MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by intended | 2025-05-29 08:28:13+00:00
On a long enough time horizon, we are all dead.

In my view, Mills (and Holmes) did not imagine someone winning in the market place of the ideas, because they found an infinite money glitch.

Your information goods you produce, are losing in the market place of ideas, not because of their quality, but because

1) You are blocked from selling them into a market of customers on the right. 2) they are too expensive compared to the alternatives available.

Take the intelligent design movement and how it was platformed by Fox News, as “schools should teach the controversy about evolution”. Implying that evolution isn’t “solid science”, and that ID was a potential answer for this issue.

Or take how fox platformed cranks and bad science on environmental issues, allowing R senators and congress people to point to it, and stop pro-environment actions and bills.

The posture of science at the time was to not engage with cranks, because “dont feed the trolls”.

Shocked by the outcomes, scientists went on Fox, hoping to engage with the audience and explain their points - only to be peppered with gotchas, rhetorical tricks and arguments that made for good TV.

Crucially, the underlying sentiment was to ridicule experts and destroy faith in the “liberal” institutions that were crushing conservative views and cultural ability.

——

These are examples to illustrate that the people who are playing the market place of ideas have financialized it. They are not in it for democracy, they are not in it, to engage in actual commerce of ideas

They are in it to break it. The job of members on the side of accuracy and science and evidence, is to understand it, realize the errors in their assumption, and to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity that inefficient behavior must create.

The cost of production of your facts and ideas, makes you more expensive and less useful, than the content being produced and subsidized on the right.

Be cheaper, be more useful, break the embargo, be financially viable, and/or institute regulation that prevents the creation of idea monopolists.

Either Participants that do not have to compete on the merits of their ideas, but on their ability to subsidize their media efforts, must be made uncompetitive in the market place of ideas.

OR, we must accept that there is an unavoidable fail state at the intersection of human neurology and Laissez faire information economies, and deal with that.
by LadyCailin | 2025-05-29 08:28:27+00:00
I solved this in my open source project by owning the name personally. The code is dual MIT/GPL licensed - I don’t/can’t fully control that (by design), but I unilaterally control the registered trademark. I feel this is a reasonable compromise between the reality of the legal and practical issues with trademarks, and the spirit of open source, even though you’re right, there’s a ton of power in owning the name itself. I’ve thought about writing up some permissive license/rules for trademark usage, which would allow me to relinquish some legal control there, while still ensuring good stewardship of the trademark. But it’s definitely a thin line to balance on.
by debeast | 2025-05-29 08:29:11+00:00
Yep, that’s the idea. You just type what you’re trying to do — like “debugging prompt for React errors” or “explain code to a junior dev” — and it finds the best one you’ve saved for that use case.

Super handy if you’re jumping between projects or tools and don’t want to reinvent prompts every time.

Out of curiosity — how are you currently managing your own prompts?
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-29 08:29:18+00:00
Maybe an analogy could help.

You volunteer at a nonprofit, and come back from work one day to find the office empty, with the phones ringing. You answer the phone. It’s a user asking for support. You help them and conclude the call, then hang up the phone. It immediately rings. It’s the director of the organization. He’s resigning. As he is explaining that he won’t be coming in to work tomorrow, he wishes you good luck before peremptorily ending the call.

With a look toward your desk with rising anticipation, the phone once again begins to ring…

Do you go in to work the next day? What do you expect to find when you do?
by EvgeniyZh | 2025-05-29 08:29:26+00:00
> But those benchmarks are in general fairly narrow. They don't really measure the "broader" intelligence we are after.

I think a general model that can

- finish nethack, doom, zelda and civilization,

- solve the hardest codeforces/atcoder problems,

- formally prove putnam solution with high probability, not given the answer

- write a PR to close a random issue on github

is likely to have some broader intelligence. I may be mistaken, since there were tasks in the past that appeared to be unsolvable without human-level intelligence, but in fact weren't.

I agree that such benchmarks are limited to either environment with well-defined feedback and rules (games) or easily verifiable ones (code/math), but I wouldn't say it's super narrow, and there are no non-LLM models to perform significantly better on these (except some games); though specialized LLMs work better. Finding other examples, I think, is one of the important problems in AI metrology.

> So, yes, we are kind of left with vibe checks, but in theory, we could do more; take a bunch of models, double-blind, and have a big enough, representative group of human evaluators score them against each other on meaningful subjects.

You've invented an arena (who just raised quite a lot of money). Can argue about "representative," of course. However, I think the SNR in the arena is not too high now; it turns out that the average arena user is quite biased, the most of their queries are trivial for LLMs, and for non-trivial ones, they cannot necessarily figure out which answer is better. MathArena goes in opposite directions: narrow domain, but expert evaluation. You could imagine a bunch of small arenas, each with its own domain experts. I think it may happen eventually if money flow into AI continues.
by arnavnath550 | 2025-05-29 08:29:42+00:00
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by forgotoldacc | 2025-05-29 08:29:57+00:00
America isn't tied to any single country. Adding tariffs to discourage trade with every country on earth (except Russia, which was exempt from tariffs, while other sanctioned countries like Venezuela were not) isn't anywhere near equivalent to making one's entire energy sources dependent on another country.

You're likely arguing against someone else you've built up in your mind and definitely about another topic. It has no relevance and the trap you're trying to set isn't effective here.

But to take the irrelevant point you're bringing up, Germany switched a substantial amount of its energy sources thanks to having an extensive trade network built up. They would've been screwed if they were dumb enough to tariff all their allies and isolate themselves. Strong trade relations make a country durable during times of conflict.

North Korea is the ideal country in the sense that it's not dependent on outside resources (and blocks most of them) and makes everything at home. They don't have to worry about the risks of trade potentially collapsing. They're free to tariff all their allies. They'll be OK if another country cuts off their gas. And the lesson we can learn from North Korea is to always do the opposite of North Korea, because the country is an absolute failure due to these policies. While its southern neighbor goes all in on trade and specializes in its own unique goods that it exports in exchange for other specialized goods from other countries.
by mistercow | 2025-05-29 08:30:24+00:00
Just to make sure I understand this (and maybe clarify for others too), because my understanding of proof-of-work systems is very high level:

When you mine a block, you’re basically bundling up a bunch of meaningful data, and then trying to append some padding data that will e.g. result in a hash that has N leading 0 bits. One of the pieces of meaningful data in the block is “who gets the reward?”

If you’re mining alone, you would put data on that block that says “me” as who gets the reward. But if you’re mining for a pool, you get a block that already says “the pool” for who gets the reward.

So then I’m guessing the pool gives you a lesser work factor to hit, so some value smaller than N? You’ll be basically saying “Well, here’s a block that doesn’t have N leading zeroes, but does have M, leading zeroes”, and that proves how much you’re working for the pool, and entitles you to a proportion of the winnings.

If you changed the “who gets the reward?” from “the pool” to “me”, that would change the hash. So you can’t come in after the fact, say “Look at that! N leading zeroes! Let me just swap myself in to get the reward…” because that would result in an invalid block. And if you put yourself as the reward line in advance, the pool just won’t give you credit for your “partial” answers.

Is that about right?
by cedws | 2025-05-29 08:31:16+00:00
The reason the registry sucks is the same reason desktop operating systems generally suck: it isn’t sandboxed. Applications should not have a global view of the system and other applications. They should have their own container where they can do stuff, like write registry keys, write files, do stuff with whatever is exposed to the container. When the app is removed, everything inside that container goes with it. Of course, this is how mobile operating systems work, and they’re rock solid compared to Windows.

When you remove an app on Windows a bunch of garbage just gets orphaned on your system to the end of time.
by dgb23 | 2025-05-29 08:37:27+00:00
It doesn't surprise me at all.

Idiomatic Go leans on value types, simple loops and conditionals, gives you just enough tools to avoid unnecessary allocations, doesn't default to passing around pointers for everything, gives you more control over memory layout.

JS runtimes have to do a lot of work in order to spit out efficient code. It also requires more specialized knowledge from programmers to write fast JS.

I think esbuild and hugo are two programs that showcase this pretty well. Esbuild specifically made a splash in the JS world.
by user_7832 | 2025-05-29 08:41:09+00:00
Nit: time difference, phase difference, amplitude difference, and head related transfer function (HRTF) all are involved. Different methods for different frequency localisation.

There's this excellent (German?) for website that lets you play around and understand these via demos. I’ll see if I can find it.

Edit: found it, it’s https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_stereophonicsound.php
by DiabloD3 | 2025-05-29 08:41:34+00:00
llama.cpp is the SOTA inference engine that everyone in the know uses, and has a Vulkan backend.

Most software in the world is Vulkan, not CUDA, and CUDA only works on a minority of hardware. Not only that, AMD has a compatibility layer for CUDA, called HIP, part of the ROCm suite of legacy compatibility APIs, that isn't the most optimal in the world but gets me most of the performance I would expect from a similar Nvidia product.

Most software in the world (not just machine learning related stuff) is written in an API that is cross-compatible (OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, Direct family APIs). Nvidia continually sending a message of "use CUDA" really means "we suck at standards compliance, and we're not good at the APIs most software is written in"; since everyone has realized the emperor wears no clothes, they've been backing off on that, and are slowly improving their standards compliance for other APIs; eventually, you won't need the crutch of CUDA, and you shouldn't be writing software today in it.

Nvidia has a bad habit of just dropping things without warning when they're done with them, don't be an Nvidia victim. Even if you buy their hardware, buying new hardware is easy: rewriting away from CUDA isn't (although, certainly doable, especially with AMD's HIP to help you). Just don't write CUDA today, and you're golden.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-29 08:42:07+00:00
If there's a lot, then it should be easy for you to link an example right? One that points toward something other than floating point error.

There simply aren't that many sources of non-determinism in a modern computer.

Though I'll grant that if you've engineered your codebase for speed and not for determinism, error can creep in via floating point error, sloppy ordering of operations, etc. These are not unavoidable implementation details, however. CAD kernels and other scientific software do it every day.

When you boil down what's actually happening during training, it's just a bunch of matrix math. And math is highly repeatable. Size of the matrix has nothing to do with it.

I have little doubt that some implementations aren't deterministic, due to software engineering choices as discussed above. But the algorithms absolutely are. Claiming otherwise seems equivalent to claiming that 2 + 2 can sometimes equal 5.
by davydm | 2025-05-29 08:42:18+00:00
Games have been running smoother on the same hardware under Linux/proton for ages - ask me, I used to dual boot for ages, but there's no point now, except if you're playing a game where the devs are actively hostile, like vermintide, which receives regular content updates, but the devs can't be arsed to update their EAC, which Valve has made a first-class citizen - just works.

Not to mention games like Apex which have some nasty-ass drm. Personally, I don't care for them, but aside from games specifically locked to windows (a small fraction), gaming under Linux is generally more peefomant.
by beAbU | 2025-05-29 08:43:13+00:00
Not sure I buy your second bullet.

Windows has had copilot baked in for a while now, where genai stuff is already possible.

Meta has their ai baked into WhatsApp, and probably into instagram as well (not sure though)

Google is rolling out gemini on android.

I would posit that for a majority of telegram users, xAi is just going to be "yet another AI integration" for them, and it'll be nothing novel.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-05-29 08:43:41+00:00
haha I still have "creating killer websites" in my bookshelf. It was a quick buy, never thought of it to become a classic. Nevertheless - it was such an experience to see websites designed the way the book shows. But, not practical INHO. In my eyes, it was just a replication of print media. If one remembers how coldfusion worked at that time, or, dreamweaver -> some things are clearly borrowed from quark express (DTP software). Like to remember the times, though. And never went the road of designing sites.
by GJim | 2025-05-29 08:43:44+00:00
> Two beers per head are still authorized after 45 days underway

Good God!

In the Royal Navy its 3 beers per man per day, every day. (Coke tin sized or 2 beers if the tins are larger, depends what the NAAFI ordered in). There are usually a few extra tins going spare if you want it and a blind eye turned, though getting drunk on board (let alone on duty) is a serious offence. Frankly, its rare for anyone to act like a knob.

Mate, two beers is 45 days is mad. No way are us British going to sign up for that!
by stevekemp | 2025-05-29 08:43:50+00:00
It comes back to the nature of the work; I've got a hobby project which is basically an emulator of CP/M, a system from the 70s, and there is a bug in it.

My emulator runs BBC Basic, Zork, Turbo Pascal, etc, etc, but when it is used to run a vintage C compiler from the 80s it gives the wrong results.

Can an LLM help me identify the source of this bug? No. Can I say "fix it"? No. In the past I said "Write a test-case for this CP/M BDOS function, in the same style as the existing tests" and it said "Nope" and hallucinated functions in my codebase which it tried to call.

Basically if I use an LLM as an auto-completer it works slightly better than my Emacs setup already did, but anything more than that, for me, fails and worse still fails in a way that eats my time.
by mistercow | 2025-05-29 08:44:39+00:00
> Still, while it is basically impossible to predict with any confidence what AI will do in 20 or 30 years, one can say something about the next decade, because most of these near-term economic effects must involve existing technologies and improvements to them.

I think you would be hard pressed to find someone who was making adequate predictions about where we would be now back in 2020, much less 2015, and if you did, I doubt many people would have taken them seriously.

I’d argue that we can currently speak with some level of confidence about what things will be like in three years. After that, who knows?
by IanCal | 2025-05-29 08:45:07+00:00
Good find - the first video is a frequency sweep, video 2 has some music.

Edit - I'm not sure that's the same thing? The release talks about pixel based sound, the linked paper is about sticking an array of piezoelectric speakers to the back of a display.

edit 2- You're right, the press release is pretty poor at explaining this though. It is not the pixels emitting the sound. It's an array of something like 25 speakers arranged like pixels.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1084704
by sgtcodfish | 2025-05-29 08:45:18+00:00
As an active maintainer of cert-manager (which is CNCF graduated), I can shed some light here. It's not just "give away trademarks for nothing"!

The CNCF pays for cert-manager's testing, web hosting and infrastructure costs and they paid for a professional security audit of the project. We get marketing help, exposure, talks, booths and other bits too. When we graduated last year, we got popcorn!

What I personally like too is that the CNCF provide a kind of "business continuity" aspect for open source, which is something I think about a lot. If the current maintainers got hit by an asteroid at an in-person event, there are CNCF people in our testing infra account and in GitHub who can log in and save the project. At the end of the day businesses have continuity plans for their projects, and for open-source projects of cert-manager's size it makes sense to do the same - and the CNCF neatly solves that problem for us.
by scotty79 | 2025-05-29 08:45:24+00:00
Blowtorch Theory posits that supermassive black holes formed very early, before the stars. I believe they didn't just form early, but that they were always there and the smoothness of the CMB doesn't come from natural isotropy of 'creation'. In my opinion it's so smooth because on the way to us the light was thoroughly mixed by the chaotic gravity (and now possibly electromagnetism) of all the supermassive black holes of the observable universe and the 'dust' swirling between them that were at the time that CMB light originated, crammed into a bubble of the size of merely 100 mln light-years. The relationship between CMB and supermassive blackholes exists but it's the other way around. It's not CMB that spawned black holes. It's black holes that generated the smoothness of CMB. The smoothness comes from overlapping gravitational lensing of trillion galaxies in concentrations ranging form 100 mln light years to 13 bln and acting for 13 bln years.

In my idea "Where did the supermassive black holes came from?" is the same kind of question like "Where did the universe came from?" The fact that in current Big Bang model we can imagine simple, mathematical origins (point like beginning of spacetime) doesn't make it more likely to be true. There's no doubt that Big Bang was a very energetic event, but you could get very energetic events without invoking creation. Just imagine two very dense black hole clusters, slamming into each other at relativistic speeds, each consisting of trillions (or more) of supermassive black holes.

What's great about this Blowtorch Theory is that it connects things we can actually observe, large scale structure of the universe, with the activity of those very early supermassive black holes (wherever they came from) in a measurable way thus potentially providing evidence of their very early existence. I hope it catches on because it's huge step in the right direction.
by randomtoast | 2025-05-29 08:45:35+00:00
ΛCDM is not a parameter elephant-fit. Yes, it has six(ish) free parameters, but those parameters were fixed two decades ago by the WMAP+2dF data set. Since then the model has predicted not retro-fitted dozens of independent observables: the precise locations and amplitudes of the CMB acoustic peaks (Planck), the BAO scale in galaxy surveys (BOSS/eBOSS), the lensing convergence power spectrum, the late-time damping tail, even the primordial helium abundance. Every new instrument is effectively a blind test, and ΛCDM keeps passing with the same numbers typed into the input deck. That’s quite the opposite of parameter-cranking.
by motorest | 2025-05-29 08:46:31+00:00
> Ecosystem, people keep forgetting syntax, grammar and standard library isn't everything.

Ecosystem means nothing if you have comparable or even better alternatives in a framework of choice.

Also, it's not like the likes of Python don't have their warts. Anyone with a cursory experience with Python is aware of all the multiplatform gotchas it has with basic things like file handing.
by benrutter | 2025-05-29 08:46:35+00:00
> The progress of knowledge—and the fact that we’re educated about it—lets us get to a certain level of abstraction. And, one suspects, the more capacity there is in a brain, the further it will be able to go.

This is the underlying assumption behind most of the article, which is that brains are computational, so more computation means more thinking (ish).

I think that's probsbly somewhat true, but it misses the crucial thing that our minds do, which is that they conceptually represent and relate. The article talks about this but it glosses over that part a bit.

In my experience, the people who have the deepest intellectual insights aren't necessarily the ones who have the most "processing power", they often have good intellectual judgement on where their own ideas stand, and strong understanding of the limits of their judgements.

I think we could all, at least hypothetically, go a lot further with the brain power we have, and similarly, fail just as much, even with more brain power.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-29 08:46:47+00:00
Squirrel is abandoned for years and still used anyway, often by people who don't realize it's abandoned. It's the default if you use the Electron toolchain, so that's why. It has serious design problems too, like it breaks Windows networks by bloating people's roaming home directories with dozens of independent copies of Chrome which then get backed up, copied around on login etc. Admins loathe it as the whole point of this design is to bypass their ability to manage their own deployments, although they still get the blame when things break, of course.

There's a better way, which I am shamelessly self-promoting in this thread (as it's 100% on topic) - my company makes a tool that can ship self-updating Electron apps and beyond being not abandoned, it's got a lot of really useful features, like being able to do the build and upload of signed updating packages (using the tech MS is pushing here) from Linux CI workers, without needing a Windows license.

https://hydraulic.dev/

It can also do forced updates on launch, which can be helpful for apps where the protocol between client and server changes regularly. And it plays well with corporate Windows deployments. People can install apps locally without needing administrator access but it goes into c:\Program Files