MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by littlestymaar | 2025-05-30 16:03:59+00:00
“Supernatural” likely isnt the right word but the belief that it will happen is not based on anything rational, so it's the same mechanism that makes people believe in supernatural phenomenon.

There's no reason to expect self awareness to emerge from stacking enough Lego blocks together, and it's no different if you have GPT-based neural nets instead of Lego blocks.

In nature, self awareness gives a strong evolutionary advantage (as it increases self-preservation) and it has been independently invented multiple times in different species (we have seen it manifest in some species of fishes for instance, in addition to mammals and birds). Backpropagation-based training of a next-token predictor doesn't give the same kind of evolutionary advantage for self-awareness, so unless researchers try explicitly to make it happen, there's no reason to believe it will emerge spontaneously.
by TOGoS | 2025-05-30 16:04:38+00:00
In summary: The more layers of interpretation your `eval` function needs to do (assumption of source language, tokenization/parsing rules, symbol definitions, etc), the less well-defined the semantics are.

So on the less-well-defined end, you have something like JavaScript's `eval` function, in the middle you have lisp macros, which get an AST instead of just source code, and on the actually-pretty-well-defined end, you have a lambda that's already been parsed/compiled and just needs to be evaluated.
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-30 16:04:59+00:00
Have you ever knitted any user interface widgets or gui dialogs?

I carved an OPEN LOOK scrollbar out of soap once.

https://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/16/open_look_scrollba...

An X-Windows Root Weave Boot Stipple Sweater would be cozy, with a nice big "X_cursor" on the front.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40936808

https://matttproud.com/blog/posts/x-window-system-boot-stipp...

https://matttproud.com/blog/posts/x-window-system-boot-stipp...
by etblg | 2025-05-30 16:05:40+00:00
Here it is cleaned up by ChatGPT:

"Really? Does having flaws actually make for better reading?

Okay, I’ll admit—that hurt to write (as did that last sentence), but writing isn’t furniture. Aside from a few tells I haven’t kept pace with (like the overuse of the word “delve”), the problem with trying to judge quality based on LLM-generated content is this: you can’t always tell whether the operator spent three minutes copying and pasting the whole thing (unless they accidentally leave in the prompts—which has happened and is a dead giveaway that no one even skimmed it), or if they took the time to thoughtfully consider the questions ChatGPT asked about what the writing should contain.

If you’ve made it this far: do mistakes like these really make for better reading?"

And I'm going to have to say: yes, I enjoyed reading your weird paragraph more than the ChatGPT sanitized version of it.
by pergadad | 2025-05-30 16:06:49+00:00
> Early this month, my wife and I spent 3-weeks in Japan with our 3-year-old son. Our second son is only 10 months old and didn't join the trip. We felt it would be hard to keep up with his feeding and sleeping schedule with the intensity of the trip, so he stayed home with his grandparents.

Wow, I cannot imagine being these parents. Who leaves their 10 month old son three weeks with the grandparents to go on vacation? I cannot judge someone else from the distance and I don't know their life and context but from just this article I get the impression these are parents that have their children mainly for esthetic reasons.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-05-30 16:07:07+00:00
I find the explanation that they neglected maintenance and upgrades in favor of dividends and stock pumping for years, and now we're paying off the last couple of decades of maintenance and upgrades in a new, more volatile wildfire climate for which PG&E has been assigned legal and financial liability.

I agree that it doesn't necessarily reflect the individual marginal cost of an additional customer, but that makes sense, things rarely do.
by Blahah | 2025-05-30 16:07:07+00:00
I saw Minecraft being used to teach people about wildlife and landscape conservation at Mozfest in 2015 — it was utterly amazing to me to see 20 or so kids (between 6-10 years old I'd guess) just easily navigating all these conservation scenarios. Several of them actually showed the devs running the workshop how to do new things or work around problems.

I'm surprised this isn't a more popular thing now.
by tombert | 2025-05-30 16:07:09+00:00
That's mostly what I've been doing too, and that's helped a bit, but the last few days the depression has started getting the best of me. I got rejected for a few jobs where I genuinely thought I aced the interviews, and it's put me into a really foul mood.

I am sure things will eventually improve, and maybe this is a sign that I've tied far too much of a my self worth into my career, but it's sometimes hard to stay optimistic.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-05-30 16:07:28+00:00
I'm willing to believe that one can be better or worse at management, and that in principle somebody could coach you on how to get better.

That said, how would we measure if our KPMG engagement worked or not? There's no control group company, so any comparison will have to be statistical or vibes-based. If there is a large enough sample size this can work: I'm sure there is somebody out there that can prove management consulting works for dentist practices in mid-size US cities or whatever, though any well-connected group that discovers this information can probably make more money by just doing a rollup of them. This actually seems to be happening in many industries of this kind. Why consult on how to be a more profitable auto repair business when you can do a leveraged buyout of 30 of them, make them all more profitabl, and pocket that insight yourself? I can understand if you're an poorly-connected individual and short on capital, but the big consulting firms are made up entirely of well-connected people who rub elbows with rich people all day.

Fundamentally, there will never be enough data to prove that IBM engaging McKinsey on AI in 2025 will have made any difference in IBM's bottom line. There's only one IBM and only one 2025!
by arh68 | 2025-05-30 16:08:14+00:00
Wow, a 5060Ti. 16gb + I'm guessing >=32gb ram. And here I am spinning Ye Olde RX 570 4gb + 32gb.

I'd like to know how many tokens you can get out of the larger models especially (using Ollama + Open WebUI on Docker Desktop, or LM Studio whatever). I'm probably not upgrading GPU this year, but I'd appreciate an anecdotal benchmark.

- gemma3:12b - phi4:latest (14b) - qwen2.5:14b [I get ~3 t/s on all these small models, acceptably slow] - qwen2.5:32b [this is about my machine's limit; verrry slow, ~1 t/s] - qwen2.5:72b [beyond my machine's limit, but maybe not yours]
by fennecfoxy | 2025-05-30 16:08:15+00:00
That's because gay clubs/bars have ended up chock full of straight women. People claim it's because it's "safer from all the gross men in other places", which may be partially true. But also I believe it's because gay clubs can just be nicer overall, plenty of interesting drinks like cocktails available rather than just beer, more variety in music, etc. I think they may disallow women because for the bi/pan men in the crowd - their behaviour changes when women are present, they get more aggressive, domineering, chest beating. I notice it all the time in queer but non-gay friends constantly.

Which always annoyed me because I've been to a few Soho "gay" bars since and they're just full of straight women/hen dos. Asked for a cocktail..."we don't do cocktails". How the fuck do you call yourself a gay bar anymore then!

I go to a regular meet and one of the places next door is a drag bar, whose entire purpose seems to be to host hen dos. Ugh.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-30 16:08:28+00:00
Isn't the Neo4j case a case of AGPL being undermined as a EULA in court? I'm having trouble interpreting whether the AGPL licence was affirmed or not in this ruling. Never thought I'd see the DMCA used for good and not evil, to be honest, so this ruling is likely running up against some cognitive dissonance in my logic circuits, but pretty sure this is another bad DMCA case from my amateur legal perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo4j#Criticisms

> Neo4j sued PureThink, a small business that had used a power created under the terms of the GNU AGPL, to remove a restrictive Commons clause that Neo4j had added to the AGPL license. The United States District Court for the Northern District of California made a decision on 2024-07-22 to impose $597,000 in actual damages on PureThink, having previously decided that PureThink had violated the DMCA by removing the Commons Clause from Neo4j's AGPL license, and that it had violated trademark law by continuing to use the name Neo4j in selling to government agencies.
by sinisterMage | 2025-05-30 16:08:41+00:00
Thanks! Totally fair — I know significant indentation and dynamic typing aren’t for everyone.

W++ leans that way just to reduce boilerplate and keep the syntax clean for smaller scripts, but it’s not trying to be the “one true way” to write .NET code. Honestly, it’s all about exploring what a lightweight .NET scripting layer could feel like.

Appreciate you checking it out
by idkwhattocallme | 2025-05-30 16:08:44+00:00
True! I golfed with the president of the division on a Friday (during work) and we got to the root of this. Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes. When you have 70%+ margin on your software, you have money to burn. Dividends back to shareholders was not rewarded during ZIRP. On VP's being respected. I found at the companies I worked at VPs and their directs were like Nobles in a feudal kingdom constantly quibbling/battling for territory. There were alliances with others and full on takeouts at points. One VP described it as Game of Thrones. Not sure how this all changes when your kingdom is a bunch of AI agents that presumably anyone can operate.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-30 16:09:17+00:00
> What do people here do to avoid getting depressed upon waking up to dozens of rejections every morning?

One of the things I did was apply to less jobs. I know it sounds paradoxical, but I realized I was applying for dozens of jobs that weren't really a great fit for me just because I needed a job. And I even interviewed at a place I was fairly certain would reject me after the interview. Gotta keep a cool head and rule out the ones that aren't a decent fit – and you'll get less rejections, too.
by jokoon | 2025-05-30 16:09:41+00:00
pch are not standard

Modules support was added recently, and I don't think most libraries or cmake support it yet, and I don't really see tutorial about good practices for modules, especially when it comes down to speeding up compilation.

Also modules do not really speed up compilation that much, apparently, or I have not seen benchmarks, maybe because modules are not well supported yet?

Modules are great in theory, but I am not sure they are usable in 100% of cases, especially with all the existing code that is out there?
by wwilson | 2025-05-30 16:10:38+00:00
DST was i̶n̶v̶e̶n̶t̶e̶d̶ popularized at FoundationDB a little over a decade ago, and has been quietly gathering steam ever since. If you’re interested in the technique, the FDB paper has some good info in section 4 and section 6.2: https://www.foundationdb.org/files/fdb-paper.pdf

(Disclosure: I am an author.)

I also gave a talk overview of it at Strange Loop back in 2015, but don’t have the youtube link handy.

If you’re interested in trying DST, we have a new company that aims to make it a much easier lift, especially for existing projects that can’t be retrofitted onto one of the many simulation frameworks: https://antithesis.com

Happy to answer any questions about the approach, here or over email.
by jonplackett | 2025-05-30 16:10:39+00:00
As we can see here though - newspapers and court of public opinion aren’t all that thorough!

I’m thinking back to various things like the videos of people being beaten up by the police, or that audio clip of trump talking about grabbing women.

Would any of these things carry the same weight today? And how much weight will they have by the next election?

Eve just being able to plausibly say ‘nah it’s just AI’ adds enough reasonable doubt that a lot of people will not believe it.
by hoakiet98 | 2025-05-30 16:10:41+00:00
We considered Tauri but went with Electron because we needed the "frame" (the part inside the user window) to behave consistently across OS. This is not something that Tauri guarantees, so we went with Electron for Chromium instead. I

n hindsight, it still would not have helped with the other desktop app based issue like friction of setting up so I think we made the right call.

A large percentage of the bundle comes with shipping Bun as a fallback runtime for users who didn't have node installed. This could've been done better as well but it would still be 300MB+ bundle size.
by daseiner1 | 2025-05-30 16:10:42+00:00
A good analogy I’ve been told is the NFL combine. Vertical jump, straight-line speed, and bench press performances are probably moderately correlated with on-field performance, but the best test of playing the game is playing the game.

I more understand the emphasis on leetcode problems for juniors but a timed session without an observer (perhaps with browser tracking) to solve those problems makes a lot more sense than bringing in the anxiety of the observer, as you’ve noted. It sucks having to spend mental energy wondering how your problem-solving looks to whoever’s watching and seems actively detrimental to assessing talent for an IC role.
by kccqzy | 2025-05-30 16:11:17+00:00
While I have used de bruijn indices successfully in the past, a part of me wonders, why can't this problem be solved at the parser level before we even get a syntax tree? The parser knows when we are introducing a new variable in a lambda abstraction, and it can keep track of a stack of variables to be able to give them new fresh names so that in later passes we won't have to worry about name conflicts. I mean when writing a parser I basically already need to keep a stack of environments to resolve names. I sometimes keep variable names as simply a source code range where it is first introduced: so instead of dealing with the variable "f" I deal with (1,4)-(1,5) meaning the variable introduced in line 1 between columns 4 and 5; here I can still recover the string-based name but I also get to differentiate between identically named variables defined in different locations.

Is this a viable idea?
by JoshCole | 2025-05-30 16:11:29+00:00
> dependent on human curated reward models to score the output to make it usable.

This is a false premise, because there already exist systems, currently deployed, which are not dependent on human-curated reward models.

Refutations of your point include existing systems which generate a reward model based on some learned AI scoring function, allowing self-bootstrapping toward higher and higher levels.

A different refutation of your point is the existing simulation contexts, for example, by R1, in which coding compilation is used as a reward signal; here the reward model comes from a simulator, not a human.

> So it still depends on human thinking

Since your premise was false your corollary does not follow from it.

> And there won't be a point when human curated reward models are not needed anymore.

This is just a repetition of your previously false statement, not a new one. You're probably becoming increasingly overconfident by restating falsehoods in different words, potentially giving the impression you've made a more substantive argument than you really have.
by bob1029 | 2025-05-30 16:11:34+00:00
I think this is fun stuff. I always enjoyed building things like this.

That said, in 2025 if I was already willing to utilize C#/.NET, I would probably prefer an "internal" DSL approach [0] - i.e., one that leverages the host language directly and builds the abstractions on top.

Examples of this would be fluent interfaces and methods like ConfigureDomainServices(Action<DomainServiceBuilder>). I know some developers frown on this approach, but I've embraced it as the least terrible way to go about handling things like AspNetCore web server configuration and setting up complicated data transformation pipelines. If these techniques are good enough for configuring a modern, production grade web server, they are probably good enough for configuring your domain too.

I spent a solid 3 years building & supporting an IronPython stack on the old 4.x .NET Framework and I learned a lot of lessons about how bad things can get when you begin coloring outside the lines. Memory leaks were probably the most difficult thing to reason about. Object lifecycles are already pretty tricky without the hosted language on top.

[0]: https://martinfowler.com/dsl.html
by v3xro | 2025-05-30 16:12:20+00:00
Many of us would prefer to see the technological leaps to be evenly distributed (so e.g. even clean drinking water that does not need to be boiled before consumption is not a baseline in 2025). So if you want to adapt to your new and improved position where you are just pushing buttons fine - but some of us are actually interested in how computers work (and are actually really uninterested in most companies' bottom lines). It's just how it is ;)
by whynotminot | 2025-05-30 16:12:35+00:00
I don’t know if what they’ve built and are building in the future will justify the level of investment. I’m not an economist or a VC. It’s hard to fathom the huge sums being so casually thrown around.

All I can tell you is that for what I use AI for now in both my personal and professional life, I would pay a lot of money (way more than I already am) to keep just the current capabilities I already have access to today.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-05-30 16:12:38+00:00
Yup exactly. Same as all the "feminist" groups campaigning to disallow trans women from such groups, usually using the excuse that they'll get assaulted by the "really just men" trans women a la "won't somebody please think of the children!" when the incidences of this happening is almost 0 comparatively.

Turns out some are allowed to have special clubs, but others not so much. And we only have societal perception of women to blame; the thing they're relying on for all this "they need their own space to protect them" is demeaning, imo. Besides the fact that the majority of victims of crime are male (and before someone points out that the majority of criminals are also male - did you know that's a sexist statement to make? It's judging an entire sex by the actions of individuals).
by TheMongoose | 2025-05-30 16:12:51+00:00
How anyone reasonably expects me to not tie self worth to a task that I enjoy doing, and perform a minimum of 8 hours a day 5 days a week is a mystery to me. The same goes for the folks that think the environment that I spend that time in should somehow not have an effect on my well-being.

The best I can do is understand how deeply broken the hiring process has been for a while now, and that we have still found a way to make it worse in the past few years.

It also probably helps that while my personal endeavors have so far generated $0 and I'll need to address the cash flow situation in some way soon, they have generated more genuine satisfaction than my last job. Which is surprising because I generally liked the work in my last role.
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-05-30 16:12:56+00:00
I agree that Marx missed to a large degree the ability of the system to adapt; and it shows both in his philosophical and economics writings.

It’s a bit ironic that in 1883, the year Marx died, Otto von Bismarck initiated a series of reforms in an effort to appease the working class. The reforms that were disparagingly called Staatssozialismus (State Socialism) by his liberal opponents.

I doubt Marx would call modern governments utopia, but the centralisation of banking, state schooling and better working conditions were indeed a part of the demands in his manifesto.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-05-30 16:13:06+00:00
The only immediate feedback I have is the name. I feel like languages and projects underestimate good naming, like Go has a nice name, but its awful to google for, hence everyone tacks on "lang" to it.

I don't think the name "W++" conveys what it is, it makes me think this is a systems language that competes with Rust, D, C++, C and even Zig. Maybe calling it based on a different snake species would convey that it might be related to Python? Calling it Cobra or something else might make sense.

Otherwise, I look forward to experimenting with this project!
by gfaster | 2025-05-30 16:13:20+00:00
I used De Bruijn indices when attempting to prove correctness of a toy language of mine. It's an elegant solution, but I found them exceedingly difficult to reason about both intuitively and in proofs. That being said, I've yet to find a better system (that isn't just augmenting De Bruijn indices) for implementing any sort of lambda calculus.
by tombert | 2025-05-30 16:13:27+00:00
Yeah, that's something I've very recently started doing, basically only applying to jobs where I think there's at least a chance of getting it.

Though the rejections for jobs I'm wholly unqualified for don't bother me that much. A little, but when the job is paying like $500,000/year, I don't get too depressed because, like, yeah, they probably get thousands of applicants for that, at least some of them are probably more qualified than me.

The stuff that gets under my skin I'm rejected for jobs where I'm reasonably confident that I am one of the more qualified applicants that they've gotten for that position. At that point, it's hard to not start feeling a little bad about myself.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-30 16:13:33+00:00
That's what Eigen does. You write the high level statement and it does template magic to convert that into an optimized series of BLAS calls, even omitting or combining calls (something impossible to do with just _Generic). CTRE does something similar. The parsing all happens at compile time, so code is only paying the cost of matching (which benefits from all the standard compiler optimizations). There's a platonically ideal compiler somewhere out there that could do both of these jobs too, but compilers are difficult enough and need to run fast enough that implementing every possible optimization in every domain isn't going to happen.
by aidenn0 | 2025-05-30 16:14:15+00:00
The traditional minimal bourne-like shell script has a single ":" in it. This is because, when looking at an executable[1], bourne-alikes may try to detect if the file is binary to prevent executing a binary file. I don't know for a fact that some sh implementations will refuse to execute an empty file, but it seems likely.

1: If you try to run a program binary from a bourne-like shell and execl() signals ENOEXEC, then (if it believes it to be a text file) it will try to run it as a shell script; this makes shebangs optional for programs executed only from a shell. You can try it yourself (tested on bash, dash, ksh, fish, zsh, and osh):

$ echo 'echo hi' > foo.sh $ chmod +x foo.sh $ ./foo.sh
by giancarlostoro | 2025-05-30 16:15:26+00:00
> I spent a solid 3 years building & supporting an IronPython stack on the old 4.x .NET Framework and I learned a lot of lessons about how bad things can get when you begin coloring outside the lines. Memory leaks were probably the most difficult thing to reason about. Object lifecycles are already pretty tricky without the hosted language on top.

I'm a little jealous ;) As someone who codes in both Python and C# mainly, never had to touch IronPython for an employer yet.