MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by froh | 2025-05-06 21:36:23+00:00
thanks for the pointer.

first, with Neil DeGrasse Tyson I feel in fairly ok company with my little pet peeve fallacy ;-)

yah as I said, I both get it and don't ;-)

And then the video escapes me saying statements about the brain "being a formal method" can't be made "because" the finite brain can't hold infinity.

that's beyond me. although obviously the brain can't enumerate infinite possibilities, we're still fairly well capable of formal thinking, aren't we?

And many lovely formal systems nicely fit on fairly finite paper. And formal proofs can be run on finite computers.

So somehow the logic in the video is beyond me.

My humble point is this: if we build "intelligence" as a formal system, like some silicon running some fancy pants LLM what have you, and we want rigor in it's construction, i.e. if we want to be able to tell "this is how it works", then we need to use a subset of our brain that's capable of formal and consistent thinking. And my claim is that _that subsystem_ can't capture "itself". So we have to use "more" of our brain than that subsystem. so either the "AI" that we understand is "less" than what we need and use to understand it. or we can't understand it.

I fully get our brain is capable of more, and this "more" is obviously capable of very inconsistent outputs, HAL 9000 had that problem, too ;-)

I'm an old woman. it's late at night.

When I sat through Gödel back in the early 1990s in CS and then in contrast listened to the enthusiastic AI lectures it didn't sit right with me. Maybe one of the AI Prof's made that tactical mistake to call our brain "wet biological hardware" in contrast to "dry silicon hardware". but I can't shake of that analogy ;-) I hope I'm wrong :-) "real" AI that we can trust because we can reason about it's inner workings will be fun :-)
by Volundr | 2025-05-06 21:36:30+00:00
> You're saying knowledge is knowledge because it's correct, where guessing is guessing because it's a guess.

Knowledge is knowledge because the knower knows it to be correct. I know I'm typing this into my phone, because it's right here in my hand. I'm guessing you typed your reply into some electronic device. I'm guessing this is true for all your comments. Am I 100% accurate? You'll have to answer that for me. I don't know it to be true, it's a highly informed guess.

Being wrong sometimes is not what makes a guess a guess. It's the different between pulling something from your memory banks, be they biological or mechanical, vs inferring it from some combination of your knowledge (what's in those memory banks), statistics, intuition, and whatever other fairy dust you sprinkle on.
by trinsic2 | 2025-05-06 21:36:37+00:00
There is no buts. If you make a decision that you are going to live with a framework that is hostile to your efforts, then that is really your choice to make your life harder. If you really want to make things better for pro audio devs stop enabling organizations that want to mold you into there way of looking at the world. Blog about it and let the industry know you will not tolerate non-freedom in software. The same goes for windows people. Move away from non-open source, take back control of your life and find other endeavors that support open source until the idiots get the point. Stop enabling your jailers.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-05-06 21:36:38+00:00
A calculator isn't software, it's hardware. Your inputs into a calculator are code.

Your interaction with LLMs is categorically closer to interactions with people than with a calculator. Your inputs into it are language.

Of course the two are different. A calculator is a computer, an LLM is not. Comparing the two is making the same category error which would confuse Mr. Babbage, but in reverse.

(“On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”)
by ziddoap | 2025-05-06 21:36:52+00:00
It's supposed to be available in plaintext to the end customer (government), at their secured archive, but not available in plaintext to TeleMessage.

>TeleMessage lies about this in their marketing material, claiming that TM SGNL supports "End-to-End encryption from the mobile phone through to the corporate archive."

Surely someone of your expertise and renown recognizes this difference.
by burntsushi | 2025-05-06 21:37:04+00:00
> I don't think grep ignoring .gitignore files is "a bug".

I don't either? Like... wat. Lol.

> Where we strongly disagree is that I believe aliases should be used to add functionality, where you believe that it should be used to remove functionality.

Not universally, not at all! There's plenty of other stuff in ripgrep that you need to opt into that isn't enabled by default (like trimming long lines). There's also counter examples in GNU grep itself. For example, you have to opt out of GNU grep's default mode of replacing NUL bytes with newline terminators via the `-a/--text` flag (which is not part of POSIX).

Instead what I try to do is look at the pros and cons of specific behaviors on their own. I'm also willing to take risks. We already have lots of standard grep tools to choose from. ripgrep takes a different approach and tons of users appreciate that behavior.

> We're never going to see eye-to-eye on this issue so there's no reason to rehash it.

Oh I'm happy not to rehash it. But I will defend my name and seek to clarify claims about stuff I've built. So if you don't want to rehash it, then don't. I won't seek you specifically out.

> I don't want to start another fight (so not linking the last).

To be clear, I would link it if I knew what you were referring to. I linked our other interaction by doing a web search for `site:news.ycombinator.com "burntsushi" "godelski"`.

> If it wasn't clear, I don't ;)

OK, so you don't use ripgrep. But you're complaining about it on a public forum. Calling me rude. Calling me creepy. And then whinging about not wanting to rehash things. I mean c'mon buddy. Totally cool to complain even if you don't use it, but don't get all shocked pikachu when I chime in to clarify things you've said.
by Analemma_ | 2025-05-06 21:37:48+00:00
> I feel like the problem seems to me to be behavior, not a technology issue.

To be honest, this has been a grimly satisfying outcome of the AI slop debacle. For decades, the general stance of tech has been, “there is no such thing as a behavioral/social problem, we can always fix it with smarter technology”, and AI is taking that opinion and drowning it in a bathtub. You can’t fix AI slop with technology because anything you do to detect it will be incorporated into better models until they evade your tests.

We now have no choice but to acknowledge the social element of these problems, although considering what a shitshow all of Silicon Valley’s efforts at social technology have been up to now, I’m not optimistic this acknowledgement will actually lead anywhere good.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-05-06 21:38:10+00:00
Instead of annotating functions with "maybe this will be evaluated by the compiler", you can not do that, and the compiler will still evaluate them as a QoI thing. The usual justification is that it's a helpful comment for developers. Consteval being much the same idea. And constinit also the same idea.

An alternative design would be "global initialisations are evaluated at compile time where possible, like everything else, and you don't need to annotate anything to get that". Which would require exactly the same compiler work as constexpr but wouldn't leave that word scattered around codebases in similar fashion to register.
by max_ | 2025-05-06 21:38:57+00:00
Leslie Lamport said that he invented TLA+ so people could "think above the code".

It was meant as a tool for people to improve their thinking and description of systems.

LLM generation of TLA+ code is just intellectual masterbation.

It may get the work done for your boss. But you intellect will still remain bald — in which case you are better off not writing TLA+ at all.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-06 21:39:28+00:00
I'm with you. I've used Fish for a few years now and I find it so much more ergonomic for having foregone strict POSIX compliance. I still write cross-platform stuff in Bash when it's going to run on machines I don't personally control, but I'll write all my routine local interactive stuff (like adding helper functions, wrappers for other commands, etc.) in Fish because it's a breath of fresh air.

I strongly disagree with the notion of only learning one shell language "because what if I telnet into an ancient Sun box and Fish isn't available?" In exactly the same way, I don't exclusively write my programs in C in case some remote host might not have Python or Rust or Fish some day. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, but in the mean time I want to use something that makes me happy and productive.
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-05-06 21:39:46+00:00
Just go back to books or other sources of knowledge and restart from scratch. It shouldn't take long to get your thinking back.

W.R.T. any large industry crash, no one's going to care if you can do your Angular (or specific tech skill) stuff in 1 days vs. 5 days, so why the emphasis on speed in this scenario? Both System 1 or 2 thinking is fine here.

We've enjoyed some pretty great technical advances for the past 40 years, even with a 10 year "dark age" we're still net ahead. We can rebuild and relearn a lot of stuff in 10 years.
by acdha | 2025-05-06 21:40:11+00:00
You know, we say “don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good” a lot for technical problems but it’s far more critical here. A child from a failing home has a lot of problems and it often takes a long time to solve them, but we can for a trivial amount of money ensure that child isn’t malnourished because they get breakfast, lunch, and in many Title 1 schools, dinner. Many of the other problems of poverty, neglect, or abuse are much harder to solve – e.g. sending a child to foster care might be the solution for abuse but it’s slow and has plenty of risks of its own – but this one is easy and cheap to fix while we work on the hard problems.
by victorantos | 2025-05-06 21:40:58+00:00
Let's be clear: Amazon isn't doing this out of the goodness of their heart or to "provide customers the most convenient experience possible." They're grudgingly complying with a court order while Apple appeals. That spokesperson's PR spin is laughable.

The fact that it took LEGAL ACTION to get basic functionality that existed on Kindle e-readers from day one speaks volumes about how these tech giants operate. They'll happily degrade user experience to avoid paying each other's extortionate fees while pretending it's about "ecosystem integrity" or some other corporate doublespeak.

And let's not forget Apple's brilliant solution to the court ruling - a slightly smaller 27% tax instead of 30%! How generous! This whole situation perfectly illustrates the duopoly stranglehold that's been choking app developers for years.

The most telling part? Amazon "probably isn't going to change its mind about avoiding Apple's 30 percent cut." So even with the court ruling, we're still stuck with a half-measure solution because two trillion-dollar companies can't figure out how to play nice without extracting maximum profit at users' expense.

Wake me up when either of these companies actually puts user experience ahead of their bottom line.
by oparin10 | 2025-05-06 21:41:11+00:00
Yes, I agree, that's likely a big factor. I've had a better LLM design experience using widely adopted tech like TypeScript/React.

I do wonder if the gap will keep widening though. If newer tools/tech don’t have enough training data, LLMs may struggle much more with them early on. Although it's possible that RAG and other optimization techniques will evolve fast enough to narrow the gap and prevent diminishing returns on LLM driven productivity.
by Analemma_ | 2025-05-06 21:42:22+00:00
I mean, I certainly would say “I’ve never seen a single commercial email that was valid and useful to me as a customer”, and this is entirely because of spam. Any unsolicited email with commercial intent goes instantly, reflexively, to the trash (plus whatever my spam filters prevent me from ever seeing to begin with). This presumably has cost me the opportunity to purchase things I genuinely would’ve found useful, and reduced the effectiveness of well-meaning people doing cold outreach for actually-good products, but spam has left me no choice.

In that sense, it has destroyed actual value as the noise crowds out the signal. AI could easily do the same to, like, all Internet communication.
The Phishing Campaign Targeting Gmail Users from April 2025
by vitalipom | 2025-05-06 21:42:38+00:00
In April 2025 a phishing campaign, targeting Gmail users has launched in a massive attack, making a malicious email look legitimate.

Foreseeing a probability of such circumstances to happen I filed a patent on an idea I had.

The issue that almost any website has is the ability to be proxied by a Man in The Middle. Means by that is that if I (Haim/Vital) now copy exactly a website, put it on my server and forward the same user actions from my site to the original site, then once the user is logged in, since it’s done via the hacker’s machine in the middle, then the attacker can keep using the victim’s session as technically it’s simply possible.

In my patent I do not let a MiTM attack a room to happen. How? Simply. Each request and response are treated like JWT! The only difference is that both parties both sign and validate the JWT. And the additional shared secret which is required by design is shared via a 3rd communication channel, via email. So that even if user’s credentials are stolen, the shared key still won’t let the attacker to fake a request.
by tmnvix | 2025-05-06 21:42:39+00:00
> It's why "preppers" buy an armory of weapons, but don't make friends with their neighbors

Interestingly, when I've seen interviews with deeply committed preppers, they almost always seem to come around to the conclusion that community is the most significant factor in their planning.

I find it fascinating how that juxtaposes with the (possibly well earned) cliche of preppers as intensely individualist libertarians who reject society. I suspect there's some relationship here to the idea that if you go far enough to the left or right, you find that the spectrum is circular and not linear.
by viraptor | 2025-05-06 21:43:03+00:00
Apple is doing fine. They have crazy profit margins on everything, but especially on hardware upgrades. They're one of the most cash hoarding tech giants and that's still after the stock buybacks. It's fine, they're not going to suddenly run out.

Also this is an article about Kindle adding an option which wasn't there before. Apple wasn't getting the money either way.
by throwaway76455 | 2025-05-06 21:43:05+00:00
Setting up clang-tidy for your IDE isn't really any more trouble than setting up a LSP. If you want the compiler/linter/whatever to reject valid code to protect you from yourself, there are tools you can use for that. Dismissing them just because they aren't part of the language (what, do you expect ISO C++ to enforce clang-tidy usage?) is silly.
by Rucadi | 2025-05-06 21:43:31+00:00
I created a library "cpp-match" that tries to bring the "?" operator into C++, however it uses a gnu-specific feature (https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Statement-Exprs.html), I did support msvc falling-back to using exceptions for the short-circuit mechanism.

However it seems like C++ wants to only provide this kind of pattern via monadic operations.
by kokada | 2025-05-06 21:43:48+00:00
I think this post explains why much better than I can: https://mastodon.social/@pid_eins/112353324518585654.

So yes, I am not saying that privilege escalation bugs are impossible if you have a different architecture, but like Lennart argues is that it makes them much more difficult to happen, especially because creating a proper setuid is difficult. Also there is a bunch of things that makes sudo especially tricky to implement correctly.
by admonaut | 2025-05-06 21:43:55+00:00
Thank you very much for your feedback.

> .. but what I'd love to see is the ability to browse by section with the posts in reverse chronological order.

Just a quick question: When you click on a topic under 'Forums', the latest posts are displayed. Am I correct in understanding that you want the latest posts to appear at the bottom (in reverse chronological order)?

> When I first looked there, it was a jumble of miscellaneous topics.

Well, this is an overview of all new posts in all topics. As we are a general IT forum, there are naturally a lot of topics. In general, the whole page is 'the forum' with different views (with topic images, ticker, stream).

> ..being able to turn off the thumbnail images would be a bonus.

That's what the ticker view is for. It shows the latest posts without thumbnails. As I said, we work with many different views to satisfy all users.

> The domain name "rootdb.com" makes it sound like the site is about databases.

It should be a bit like imdb.com, a database full of IT knowledge - not the database itself (although we do have that as a topic).

But that's what I meant by good feedback. Here in Germany we've had very positive feedback about the organisation. Internationally it seems to be different. Interesting, and thank you very much. I look forward to more feedback.

Frank
by ris | 2025-05-06 21:44:38+00:00
This is cool, but still

(...HN formatting fail, imagine shell output showing the nixpkgs bash binary is 1.1M, the brush binary is 6.9M...)

with no prospect of further amortizing that size through shared libraries. Without shared libraries the only chance I see for rust being used to replace base system tools is with multi-call binaries a la busybox.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-06 21:45:16+00:00
The way I see it, they mainly just aren’t interested in devs treating macOS as just another lowest-common-denominator target, which makes some amount of sense. Such software is likely to not be as nice to use as something purpose-built for the OS, particularly when considering that the dev probably never even tested the software in question under macOS, greatly hampering their ability to find and eliminate bugs.
by bayindirh | 2025-05-06 21:45:30+00:00
> It's entirely clear that every last human will be beaten on code design in the upcoming years (I am not going to argue if it's 1 or 5 years away, who cares?)

No code & AI assisted programming has been told to be around the corner since 2000. We just arrived to a point where models remix what others have typed on their keyboards, and yet somebody still argues that humans will be left in the dust in near times.

No machine, incl. humans can create something more complex than itself. This is the rule of abstraction. As you go higher level, you lose expressiveness. Yes, you express more with less, yet you can express less in total. You're reducing the set's symbol size (element count) as you go higher by clumping symbols together and assigning more complex meanings to it.

Yet, being able to describe a larger set with more elements while keeping all elements addressable with less possible symbols doesn't sound plausible to me.

So, as others said. Citation needed. Extraordinary claims needs extraordinary evidence. No, asking AI to create a premium mobile photo app and getting Halide's design as an output doesn't count. It's training data leakage.
by geoffpado | 2025-05-06 21:46:14+00:00
> They could also implement that independent of the injunction, which applies to steering rules.

They actually can't, not with the latest ruling that unlocked this Kindle change. Apple annoyed the judge enough with their shenanigans that she shut this down, too. The ruling reads (emphasis mine): "Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users *nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases*."
by derefr | 2025-05-06 21:46:14+00:00
Not really. Presume that everything is time-reversed, and the game kills you if you do anything not possible when your playback is flipped around and played "forward." Then:

- Obviously, you "emit" dots and fruit and power pellets as you traverse the grid.

- Less obviously, once you populate a dot/fruit/power pellet onto a grid square, you can't visit that position again — as, if reversed, that'd look like you going over those things without collecting them.

- You'd randomly enter the powered-up state, and you'd then have to visit one of the unpopulated power-pellet grid positions in order to emit the power pellet to get out of that state — before the powered-up-state timer expires. (The power-up-state going on longer than that is invalid!)

- While in the powered-up state, you'd see pairs of ghost eyes unavoidably approaching you; they'd touch you, turn into ghosts, and then flee from you. That's fine. But once they become ghosts and move off of the grid-space you occupy, you can't touch them again.
by xp84 | 2025-05-06 21:46:19+00:00
They can, and then they’ll have to face their customers directly with it being exactly clear (even to “normies” who don’t follow obscure tech news like this) exactly whose greedy fingers are taking things away from them.

Up till now, situations like Kindle were just weird quirks to most people and most people wouldn’t have been able to tell you why you can’t do this very normal-seeming thing on iOS. If/when Apple takes it away, it’ll be obvious to everyone what’s going on.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-05-06 21:47:54+00:00
I had someone at work lead me down a wild goose chase because claude told them to do something which was outright wrong to solve some performance issues they were having in their app. I helped them do this migration and it turned put that claude’s suggestions made performance worse! I know for sure the time wasted on this task was not debited from the so called company productivity stats that come from AI usage.
by ComplexSystems | 2025-05-06 21:47:54+00:00
> This is irrelevant. It is obviously the case that a "there exists X such that for all Y" is very different from "for all Y there exists X", yet the latter is by no means an "effective approximation" of the former.

If there's an algorithm that gives the correct answer to the halting problem for "lots of inputs," I think that's very relevant - particularly if we can get a sequence of such algorithms that get closer and closer to the behavior of a true halting oracle!

> At the end of the day, we're always looking for some algorithm that is useful for a large class of inputs, and we know that any such algorithm cannot violate the time hierarchy in any way. It will be able to efficiently solve problems that are easy and unable to efficiently solve problems that are hard. Having any algorithm solve more problems will require it to run longer.

I don't think it's clear that a time hierarchy even exists for randomized Turing machines, but even if it does, this is again only true in an asymptotic sense...

> It may be the case that a large set of practical problems are easy, but it is also the case that a large set of practical problems are hard. Only a world-changing discovery such that P = PSPACE or that there are tractable and useful approximations for all of PSPACE will change that.

Figuring out if an algorithm is in P/PSPACE/etc to begin with is much harder than solving the halting problem!
by NathanKP | 2025-05-06 21:48:49+00:00
Back to AI: Would you agree that the problem comes when no knows how to think any more, not when most people don't?

Personally, I'm pretty concerned about both. The fact that many people don't have basic survival skills like sourcing their own food, safe drinking water, and heat. And the fact that that many people lack basic thinking skills: ability to detect misinformation, or deal with the challenges and inaccuracies of flaky AI.

In an ideal world society everyone who is capable has a higher level of training in both. But under modern oligarchic capitalism there are advantages to ensuring that people have neither skill: survival or thinking.