MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-30 15:00:11+00:00
Drones that can survive a modern contested environment are more like $10k+, even in the Ukraine with less technically sophisticated countermeasures.

The US has a few different extremely cheap anti-drone rocket systems under testing that roughly achieve cost parity per missile with a survivable drone. For example, this[0] system which allows an F-15 to carry 42 mini-missiles (+8 Sidewinders). These rocket pods have sometimes been mounted on vehicles historically, so I imagine these ones can be too.

[0] https://www.twz.com/air/f-15e-spotted-packing-big-laser-guid...
by igtztorrero | 2025-05-30 15:00:35+00:00
I really like Minio, but it's very expensive. The cheapest license costs $96,000 annually. For a small business that needs 5 TB of storage, the cost is $851,520 annually, which is out of budget. I think they should consider scaling their prices more affordably, and that way they'll reach a broader customer base.
by eranation | 2025-05-30 15:00:40+00:00
Yes of course, and the fact you have to ask these days (I would have asked the same) show how bad the situation is.

I review a lot, revert a lot, reevaluate my life choices at times, it’s like supervising a toddler with 20 years of experience. It definitely contains security issues at times, perhaps less obvious ones, but subtle and harder to detect ones (the issues move up the stack).

It’s almost never correct and shippable on the first go, but it still saves me and my team a lot of time on boilerplate and heavy lifting, and let us focus on creating value for customers. It’s still software engineering, just the actual coding part is much more productive (Coding has never been the main activity that software engineers spend most of their time on. They design, gather requirements, define scope, architect, plan, test, review, gather feedback, iterate, etc. Now they simply have more time to do these activities)
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-30 15:01:59+00:00
At least temporarily, it can be somewhat self-fulfilling, though. Companies believe it, think they'd better shed white-collar jobs to stay competitive. If enough companies believe that, white-collar jobs go down, even if AI is useless.

Of course, in the medium term, those companies may find out that they needed those people, and have to hire, and then have to re-train the new people, and suffer all the disruption that causes, and the companies that didn't do that will be ahead of the game. (Or, they find out that they really didn't need all those people, even if AI is useless, and the companies that didn't get rid of them are stuck with a higher expense structure. We'll see.)
by mytailorisrich | 2025-05-30 15:02:11+00:00
On the other hand, in modern European politics very often anything that is traditional right wing is labeled "far right extremists" anyway at this point, especially if they are a bit too critical of the EU and open borders. The only thing 'acceptable' is "centre right".

For instance in France, at this point, the National Rally (Le Pen) is not really more in the right than the traditional conservative/right wing party was in the 70s and 80s (with years in government). It is plainly just "the right" and largest party in Parliament, yet they are labeled dangerous far right extremists because it is (less and less) helpful politically...

Not sure exactly how the political positioning is in Germany but overall "far right" and "right-wing extremists" have lost all meaning generally in Europe because those terms are so abused. The current German government coalition does not seem to particularly reflect the democratic result of the latest election (majority on the right), same as in France.
by runjake | 2025-05-30 15:02:28+00:00
First, using Ansible for setting up a single Mac is way overkill. Jeff's only doing it because he literally wrote the book on Ansible. For a single Mac where you want reproducible, just use shell script(s).

Anyway, for my Ansible environment for servers and network devices, I use uv[1]. It works flawlessly.

If I were doing things even more right, I'd host it in a container, but I don't have time for all that right now.

And nobody's mentioned Homebrew[2], yet.

PS: OS X is now called macOS, and at least in some parts, "OS X" is still used to refer to really old OS releases and may generate some confusion.

1. https://docs.astral.sh/uv/

2. https://brew.sh/
by brettgriffin | 2025-05-30 15:02:50+00:00
Leet Code style questions are a shorthand assessment for two things:

1. Raw mental horsepower

2. The ability to just repeatedly do focused learning, aka just grinding

And sure, it probably does favor #2 these days - but that is a critically important skill. You can trade one for the other, but everybody has some amount of both, and these questions figure out, roughly, your computed aggregate score of these.

They have a very high false negative rate, but an exceptionally low false positive rate for a 60 minute interview, so it works very well in companies with large interview candidate pipelines.
by ModernMech | 2025-05-30 15:03:24+00:00
How is what I said a lie??

My initial post said: "they can't be programmed to not do things, like not run though a picture of a road like Wile E Coyote."

Then someone said: "That video was not FSD, but an old version of “driver assist”."

Then I linked a video showing that in fact FSD was driving through the wall.

Obviously if you have to upgrade the hardware to not run through the wall, then they can't program their current cars to not do so. Because, as I've said since the beginning: their sensors stack is insufficient.

And that's the standard line with Tesla fans is constantly shifting the goal posts. It was supposed to be the case that in 2016, all Teslas sold would be equipped with hardware capable of self driving, because Elon told us that cameras were enough. And yet, they have required hardware refresh after hardware refresh after hardware refresh (now on V5) because he's been wrong time and time again. Because cameras aren't enough.

And what is this progress you speak of? Just special casing edge cases while leaving fundamentally flawed hardware and software on the road. Now it's 2025 and maybe finally HW5 will bring it? I guess we'll have to see because nothing Elon says can be trusted as fact.

> This person is just too embarrassed to admit they fell asleep at the wheel and the weight of their hand disengaged FSD

Ah yes, a driverless system that actually doesn't prevent you from crashing because you fell asleep. I don't know why you feel this alternative take makes Tesla's product look any better. Such progress. Much driverless. It's like a sailboat that sinks instead of floating.
by beedeebeedee | 2025-05-30 15:04:04+00:00
Hi, you are a long way off from your initial comment that there were no workers revolts in the US in the 19th century. That claim is easily disproven unless you then claim strikes are not workers revolts (which makes discussion with you unproductive if you redefine terms instead of accepting reality-based nuance). Strikes are worker revolts, even if they were not always trying to overturn the whole economy. They could become incredibly violent, especially in the 19th century, when the authorities repressed them. Regardless, these strikes improved the lives and working conditions of countless people and we owe all of their participants gratitude for what they did for us.

Likewise, your claim that China's economy is practically synonomous with free markets is laughable. Yes, they have capital markets and allow entrepeneurship, but it is still one of the most heavily planned economies with the most government intervention in the world.

Drop the "free market" sloganeering and you might touch on reality.
by severusdd | 2025-05-30 15:04:07+00:00
The 92 % stat looks really interesting! It’s rarely the spectacular crash that knocks a cluster over. Instead, the “harmless” retry leaks state until everything breaks at 2 a.m on one fateful Friday. Evidently, we should budget more engineering hours for mediocre, silent failures than for outright disasters. That’s where the bodies are buried.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-05-30 15:04:11+00:00
This is an interesting article in general, but this is the standout piece for me:

>For example, an agent optimized with Claude 3.5 Sonnet also showed improved performance when powered by o3-mini or Claude 3.7 Sonnet (left two panels in the figure below). This shows that the DGM discovers general agent design improvements rather than just model-specific tricks.

This demonstrates a technique whereby a smaller/older/cheaper model has been used to improve the output of a larger model. This is backwards (as far as I understand). The current SOTA technique typically sees enormous/expensive models training smaller cheaper models.

If that's a generalisable result, end-users should be able to drive down their own inference costs pretty substantially.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-30 15:06:15+00:00
> Electronic warfare/directed energy usually fits the bill for the smaller drone threat profile.

Down a rabbit hole last night and I saw that fiber-optic drones are the new thing in battle to evade electronic (radio) warfare. They literally spool out fiber optic line and are (obviously) limited in range to the length of fiber they carry. (But this can be 10,000 feet or so?)
by tialaramex | 2025-05-30 15:06:16+00:00
Note that these strategies (collectively, "delayed reclamation") lose one benefit of the RAII concept. With Rust's Drop or C++ destructors we are guaranteed that when we don't need this Goat the clean-up-unused-goat code we wrote will run now - unlike with a Garbage Collector where that code either runs at some unspecified future time or not at all.

Delayed reclamation means that "when we don't need this Goat" will sometimes be arbitrarily delayed after we apparently didn't need it, and it's no longer possible to say for sure by examining the program. This will almost always be a trade you're willing to make, but you need to know it exists, this is not a fun thing to discover while debugging.
by spcebar | 2025-05-30 15:06:21+00:00
Something is nagging me about the AI-human replacement conversation that I would love insight from people who know more about startup money than me. It seems like the AI revolution hit as interest rates went insane, and at the same time the AI that could write code was becoming available, the free VC money dried up, or at least changed. I feel like that's not usually a part of the conversation and I'm wondering if we would be having the same conversation if money for startups was thrown around (and more jobs were being created for SWEs) the way it was when interest rates were zero. I know next to nothing about this and would love to hear informed opinions.
by matheusd | 2025-05-30 15:06:25+00:00
> I don’t think they can yet self improve exponentially without human intuition yet

I agree: if they could, they would be doing it already.

Case in point: one of the first things done once ChatGPT started getting popular was "auto-gpt"; roughly, let it loose and see what happens.

The same thing will happen to any accessible model in the future. Someone, somewhere will ask it to self-improve/make as much money as possible, with as little leashes as possible. Maybe even the labs themselves do that, as part of their post-training ops for new models.

Therefore, we can assume that if the existing models _could_ be doing that, they _would_ be doing that.

That doesn't say anything about new models released 6 months or 2 years from now.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-05-30 15:06:30+00:00
I can recognize some admirable goals here, but holy heck, there's no replacement coming. Tax breaks for the ultra wealthy, destruction of opportunity and social safety net for everyone else, "for my friends anything, for everyone else the law" politics.

Liberals have tried helping everyone, endlessly. Giving chance and opportunity to all. That doesn't seem so unreasonable. They've lead not with restraint and threat (except to say you have to allow other people to be people). Conservatives are broadly against art and culture and science, perceiving them as liberal in mature and actively working to gut these institutions, with no replacement to be found. "The professors are the enemy" and so are the artist, the scientist, anyone who will not publicly supplicate themselves fully before this administration & it's madcap regex powered book burning scorched earth.

There's nothing like this intolerance, like this assault on not just a couple perceived Harvard elites, but on the tools America has used to bolsters the welfare and development of its people. This assault on speech and free thinking. This purposeful agenda to destroy a culture, to regress the Civil Rights of citizens, to undo a New Deal that finally saw to the common welfare of suffering people and built a nation that believed in its own greatness, to regress what chance reconstruction offered. This is a filthy mad quest to insure only a certain elite favoritism prevails and rules with absolute power, unchecked, with courts entirely stocked by radical extremeists that represent only the tiniest most wealthy and largely white nationalist oriented segment of society. That seems to controls speech and thoughts absolutely. Whatever the qualms with the Harvard elite, I just cannot see how much obvious imperious rulership, with nothing to offer other than destruction, is good. Control of discretionary funds should boost the welfare and liberty of this nation, broadly, not reduce us down and be used to allow meanness and grievance to flourish. I can't imagine at all how you can equate such control for such political and biased vicious ends, such narrowing and winnowing of the mind, with the boring and carrot-first center-left attempts to expand and enrich the world & human potential.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-30 15:06:42+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_22_drone_attack

> On 28 January 2024, an attack drone, launched by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq—an Iranian-backed Shia militia group—struck Tower 22, a U.S. military outpost in Rukban, northeast Jordan. The explosion killed three U.S. soldiers and injured 47 others.

> The incident marked the first time U.S. troops were killed by enemy fire since the start of the Gaza war. President Joe Biden condemned the attack as "despicable" and pledged retaliation at a suitable time. The U.S. began retaliatory strikes on 2 February, hitting sites in Iraq and Syria. Iran denied any involvement in the attack.

What might have made this attack different, and hopefully some indications that lessons were learned:

> The failure of air defenses to intercept the drone was a key focus of the subsequent U.S. Central Command investigation of the attack. A U.S. preliminary report found that the hostile drone attacked around the same time an American surveillance drone was returning to the base, which likely led to confusion over whether it was an enemy drone and delayed a response.

And, the reason this belongs on HN imo:

> An Analog Devices employee was arrested in December 2024, and later charged with evading U.S. export controls and facilitating indirect sales of some of the technology used in the drone, via the Iranian military.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-05-30 15:07:16+00:00
Telcos have systems in place that are specifically to allow international phone calls to appear as if they're local calls. This is to "facilitate business".

They have these services and continue to offer them because they get paid for having them, despite the double decker bus sized hole this provides for scammers.

I agree 100% that there should be much tighter regulation on telcos.

What I'm not sure of is actually whether it's possible without having to rebuild a lot of their networks almost from scratch.
by doright | 2025-05-30 15:07:40+00:00
I think this is a new paradigm shift only just getting underway within the past decade.

In the past we used to be able to look forward to the future to solve obvious limitations of technology back then. Example is how limited and expensive it was to capture photos on rolls of film. Within the past 20 years we can now take effectively unlimited photos digitally on a device that can do much more than just take photos, and that limit has been abolished forever.

It is this forever that is starting to loom on us. Most of us can't imagine a life without Facebook, smartphones, addictive feeds and the like even if we don't directly use them. It is not possible to go back to a state of life untainted by this technology. So now a fancy new technology that promises to paint your end-products for you comes out and in the span of just a few years threatens to change the whole landscape of art that has been repeated in cycles for thousands of years, forever. It is only natural that some would loudly object.

But the same wheels driving human progress that removed the limitations of the disposable camera will not slow down at the stage of generative AI either. I don't see how this would happen given our intelligence has already gotten us far in many other domains. Progress is like a wildfire that eats up dry bushes. If enough of the medium is there it will spontaneously occur and not much can be done to prevent it. Except with technology, it is not dry timber but "what ifs." "What if art doesn't have to be defined by the journey to get there, but by a satisfying end product?" "What if a computer program could replicate the motions of a paintbrush, and create art indistinguishable from a human's?" Any one of us can come up with the next "what if."
by michaeldoron | 2025-05-30 15:07:43+00:00
Every time an analyst gives the current state of AI-based tools as evidence supporting AI disruption being just a hype, I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers.

Putting that aside, how is this article called an analysis and not an opinion piece? The only analysis done here is asking a labor economist what conditions would allow this claim to hold, and giving an alternative, already circulated theory that AI companies CEOs are creating a false hype. The author even uses everyday language like "Yeaaahhh. So, this is kind of Anthropic’s whole ~thing.~ ".

Is this really the level of analysis CNN has to offer on this topic?

They could have sketched the growth in foundation model capabilities vs. finite resources such as data, compute and hardware. They could have wrote about the current VC market and the need for companies to show results and not promises. They could have even wrote about the giant biotech industry, and its struggle with incorporating novel exciting drug discovery tools with slow moving FDA approvals. None of this was done here.
by larrled | 2025-05-30 15:08:15+00:00
No, older people aren’t greedy. They are insecure about their age and doing things they perceive younger more successful people as doing reduces their existential angst and fear of mortality. Wanting to live and be loved is also not greed. The actual flaw is a society that permits crypto currency, and encourages trade and globalization at any cost. Gotta give all the elderly 5g cell phones and Facebook accounts, and be saddened when millions of Indian scammers reach out and touch someone.
by Jtsummers | 2025-05-30 15:08:32+00:00
It's targeted at distributed systems, but it can be used to model any system over time. I've used it for distributed systems, but also for embedded systems with a peculiar piece of hardware that (seemed, and we found was) to be misbehaving. I modeled the hardware and its spec in TLA+, then made changes to the behavior description to see if it broke any expected invariants (it did, in precisely the way we saw with the real hardware). The TLA+ model also helped me develop better reproducible test cases for that hardware compared to what we were doing before.
by iainctduncan | 2025-05-30 15:08:35+00:00
PSA: Many (I mean many) bird injuries are from window strikes, including in this adorable list. These are often fatal even if the bird appears to fly away. My partner is a bird biologist and does work specifically on this area. Unfortunately, fancy modern glass buildings (including that which is in style at universities and other techy campusus) are brutal for this, because the birds can see through the building and think they can also go through. This is not minor, it is actually an existential threat to some species in some urban areas.

There are some very effective and cheap solutions if you have a window birds are hitting. Wavy lines on the window with a bar of soap work well. Even better are strings hanging in vertical lines outside the window. Believe it or not, your brain gets used to these and you stop noticing them very quickly. They cut down on bird fatalities a TON.

Example: https://www.birdsavers.com/
by vidarh | 2025-05-30 15:08:56+00:00
> As long as you create the grammar, the language exists.

Yes, but it didn't exist during training. Nothing in the training data would provide pre-existing content for the model to produce from, so the output would necessarily be new.

> But if you take the time to explain each concept....

Based on the argument you presented, nothing a human does is new, because it is all based on our pre-exististing learned rules of language, reasoning, and other subjects.

See the problem here? You're creating a bar for LLMs that nobody would reasonably assign to humans - not least because if you do, then "accusing" LLMs of the same does not distinguish them from humans in any way.

If that is the bar you wish to use, then for there to be any point to this discussion, you will need to give a definition of what it means to create something new that we can objectively measure that a human can meet that you believe an LLM can't even in theory meet, otherwise the goalpost will keep being moved when an LLM example can be shown to be possible.
by trealira | 2025-05-30 15:09:23+00:00
> If CEOs are salivating at the thought of replacing white collar workers, there is no reason to think next step of AI augmented with robotics won’t replace blue collar workers as well.

Robotics seems harder, though, and has been around for longer than LLMs. Robotic automation can replace blue collar factory workers, but I struggle to imagine it replacing a plumber who comes to your house and fixes your pipes, or a waiter serving food at a restaurant, or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores, that kind of thing. Plus, in the case of service work like being a waiter, I imagine some customers will always be willing to pay for a human face.
by mattbee | 2025-05-30 15:10:19+00:00
I'm in the middle of setting up a few 10s of PiBs with minio, and this does seem like a weird decision.

The deleted console UI helped you understand the data in the system, get started with it and do some basic admin. But for any real application built on it, you'd need to build some of your own tooling and get acquainted with the mc command line tool. It was a very shallow UI - it didn't help with ACLs where you just had a big box to paste your JSON into.

It also had a lot of asterisks to show you which tabs were premium - at least they were visible.

Now it lets you browse buckets, but not create users? All the premium tabs are gone. If I hadn't used it before this I'd have assumed it was just raw and unfinished.

It's solid software, but the documentation really only covers the happy paths, and there's no community around it.

Annual pricing for the complete package & support is about 75% of Backblaze's, but you have to bring your own hardware and network. I guess it compares much more favorably against S3, or maybe better still if you're going to exabytes.

But yeah this just seems like damage to the on-ramp for people who want to grow into it.