MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iLemming | 2025-05-16 02:27:52+00:00
I feel like I'm talking to a toddler, sigh. Let me try again.

Immutability doesn't mean that an "object cannot be modified", it means that in order to modify an object, you must create a new (clone) object. That's all what I meant to say. Sure, you can get pedantic or otherwise and say "yes, pdfs are immutable; or no, pdfs aren't immutable in some contexts", etc., and depending on the point of view, both of these claims could be correct — I'm not arguing about the specifics.

I'm just saying that your explanation of why you think pdfs are not immutable hinges on an incorrect idea of what immutability actually is.

There's a rigorous definition for "immutability" in computer science, e.g., strings in many programming languages are immutable, but that doesn't mean you can't manipulate them, it just means that operations that appear to modify strings actually create new string objects.

The greatest illustration for immutability is imbued in programming languages with immutability-by-default, e.g., Clojure. Once someone groks the basics, it becomes really clear what that thing is about.
by dustbunny | 2025-05-16 02:28:04+00:00
> requires you to assign authorities to every entity and to send a remote procedure call when attempting to affect entities you do not control.

You can consider every object to be server authoritative and then only send inputs from the client to the server. Other clients don't need to know about other client inputs. They only need to see state changes from the server. Clients functionally only have authority over their own input. This is a simple model of state synchronization that doesn't have the extra complexity of having authority over random objects. In this model, you only do a rollback if the server state differs from your predicted representation of the state. Besides, your game tick should be fast enough that you can rollback and resimulate every frame multiple times anyways.
by rerdavies | 2025-05-16 02:28:21+00:00
The question Evans asked:

But if AI is so obviously superior … show us the code. Where’s the receipts? Let’s say, where’s the open source code contributions using AI?"

The answer I provided:

Here: https://rerdavies.github.io/ About (at least) 30% of the NEW code in my open source repos are currently written by AI (older code is not).

The point I wanted to make: code currently written by AIs isn't obviously different or segregated from code that is not. That's not how the tool is used.
by panchamkhaitan | 2025-05-16 02:30:48+00:00
I face this problem so badly! And I needed a solution that worked according to my needs. This is why I have been building a tool called Sunchay. It will auto-analyze anything that I have saved, generate AI summaries, keywords and have an article reader built right into it. It will then send me emails about the things that I have saved recently and how they are all connected.

You are welcome to try it and share anything feedback that you may have. At the moment, I can save markdown notes, websites, files, anything, and it shows everything in a nice grid view while also generating AI summaries, like TLDR and keywords (which I can then search for.)

I will try to add those features / fix those bugs that you suggest. :)

https://sunchay.com
by BizarroLand | 2025-05-16 02:31:27+00:00
Trump is his own entire rant. He's terrible.

When I was a child I saw a video about how he had ties to the russian mafia and how he was stiffing his employees on their pay and I said to myself, "Oh, he's a bad person. Got it" and I have never cared a whit for him since.

Kind of great when you have a correct opinion spoonfed to you at such an early age.

He's the king Midas of crap, everything he touches turns to shit.

I don't believe that selling your soul to the devil is possible but if a demon appeared and put a gun to my head and said, "Name one person on this planet who has sold their soul to the devil or you die and you only get one chance" I would name DJT and know I would survive.

The man has the intellectual depth of day old oatmeal and half the appeal. He wears spray tan to emulate JFK but the only connection I see between them is their deaths should have been swapped. The man credibly sexually assaulted multiple women and convicted on 34 felonies and still got elected again? I would need Jesus, Mohammed, and Moses to vouch for him before I could be convinced that the devil didn't meddle with this outcome.

I can rant for hours if I really had to. Hate the guy. Hope I outlive him.
by ahelwer | 2025-05-16 02:31:34+00:00
That's very neat! I will look at Truffle. The TLA+ interpreter is definitely "weird" in that it does this double duty of both evaluating a predicate while also using that same predicate to extract hints about possible next states. I wonder how well this highly unusual side-effectful pattern can be captured in Truffle.

Edit: okay the more I look into GraalVM the more impressed I am. I will have to sit down and really go through their docs. Oracle was actually cooking here.
by paul7986 | 2025-05-16 02:32:01+00:00
Wow such cool & rich New Mexico information, thank you!

Will definitely look into those places.

So one of my travel buddies likes to take her / our time where I’m like go-go-go. The map I linked to shows her that it’s not a lot of driving and we can drive to an attraction (Carlsbad) and then drive & stay in Roswell. Less then five hours of driving each day. So I showed her my map and she saw the distances we have to drive each for attraction and then drive to town sleep in/check out.

She was fine with that plan and our discussion was done about planning our NM trip pretty quickly, thanks to the quick visual map image I linked to. Thought she Then said wait we’re gonna soak in hot springs in the desert in June …that’s dumb where I agreed ..let’s go early fall. Now we will look into a salt flat, thank you. Anything else we should check out?
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-16 02:32:06+00:00
> Houthis demonstrated this

The Houthis have sunk 2 civilian ships, out of 30 damaged.

It's hard to sink a ship.

It's even harder to sink a military ship in prepared condition with a crew trained in damage control.

The USS Cole was reportedly hit with 1,000 lbs of C4 against the hull [0], while presumably not at battle stations, yet still managed to stay afloat.

Watch some of the sinkex's for what it takes to send a ship to the bottom (read: heavyweight torpedo). There's a reason they usually burn before they sink.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing#Attack
by rambojohnson | 2025-05-16 02:32:46+00:00
this sounds largely like spiritualizing technology without wrestling with its material consequences. There’s something slippery about invoking “awareness” as both subject and substrate without ever pinning down whose awareness, under what conditions, and to what end.

"now is your shot at particpating" in what exactly? merely existing? you techno-mysticism types spook the hell out of me.
by kevinis | 2025-05-16 02:33:44+00:00
Also curious about the potential users of your product, do you target individual users, small businesses, or large enterprises? Pursuing SOC2 and HIPPA make me think about the large ones; but aren't they already happy using hyperscalers?

Not to mention GCP and Azure both have confidential GPU offerings. How do you compete against them, as well as some startups mentioned in other comments like Edgeless Systems and Opaque Systems?
by const_cast | 2025-05-16 02:36:32+00:00
> In my eyes, it’s pretty simple: use the ORM for the simple CRUD and simple data querying, because you’ll have to do a lot of it in most codebases.

The "danger" here is the movement towards an object-oriented design instead of a SQL-first approach to querying the database.

In my experience, I have seen ORMs used for these simple CRUD cases and what tends to happen is you have objects with dozens of members when you only need one or two. And then down the line you also start doing JOINs in memory - you just don't recognize it like that.

You see, you get Object X using CRUD and then object Y using CRUD and then you need a way to say which relates to what and... oops now we've done joins in memory. And sometimes, maybe even often times, we're doing all of that for a single field we need in this one place.
by firecall | 2025-05-16 02:36:38+00:00
The quote below demonstrates the warped thinking and perspectives!

Why not put the AI in a bunker with an off switch?

The idea that you would choose to release a technology that could be dangerous, whilst assuming you can hide in a bunker and be ok is astoundingly cruel and naive.

From the Article: “Once we all get into the bunker—” he began, according to a researcher who was present.

“I’m sorry,” the researcher interrupted, “the bunker?”

“We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI,” Sutskever replied. Such a powerful technology would surely become an object of intense desire for governments globally. The core scientists working on the technology would need to be protected. “Of course,” he added, “it’s going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker.”
by tptacek | 2025-05-16 02:37:48+00:00
He wasn't saying that curing diseases wouldn't lead to designer babies because he objects to the idea (though he might). He's saying that the factors that lead to a "130 IQ" score are, to the extent that they're causatively genetic at all, highly polygenic. Molecular genetics results aren't putting us on a track to predict polygenic behavioral traits (I guess except smoking?), let alone control them.

It's helpful to evaluate claims on this thread in the context of the story. It's possible (though still a very open question) that complex behavioral traits will generally become predictable or maybe even controllable in the future. But those would require breakthroughs (including basic science discoveries breaking in the direction baby-designers want them to) more significant than the announcement on this story.
by johnea | 2025-05-16 02:38:17+00:00
Thanks for replying. Sorry, I ended up typing a small chapter 8-/

> people who add no economic value are a problem for our societies as they are structured today.

There's no denying that, I think it's a pretty balanced statement, but a lot of people would point the finger at "as they are structured today".

The fact is, tech advances have been disrupting established social patterns of providing "economic value" from the beginning. And while the Luddites might be pointed to as an example that the world marches on, they actually do serve as a very good example of how the world marches on, with ownership reaping a bigger piece of the economic pie, and labor reaping less.

Working people have been increasingly disadvantaged by tech advances in pretty much every single case, from the beginning of tech advances.

Inequality is on a scale with all time record highs at this point, and tech is being applied to fields never approached before.

So, it's also reality that fewer and fewer people are needed to operate society.

There are already too many people, and fewer and fewer are able to provide "economic value" (the statement of which is silent on who receives that economic value, because it's assumed that it's not value until it's received by ownership. This is just by definition).

One natural consequence we're seeing of this, is that fewer people want to have kids.

Everyone should be happy about this. It means the economic value can be spread more densely while leaving fewer people lacking, and we obtain a greater ability to continue generating economic value into the future. Because the "trashing the planet" consequences are not a joke, even though the owners of the world's largest wealth are treating them that way.

We don't need eugenics, all we have to do is facilitate the already existing population declines, which again, is the opposite of what ownership is trying to do. It's all a panic because the ponzi scheme is going to implode.

1 billion people on the planet would be plenty... Why is that so hard to believe? Why is that so impossible to accomplish?

For all the brilliant advances and innovation that the world's wealth holders are supposed to be "creating", to me they seem pretty cluelessly unable to grasp even the basic facts in front of them and chart a path forward...
by OJFord | 2025-05-16 02:38:27+00:00
First I'm hearing of it all, but no, that's clear conspiracy theory territory, Musk makes some intervention like that and then X AI publishes TFA about the 'unauthorised' action 'circumventing' established processes etc.? No, Occam is not satisfied.

(Obligatory that's not what the razor is about anyway: it's that give a bunch of otherwise equally probable explanations, the simplest is likely the correct one; not just what's the simplest possible hypothesis you can imagine that is the answer.)
by minimaxir | 2025-05-16 02:38:30+00:00
The Grok screenshot that went around only said that it was given a command to talk about the issue, which is corroborated by this official tweet. (as an aside, "confirmed by Grok" is generally not strong evidence because it is a LLM)

It did not confirm that Elon Musk did it which is a very specific allegation.
by dustbunny | 2025-05-16 02:38:41+00:00
Theres some missing information here. A "rollback that doesn't do anything" shouldn't be noticeable to the user. It would only be noticeable if the game simulation can't keep up with the # of frames it's being asked to simulate. And in street fighter, the simulation is ridiculously simple. There should be no reason why street fighter wouldn't be able to "rollback and resimulate" dozens if not hundreds of times per frame. There's no way that game is CPU bound... Am I missing something?
by SoylentOrange | 2025-05-16 02:39:09+00:00
Just a small note about mypy and python - annotations are first-class citizens in Python3 and are not tied to any particular type checking system such as mypy, but are instead a core part of the language and actually serve vital functions in frameworks and libraries that are used to check interfaces such as Pydantic and FastAPI (eg URL params).

Mypy is just one type checker for Python, but there are many others including pyright. In fact pyright is quickly becoming the dominant checker over mypy.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-16 02:39:55+00:00
The problem is the frontend web application model is not great design. People are designing distributed systems when all they really want is to provide data to the user, or provide a user interface (which provides data from the user back to the system). You can do both those things without being stateful on the frontend.

There are multiple network protocols for synchronizing state, and they are annoying as hell. Necessary in some very specific/limited situations, but not for a broadband mobile or web application. Even when we were on 33.6k modems we didn't need it.

But then again if we were talking about native apps, we'd still be using HTTP APIs to transfer state data, because developers can't be arsed to do anything they're not used to. (Unless you show them something more technically complex, yet easier to use/think about; shit's catnip for coders)
by squigz | 2025-05-16 02:40:17+00:00
> An absolutely terrible and tone-deaf way to phrase that thought, but the fact of the matter is that most of the world (you and I included, in all likelihood) will not get access to this sort of thing in our lifetimes. Not because modern medicine won't have been there yet, but because our lives (and those of our children) are simply seen as being worth significantly less than a rich person's desire to become richer.

I'm as negative about the rich and powerful as anyone but this is such a cynical take - that might have been applied to many medical treatments in the past that have become relatively commonplace and easily accessible to people of all classes, at least in sane countries with sane healthcare systems.
by nkurz | 2025-05-16 02:43:53+00:00
Wouldn't the simplest explanation be that someone who had direct access to change the system prompt changed it alone? Would Elon be able to change it himself directly? If not, assuming he ordered someone else to change it adds an entity.

While I have no idea what actually happened here, my instinct is that this was done by someone who wanted Grok and Musk to look bad, not someone who wanted to change the world to view white South Africans more positively.
by devman0 | 2025-05-16 02:44:26+00:00
Pulling $10k out of the global banking system by physical coercion in a way that isn't reversible and won't get you caught is hard problem, you might as well attempt to rob the bank instead. That's why most of the "successful" criminals in that space use social engineering and scamming where the victim is a unwitting participant rather than kidnapping someone.

With crypto, no bank or other middleman involved, it's like stealing physical cash/gold/diamonds from someone, if you know they have it in their possession, so violence can be a lot more successful at coercing a change of possession.
by lacker | 2025-05-16 02:45:23+00:00
I tried it out but I don't have any pending pull requests on my personal repositories, and I don't want to give a new tool write access to a professional repository where other people are working before trying it out a bit. It would be great if it would scan a repository and tell me if it found any bugs, so that I could see if it worked before messing with real pull requests.
by minimaxir | 2025-05-16 02:46:27+00:00
Elon has a very specific history around this particular issue that I suspect a random new-hire would not: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/south-africa-racist-white...

A CEO force-merging a change to production would indeed be an "unauthorized action circumventing established processes" by exact words.

I agree it's ridiculous, but it's mostly because the alternative hypotheses make no sense. There's making a change to a prompt without testing or review (e.g. the ChatGPT sycophancy incident), and then there's prompting a LLM with a very specific response that is not relevant to most people.
by bostonwalker | 2025-05-16 02:47:07+00:00
> The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality... all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

Network (1976)
by joshdavham | 2025-05-16 02:48:28+00:00
If anyone is interested in hearing more about this whistleblower's backstory, I'd highly recommend checking out this podcast series:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tyler-shultz-theranos-...

Interestingly enough, one of the podcast interviewers is also a co-founder of Y Combinator.
by RandallBrown | 2025-05-16 02:48:56+00:00
Surely Theranos developed some technology that was useful?

It lasted for 15 years and (as far as I know) employed actual scientists and researchers that were trying to revolutionize blood testing. They must have gotten somewhere right? Even if it wasn't as far as they wanted/claimed?

I don't know much about what Haemanthus is claiming, but could a business be built using whatever technology Theranos developed? Or were they headed down a dead end street with nothing of use along the way?
by cayley_graph | 2025-05-16 02:49:46+00:00
Indeed, my view is heavily American-centric. And the trends of the past-- which you're right about-- may not apply to the future given increasing wealth inequality, the cost-of-living crisis, and the climate crisis (for which undoubtedly the poorest of us will be forced to shoulder most of the burden).

I'm explicitly not saying this work shouldn't be done, it should! But it does not exist in a vacuum, and it would be silly to pretend that it is not colored by vastly unequal access to modern healthcare. The reason I get excited about technology is because of the potential it holds for making us all happier and freer to do the things we like for longer. We are lost if we do not at least speak about the thunderclouds on the horizon for this philosophy of technology.
by iLemming | 2025-05-16 02:50:20+00:00
> struck me is how easy it is to refactor

Yes! After a few years of using Clojure for work; Fennel for configuring anything that requires Lua; Lisp-based editor, nbb and babashka for scripting — now I just can't deal with non-lispy languages without getting mentally and emotionally exhausted. It feels so taxing to have to deal with all the syntax elements, indentation, etc. So many times my thoughts got derailed due to a missing comma in some json or slightly misindented shit in yaml.

I just don't understand how I used to happily write programs before, and I did it for over a decade. Without ever being able to "transpose these two things around", "lift this structure and move it over here", "slurp this thing inside", "raise this expression", "wrap this piece into its own block", etc. And then the actual REPL — OMG, that's a song of its own accord.

Programmers with shallow understanding and lacking experience of Lisp (or straight bias against it) are missing out so much, it really is sad.
by tombert | 2025-05-16 02:51:16+00:00
Pretty interesting.

I have finally bitten the bullet and learned Rust in the last few months and ended up really liking it, but I have to admit that it's a bit lower level than I generally work in.

I have generally avoided locks by making very liberal use of Tokio channels, though that isn't for performance reasons or anything: I just find locks really hard to reason about for anything but extremely trivial usecases, and channels are a more natural abstraction for me.

I've never really considered what goes into these lock-free structures, but that might be one of my next "unemployment projects" after I finish my current one.
by rerdavies | 2025-05-16 02:52:06+00:00
The problem I have is keeping up.

Current generation coding assistants are capable of doing things they could not do mere months ago, and are dramatically more capable than they were a year ago. I recently gave my coding assistant a task that was much larger than I usually trust my coding assistant with; and it produced a very large chunk of code that was remarkably well implemented. (And then rewrote about 2/3 of in order to add an innovative feature. But still).

As things stand at this particular moment, I am unsure of the upper limit of what I can trust this month's AI coding assistant with. Learning to use ones' tools properly is a big part of programming.
by wahern | 2025-05-16 02:53:26+00:00
If the close routine on an event source, or the low-level (e.g. epoll) registration, deregistration, and dequeueing logic doesn't know how to keep polling and liveness state consistent between userspace and the kernel, they've got much bigger problems. This looks like Rust code so I would hope the event stream libraries are, e.g., keeping Rc'd file objects and properly managing reference integrity viz-a-viz kernel state before the application caller ever sees the first dequeued event in a cycle. This is a perennial issue with event loop libraries and buggy application code (in every language). One can't just deal with raw file descriptors, call the close syscall directly, etc, hoping to keep state consistent implicitly. There's an unavoidable tie-in needed between application's wrappers around low-level resources and the event loop in use.
by minimaxir | 2025-05-16 02:54:55+00:00
The existence of a rogue xAI employee that secretly hates Elon and Grok and has enough influence to merge changes to would arguably be more professionally embarrassing for xAI than having the CEO do it.

That's also noting that this is the second time that a system prompt incident has happened for xAI; the first time, they blamed a rogue employee and presumably they would now have checks-and-balances to prevent this specific type of incident from happening again.