MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AstroBen | 2025-05-03 18:04:17+00:00
> a lot of coding is delving into nuance

this is the core issue. The best language we have for specifying this nuance is still programming languages, not English

Moving up from ASM -> C -> Python we're mainly abstracting over performance and implementation details, not functionality.

Here thouhg, in making the next jump from the high level Python to an English-specified LLM output we're trying to abstract over functionality. This doesn't work. It's flawed from the start
by caseyy | 2025-05-03 18:04:26+00:00
My argument was that explicitly agreeing not to collect someone's data for AI training, then collecting data for AI training, is lying. You argued that collecting data without explicit agreement is, actually, not lying. Arguing with an easy claim no one made is the definition of a straw-man response.

Look, just have courtesy for others and don't argue in bad faith, the snark included. This community came up with the HN guidelines, let's try to follow them more. That's all I wanted to say. All the best.
by puetzk | 2025-05-03 18:04:38+00:00
> https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/about > > After high school, Alexandria attended Boston University, and graduated with degrees in Economics and International Relations (and tens of thousands of dollars in student loans). During this period she also had the opportunity to intern in the office of the late Senator Ted Kennedy.

She was indeed a congressional intern, but then her father died and family finances got rough, and a year later Ted Kennedy died (August 25, 2009) so she lost the job in his office.

> Following the financial crisis of 2008, tragedy struck when her father passed away suddenly from cancer. The medical bills and other growing expenses placed their home at risk of foreclosure. Alexandria pulled extra shifts to work as a waitress and bartender to support her family,

Her father seems to have been in the business of home remodeling and renovations. I haven't found any source for "owned multiple brownstones", but a little bit of house-flipping or some rental properties wouldn't be weird to see in that kind of business. Being a landlord with a mortgage doesn't necessarily mean huge wealth, and it it's easy to believe a combination of cancer treatment bills/being unable to work/2008 housing crisis could take a situation like that from comfortable to house-poor to foreclosure on upside-down loans in an awful hurry.
by anonzzzies | 2025-05-03 18:04:54+00:00
Wow that is a long time ago. I spent so much time in there. I wrote my own BBS software for the MSX in Pascal before that and got a bit obsessed with cramming features. When my family switched to PC, I believed real programmers, including the author of qmodem, of course, programmed in C. If I had known then it was Pascal, I would've been a lot more sure of my young self that I was on the right track (I was 14 or so).
by humbledrone | 2025-05-03 18:05:31+00:00
This is a long story, which is still ongoing. The GPU code is very, very heavily optimized (though I do still have some ideas on how to go further). The main problem we're having on Mac hardware is that the OS heuristics for when to turn the clock rate up on the GPU work really poorly for the audio use case. If you want gory details, I've written about it:

https://anukari.com/blog/devlog/waste-makes-haste

If anyone can put me in touch directly with an OS/Metal person at Apple it would be EXTREMELY helpful. I've had limited success so far.
by K0balt | 2025-05-03 18:05:53+00:00
The key to this working efficiently is responsible planning and zoning. Single family dwellings / 1-2 story housing is not likely to be viable adjacent to growing urban areas. Zoning should reflect this. This disincentives building single family homes in these areas, since taxation will be based on the fact that the lot could house a.32 unit condo, minimum lot sizes also reflect that planning, so property taxes would become quickly onerous for a single family home. If you want to live in a city, you should be amenable to living in a higher population density dwelling. I would imagine that for people that like their location, development deals that include a ground floor or penthouse apartment in exchange for part of the land value to a developer would become part of the norm. That way you can step out of the way, live somewhere else for 6 months and come home to your new flat. OTOH if you are just rich and stubborn, you can just pay the taxes.. but that will curtail the value of the home to a reasonable level. The current system rewards instead of penalizes homeowners for standing in the way of progress. At least tax revenues can be useful to the community.
by juliag2 | 2025-05-03 18:06:20+00:00
I think that begs the question, what is 'average' or 'best'? It's music enjoyed by many people. Why do they enjoy it? Because it matches their taste in music. I think we're ultimately going to get super-personalised recommendations and even original artworks tailored exactly to what we like. The true challenge in implementing this will be to find a way to 'generalise taste adaptation'. Creating a model that can adapt to any person's taste based on as little information as possible. I think that will give us very deep insights into how our preferences are formed as research progresses.

I'm sometimes scared that life will loose its spark when AI is just able to solve any problem better or faster than humans. I think music generation is scary, because music is often created using your intuition, rather than relying on general principles or strict rules alone. Intuition feels almost magical, because it feels like you somehow just know the right thing to do, without having to reason about it. If AI gained this hard-to-grasp 'intuition', that would reveal that we are just biological machines after all, and intuition is simply a sophisticated hidden pattern.
by jsbisviewtiful | 2025-05-03 18:06:24+00:00
Eh, you’re giving technology too much credit and not considering what biology has developed to do naturally and far more efficiently. It’s also postulated that computational technology is nearing its current limits. Humanity’s hubris around technology is going to be our downfall, like how we think we can “stop” climate change with theorized technology even after we let the climate go too far into the red. We are greatly overestimating and exaggerating what tech can do.

DDG’s bot’s summary of the linked article and one other:

“The computational power of the human brain is often estimated in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), with estimates ranging from 10^12 to 10^28 FLOPS, depending on the level of detail considered. In comparison, modern supercomputers can perform up to several hundred petaflops, but the brain is believed to operate at a similar or even higher efficiency due to its unique structure and processing capabilities.”

https://foglets.com/supercomputer-vs-human-brain/
by godelski | 2025-05-03 18:07:15+00:00
> That's where the talking past each other comes in...

Then sorry, but that's your own damn fault. I was clear about my definition and quoted a famous mathematician to give some authority, to not be "trust me even though I'm some rando". The way to respond to that is not "you're wrong, trust me, I'm some rando".

Yes, I agree we're misunderstanding each other because we're using different definitions but "you've" rejected "mine" without defining "yours" and expecting everyone to understand. Of course that'll lead to confusion. You can reject the mathematicians definition of math, but you sure gotta say more than "trust me" and it's a pretty wild thing to do, especially as non mathematicians.

The problem here is one side who's dabbled in cooking says "a chef makes desserts" and chefs are responding "we do a lot more than that". Maybe there's a few chefs that go "yeah all I do is dessert" and everyone points to that while ignoring the second part of their sentence is "but that's just my speciality." Wouldn't you think that conversation is insane? The only reason it's obviously so is because we all know what a chef is and agree on the definition. But who is better qualified to define the chef's job? The chef or consumer?
by neonsunset | 2025-05-03 18:08:19+00:00
Much less of a problem in .NET (its GC tuning sits somewhere in between the two, especially when SRV GC + DATAS is in use, like in container scenarios, where Go is funnily unaware of limits set by cgroups and needs an external package to fix it). It does pre-allocate more memory than Go per se but in return yields much, much higher allocation throughput out of box. Java allows for even higher allocation throughput, having multiple more sophisticated GC implementations but as you said is not very good at reducing sustained RSS used by an application.
by foobarchu | 2025-05-03 18:09:30+00:00
> There was no ethics violation whatsoever.

This is a textbook case of using human subjects without consent. There is absolutely no room for argument that this isn't an ethic violation, regardless of whether you feel harm was caused to people or not.

Calling it "not an ethics violation" is like saying that a theft wasn't theft because of what was stolen or who from. It's irrefutably not true. No journal would accept this research, and for very good reason.
by tocs3 | 2025-05-03 18:09:30+00:00
So, my take:

The LLMs are just predicting the next likely word (token) to add to a conversion. If it is just trained on data that always say one thing it will just repeat that thing. If it is trained on data that says two things it will return one of the things sometimes and the other thing other times. It may return something "novel" in the same sense that picking words (tokens), that fit together, by rolling a die. Currently it seems to be useful to look some types of things up and entertaining to play with but there is nothing profound (in the sense of new thoughts or ideas) in it.
by davidw | 2025-05-03 18:09:44+00:00
Investors only invest in things with a good return. It's why they don't buy up, say, nails, because the nail makers would just produce a lot more nails to sell to them and they'd be left sitting with a bunch of nails.

They invest in housing because it's scarce because we don't build enough of it.

And if you look at the actual numbers, large-scale institutional investors just aren't that big a factor. It's another bogeyman for people desperate to avoid the solution to not having enough housing: building more housing.

Austin is an example of the market balancing out when allowed to do so.
by brigade | 2025-05-03 18:10:23+00:00
Eyeballing 3rd party annotated die shots [1], it’s about the size of two GPU cores, but achieves 15.8 tflops. Which is more than the reported 14.7 tflops of the 32-core GPU in the binned M4 Max.

[1] https://vengineer.hatenablog.com/entry/2024/10/13/080000
by ivape | 2025-05-03 18:11:02+00:00
We can't.

I'll explain why very simply. The vision of AI and the vision of Virtual Reality all existed well before the technology. We envisioned humanoid robots well before we ever had a chance of making them. We also envisioned an all-knowing AI well before we had our current technology. We will continue to envision the end-state because it is the most natural conclusion. No human can not not imagine the inevitable. That every human, technical or not, has the capacity to fully imagine this future, which means the entirety of the human race will be directed to this forgone conclusion.

Like God and Death (and taxes). shrugs

Smith: It is inevitable Mr. Anderson
by Clubber | 2025-05-03 18:11:04+00:00
>It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter?

It mattered enough for someone to pay you money to do it, and that money put food on the table and clothes on your body and a roof over your head and allowed you to contribute to larger society through paying taxes.

Is it the same as discovering that E = MC2 or Jonas Salk's contributions? No, but it's not nothing either.
by hakfoo | 2025-05-03 18:11:19+00:00
It's a two-sided coin though.

We should be stopping leaks, but we also need to reduce the value of leaked data.

Identity theft doesn't get meaningfully prosecuted. Occasionally they'll go after some guy who runs a carding forum or someone who did a really splashy compromise, but the overall risk is low for most fraudulent players.

I always wanted a regulation that if you want to apply for credit, you have to show up in person and get photographed and fingerprinted. That way, the moment someone notices their SSN was misused, they have all the information on file to make a slam-dunk case against the culprit. It could be an easier deal for lazy cops than going after minor traffic infractions.
by bhelx | 2025-05-03 18:11:48+00:00
Hack night is the generic networking meetup at the rusty nail. It's way more casual. No presentations or organizing. below-c-level and frontend party are generally more organized and have talks. All the meetups happen before (and geographically near) to hack night on the same night. So you can generally do both. See a meetup then walk to the bar with everyone for the networking event.
by Tallain | 2025-05-03 18:12:04+00:00
I disagree, it's not overkill unless you make it overkill.

My update process is:

- Click a button to back up

- Click a button to update everything

- Open my blog to make sure it still looks normal

Definitely not onerous. To be fair I don't use many plugins, and my theme is very simple. I don't think a plain old blog doesn't need many plugins.

Sometimes I take a break from blogging. I don't want to have to read documentation on how my SSG works (either my own docs or docs on some website) to remember the script to generate the updates, or worry about deploying changes, or fiddling with updates that break my scripts, or anything like that. I do stuff like this for my day job.

I like my blogging experience to be focused on a single thing: writing.
by Pamar | 2025-05-03 18:13:07+00:00
If you are answering to my Berlin->Györ example:

Yes, it is not exactly the same thing but the point is: by getting off at B you are making the B->C flight travel with a wasted (empty) seat. Which they would have preferred to either sell to someone else or use for moving a pilot or technician to C.

(Note also that this trick of getting out mid-itinerary only works if you do not have checked baggage, because that will arrive in C, and neither the airline nor the airport will be happy to reroute it to wherever you thing you want to go next.

Flying is expensive and logistically complex. Just making sure you end up where your ticket say is complicated. If you (as a customer) decide to change your plans you are making everything more complicated (and possibly preventing other customers to pay for the whole itinerary).
by ashishbijlani | 2025-05-03 18:13:22+00:00
Plug: I've been building a similar tool: https://github.com/ossillate-inc/packj

Packj uses static+dynamic code/behavioral analysis to scan for indicators of compromise (e.g., spawning of shell, use of SSH keys, network communication, use of decode+eval, etc). It also checks for several metadata attributes to detect impersonating packages (typo squatting).
by tbrownaw | 2025-05-03 18:14:14+00:00
> and companies who support safety, transparency and honesty will support them.

Not quite.

Companies who can use the official labels to back up their own advertising campaigns will support them. (I know people who think that having a label for something is evidence of that thing being good or bad. No, it's evidence that someone thought that expending the effort to convince the government to have that label would have a positive return.)

Companies with more ability to amortize regulatory overhead (relative to their competitors) will support them, because for then that overhead is itself a competitive advantage.
by Bjorkbat | 2025-05-03 18:15:12+00:00
I'm always a little bit skeptical whenever people say that AI has resulted in anything more than a personal 50% increase in productivity.

Like, just stop and think about it for a second. You're saying that AI has doubled your productivity. So, you're actually getting twice as much done as you were before? Can you back this up with metrics?

I can believe AI can make you waaaaaaay more productive in selective tasks, like writing test conditions, making quick disposable prototypes, etc, but as a whole saying you get twice as much done as you did before is a huge claim.

It seems more likely that people feel more productive than they did before, which is why you have this discrepancy between people saying they're 2x-10x more productive vs workplace studies where the productivity gain is around 25% on the high end.
by tinco | 2025-05-03 18:15:24+00:00
It's dual licensed in a way, but neither license is open source. The OSI messed up in not coming up with an answer to the SSPL, and now ambitious projects that would have traditionally gone with an open source license like AGPL are now foregoing open source entirely and just slapping a sustainable use license on it.

So yeah, you can use n8n for free, but that doesn't make it open source. It is a source available license.
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by hilbert42 | 2025-05-03 18:17:25+00:00
"…the thing exploded in the atmosphere without ever reaching the surface because the team at JPL used metric while Lockheed Martin used imperial."

I've just read the Wiki on the Mars Climate Orbiter and it explains the disastrous implications of that mistake. What's tragic about such errors is that the US keeps repeating them, Hubble was another very expensive Imperial/Metric fuck-up even though it was recoverable.

I've often had debates with Americans about Imperial versus Metric when I was in the US and their retort is usually along the lines "why should we give up God's own units for that nasty French stuff?" or words to that effect.

They gave other specious arguments too, such as cost of new tooling would be prohibitive. That's rubbish† of course (certainly in the grand schema of things as the long-term benefits far outweigh initial costs).

Well, anyway, by the looks of it God is on the side of the French!

What many of us outside the US find odd and can't figure out is that in its early days the American Republic was hand-in-glove with the French against that horrible Imperial island, so why did it reject the French system?

Yes, I know of the early attempt at metricization and the loss of weights and measures at sea whilst in transit from France to the US but given its impact that's pretty paltry excuse.

It really is time you guys caught up with the rest of the world. Surely, it's getting a bit too expensive to continue to lose spacecraft to whims of measurement.

__

† Check how well Australia's metric conversion went some 50 years ago. It's a textbook example of how to go about it correctly. I know, I live there—we fuck things up more often than not but this one we got AOK right. If you ask kids at school today what various Imperial units are they'd likely say they've never heard of them.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-03 18:17:54+00:00
FTA

>An asshole filter happens when you publicly promulgate a straitened contact boundary and then don't enforce it; or worse, reward the people who transgress it.

A lot of people do this unwittingly, so it's a good article to read.

The converse is to this is many companies demand it. If you're not an asshole, you're simply going to get ignored.
by Spunkie | 2025-05-03 18:19:01+00:00
I don't think I could ever go back to SSR like WordPress. My only real concern with SSG is if the build will work, and even when it doesn't it's never an emergency.

Whereas the concerns for something like WordPress is

1. Has our website been hacked and publicly defaced?

2. Has our website been silently hacked and is being used to secretly distributing malware or worse, aka the FBI randomly shows up at your business.

3. Will updating one random plugin nuke your entire live site, resulting in multiple sleepless nights? Will not updating it cause your site to get hacked also resulting in sleepless nights?

4. Or better yet something in your underlying environment changes and nukes your site, usually in the middle of a weekend out with your family, and your hosting provider pinky swears they didn't change anything. So you spend your whole weekend investigating just to find out your provider did change something, usually something stupid too.

5. Considering all the above your off-site backup solution is vital so better keep that maintained and thoroughly tested as well.

6. Plus a thousand other reasons to waste time, worry, and lose sleep.
by olddustytrail | 2025-05-03 18:19:12+00:00
You can see stars in the Milky Way.

Pedantically, all the stars you can see are in the Milky Way, but in the sense you mean, the furthest stars are the ones that form the fuzzy cloud but there are closer ones in the same plane that you can see, so it looks like a long cloud dotted with stars.

So you don't need to know the fuzzy bit is also stars to depict stars in it.
by lupusreal | 2025-05-03 18:19:17+00:00
This is the ignorance I was talking about. There are many reasons to irradiate food besides substandard handling. For instance, potatoes can be irradiated to inhibit sprouting, increasing how long you can store them. And imported fruits can be irradiated to prevent the spread of insects and other pests (without needing to use far riskier pesticides.)
by tinco | 2025-05-03 18:21:35+00:00
Typically when people say open source they mean that the source code can be used , modified and made public for any purpose. There is an organization called OSI that maintains a ratified list of licenses that are compatible with the ideals of the open source movement. Although the OSI has been compromised by the big cloud providers and no longer serves the public interest, the list can still be relied on as a good sign that the license you're looking at is open source.
by Tallain | 2025-05-03 18:22:00+00:00
We're talking about blogging here, not business-critical website infrastructure. If my blog went down I wouldn't lose a sleepless night over it. I'd figure it out later.

If I were choosing a CMS or tech stack for a critical piece of infrastructure my requirements would be different and I might find some other tool.

Also, if all these were so much concern, I doubt so much of the web would run on Wordpress. Yes, you need to keep your install and plugins up to date. But you need to keep your toolchain up to date no matter what you use. Risk of breakage on update is a thing everywhere, not just Wordpress. I'm by no means a Wordpress fan, but it really is not as bad as it's painted.
by cynicalpeace | 2025-05-03 18:22:29+00:00
"Wow this song is great! Who's song is this?"

"It's AI!"

"Oh."

I've literally seen this happen, in person.

The song doesn't get passed to friends. The artist themselves is the transmission mechanism.

> With "Milli Vanilli," they took it to the extreme by having the "musicians" no longer sing themselves

This simply proves my point, not detracts from it.

You can try to make an AI into an actual human (see Miquela) but the fakeness of that is simply insurmountable. Miquela hasn't had breakout success.

There's something very condescending in the elite culture of the past 10 years (it's starting to go away) that thinks you can get successful by being fake. It assumes the masses are stupid.

They are not.