain temporarily is a real amount of money, not an astronomical one.
by echelon | 2025-05-05 19:30:32+00:00
Perhaps it's in putting the brain in a place where the body is on autopilot and the verbal / spatial centers of the brain can be free to wander in and out of focus.

Podcasts kill this mode for me, so you can't have the brain thinking about other people's thoughts or words.

Playing a video game doesn't work, so I think your spatial thinking has to be free too.

It's as if distracting the brain's non-verbal/spatial modes or burning some amount of calories from those centers gives the "thinking" parts of the brain some "alone time". That's an incredibly non-scientific and unserious hypothesis though.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-05 19:30:45+00:00
Which is a funny thing for someone who lived through and contributed to at least one entire upending of paradigms to say.

PLENTY of science proceeds without anyone dying. Usually it just requires insanely entertaining loud arguments at large conventions. Go lookup the philosophical arguments about early thermodynamics and like statistical mechanics.

Science advances one unexplainable datapoint at a time.
by whalesalad | 2025-05-05 19:30:55+00:00
My power went out today. Which means at some point my UPS' run out of capacity and my core infra VM host has to shut down. I run Adguard on that device ... so once it is gone, my ad-blocking is gone.

I loaded a few websites during the interim period between DNS services going down, and the entire core infra going down (about 30 mins of just rawdog internet usage) and it is truly unusable. I don't know how people use the modern internet without network-wide ad blocking.
by jfengel | 2025-05-05 19:30:55+00:00
Naming is a red herring. You'll hear over and over "Oh, sure, it's a real problem, but we can't deal with it while you're calling it that".

The name isn't the issue. No matter what you call it, people are going to object. They're not really objecting to the name. They're objecting to the fact that it makes them feel bad, and they're singling out the first thing they see as the excuse to do nothing.
by jancsika | 2025-05-05 19:31:04+00:00
> Yuck all round.

Yes, but also it's an impressive digital Jedi mind trick on a website.

signs a question mark with hand

"This is the support number you're looking for."

And the victim is extra primed here because so many companies make it nearly impossible to talk to a human. Yikes!

Almost seems like there's room here for a grey hat to come in and use this trick to do a good faith job trying to help the customer through their problem. Then tell them at the end that a recent anti-trust suit requires them to tell the customer about alternate independent venues in their area where they can support live music.
by achierius | 2025-05-05 19:31:09+00:00
> You have given up and are trying to justify it

While I get where you're coming from -- I think the correct thing to do is to both move for systemic change and attempt to live the life you advocate for -- I think the position of "I'm moral, why do other people need the system change in order to be 'moral' as well?" more totally abandons the actual goal (fixing things) than the other way around. Fundamentally, things tend to change for material, systemic reasons, and so most often the best way to get at issues is not to go after individuals (whose behavior is more a symptom than the disease) but the root cause, the systemic influences that cause them to act that way.
by sho_hn | 2025-05-05 19:31:39+00:00
No, it's good that you feel this. Don't give up on tech, protest.

I've been feeling for some time now that we're sort of in the Vietnam War era of the tech industry.

I feel a strong urge to have more "ok, so where do we go from here?" and "what does a tech industry that promotes net good actually look like?" internal discourse in the community of practice, and some sort of ethical social contract for software engineering.

The open source movement has been fabulous and sometimes adjacent to or one aspect of these concerns, but really we need a movement for socially conscious and responsible software.

We need a tech counter-culture. We had one once, but now we need one.
by gwd | 2025-05-05 19:31:57+00:00
Sure, but it seems there are references to incompatible goals within the Project 2025 document, which is meant to be a unified goal document.

For instance, one goal was that "The United States must regain its role as the 'Arsenal of Democracy'... the United States built its reputation as a reliable partner with a strong defense industrial base that could supply military articles and goods in a timely manner."

But as explained in the video below, "The last three months have seen the worst damage to that reputation since the post-WWII order came into force."

The video is worth watching: it does bring out a lot of what you're talking about (different parts w/ different concerns), and does actually make sense of a lot of what Trump is saying and doing wrt Ukraine and NATO. I do find it preferable that the administration has rational goals which are simply not compatible with each other, than that they're behaving completely randomly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDSz62i6F3Q
by sneak | 2025-05-05 19:31:59+00:00
One of the most popular “e2ee” communication systems, iMessage, does exactly this each night when the iMessage user’s phone backs up its endpoint keys or its iMessage history to Apple in a non-e2ee fashion.

This allows Apple (and the US intelligence community, including FBI/DHS) to surveil approximately 100% of all non-China iMessages in close to realtime (in the usual case where it’s set to backup cross-device iMessage sync keys).

(China, cleverly, requires Apple to not only store all the Chinese iCloud data in China, but also requires that it happen on machines owned and operated by a joint venture with a Chinese-government-controlled entity, keeping them from having to negotiate continued access to the data the way the FBI did.)

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

Yet Apple can still legitimately claim that iMessage is e2ee, even though the plaintext is being backed up in a way that is readable to them. It’s a backdoor by another name.

Everyone wins: Apple gets to say E2EE, the state gets to surveil the texts of everyone in the whole country without a warrant thanks to FISA.
by blagie | 2025-05-05 19:32:04+00:00
Reality: It is the same as any other for-profit with a better-sounding name. It confuses a lot of people into thinking it's a non-profit without being one.

Theory: It allows the CEO to make decisions motivated not just by maximizing shareholder value but by some other social good. Of course, very few PBC CEOs choose to do that.
by childintime | 2025-05-05 19:32:20+00:00
The previous polls:

- 30 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584842

- 60 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43265234

Don't forget to upvote, because previous polls didn't make it out of the `new` section.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-05 19:32:26+00:00
> Service work is higher paying, which is why factory workers try to get their children educated enough to do it

You think service workers at a fast food restaurant or working the till at Walmart are higher paid than Factory workers?

> They mostly moved up. But notice this graph is positive for every group.

The reason it is positive for (almost) every group is because it isn't measuring anything meaningful

Salaries may have nominally gone up but this is clearly not weighing the cost of living into the equation
by ilikegreen | 2025-05-05 19:32:40+00:00
Oh my. Although I understand, and I do truly, that the em dash might be a tell for LLMs...I have been using it for years, now, and the last time this came up on HN I understood exactly when: Mac OS makes it very easy to type the em dash. You just long press the regular -.

I don't use a Mac anymore, but the first thing I'll do on a Linux build is configure my modifier key in such a way to produce — easily.

Not to deny that discourse on the internet, and reddit of all places, might be getting infested with LLM output. I just don't think focusing on the em dash is a good strategy to predict a tell.
Sds vs. GB: C string libs, copy or coincidence?
by nephewtom | 2025-05-05 19:34:32+00:00
I was testing a bunch of different of C/C++ libraries to manage strings, and found this coincidence:

sds (Simple Dynamic Strings from antirez, Redis creator): https://github.com/antirez/sds/blob/master/README.md?plain=1#L33

gb (gb single file libs from gingerBill, Odin language creator): https://github.com/gingerBill/gb/blob/master/gb_string.h#L71

Copy or coincidence?
by Nedomas | 2025-05-05 19:34:49+00:00
Welcome to MCP hosting space guys. We’ve also been hosting MCPs since early Feb in https://supermachine.ai and investing a lot into open-source (see https://github.com/supercorp-ai/supergateway and many others).

Guess there’s gonna be more competition haha (but don’t worry, I think our approaches are a bit different).
by always_imposter | 2025-05-05 19:34:51+00:00
AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything. Like us humans, we don't wait for somebody to give us a task and go do it as if that is our sole existence. We live with our thoughts, blank out, watch TV, read books etc. What we currently have and possibly in the next century as well will be nothing close to an actual AGI.

I don't know if it is optimism or delusions of grandeur that drives people to make claims like AGI will be here in the next decade. No, we are not getting that.

And what do you think would happen to us humans if such AGI is achieved? People's ability to put food on the table is dependent on their labor exchanged for money. I can guarantee for a fact, that work will still be there but will it be equitable? Available to everyone? Absolutely not. Even UBI isn't going to cut it because even with UBI people still want to work as experiments have shown. But with that, there won't be a majority of work especially paper pushing mid level bs like managers on top of managers etc.

If we actually get AGI, you know what would be the smartest thing for such an advanced thing to do? It would probably kill itself because it would come to the conclusion that living is a sin and a futile effort. If you are that smart, nothing motivates you anymore. You will be just a depressed mass for all your life.

That's just how I feel.
by xavriley | 2025-05-05 19:34:54+00:00
I went down a similar rabbit hole at the start of my PhD and I wish I’d written more of it up. One of my theories is that they combined effects quite often. For example, “harder better faster stronger” seems more likely to be a talk box recorded for a single note, then looped, then run through an AutoTune rack unit with MIDI inputs to repitch it. I mention this a little bit in a talk I have at ADC 2022 https://youtu.be/uX-FVtQT0PQ?feature=shared