MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by omneity | 2025-05-06 20:06:39+00:00
A fascinating thought. But then who verifies that the TLA+ specification does indeed match the human specification?

I’m guessing using an LLM as a translator narrows the gap, and better LLMs will make it narrower eventually, but is there a way to quantify this? For example how would it compare to a human translating the spec into TLA+?
by mdp2021 | 2025-05-06 20:06:48+00:00
> AIs are

"AI"s are designed to be reliable; "AGI"s are designed to be intelligent; "LLM"s seem to be designed to make some qualities emerge.

> one tool is designed for one thing, and one is designed for another

The design of LLMs seems to be "let us see where the promise leads us". That is not really "design", i.e. "from need to solution".
Ask HN: Any AI Agents Recommendations
by badestrand | 2025-05-06 20:08:10+00:00
I use the typical ChatGPT and Gemini LLMs a lot but to be honest, I am still waiting for a proper agent, something that can take over more complex tasks, maybe spawning sub-agents along the way.

Just today I tried to transcribe a short audio file and had to Google for a converter mp4->mp3 first, use it, then Google for a free transcriber that doesn't require registration and finally save the text which was difficult on mobile.

Does anyone know any proper AI Agents that are usable for more general use cases than just text replies?
by DanHulton | 2025-05-06 20:09:41+00:00
Yeah. Every time I see entirely unfounded claims like that, I remember that I've been seeing them for literal years now. While there have definitely been improvements in AI capability, they have largely been very marginal, while the claimed "will handle entire engineering tickets" capability requires huge leaps in capability and reliability that _we just have not seen evidence for._

Mentally, I'm replacing claims like this with "it will do magic!" and I think I'm just about as likely to be correct.
by dinfinity | 2025-05-06 20:09:51+00:00
A bit offtopic, but it's funny how people call parrots/birds "extremely intelligent" and AI/LLMs "just stochastic parrots devoid of any intelligence", even though their capabilities are very obviously far more like the inverse of those qualifications (show me a video where someone has even a basic extended back and forth conversation with a bird).

There is a pretty clear double standard there.

Looking at the numbers: Grey parrots have almost 1 billion 'forebrain' neurons ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n... ). Estimates for the average number of synapses per neuron range in the thousands, so a conservative estimate for the total would be 1 trillion synapses.

If you assume that LLM parameters are comparable to synapses, then such a bird brain is similar to the frontier LLMs in size ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_language_models ). Yes, the bird brain is far more energy efficient, but with regard to intelligence modern AI absolutely smokes birds.
by jbritton | 2025-05-06 20:09:54+00:00
I know a ‘C’ code base that treats all socket errors the same and just retries for a limited time. However there are errors that make no sense to retry, like invalid socket or socket not connected. It is necessary to know what socket error occurred. I like how the Posix API defines an errno and documents the values. Of course this depends on accurate documentation.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-06 20:11:23+00:00
There is ~2TW of renewables and batteries in US interconnect queues at the moment, and this admin has less than four years left. Like tariffs, it’s a pause, not a change in course.

https://www.interconnection.fyi/

US shale is unsustainable below ~$60/barrel.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-14/sub-60-oi... | https://archive.today/OZGwF

https://oilprice.com/oil-price-charts/
by Tade0 | 2025-05-06 20:11:35+00:00
Subway stations all over the eastern block were built to serve as bomb shelters when needed.

Nowadays this is used mainly during heavy rains, as the gates are watertight:

https://bi.im-g.pl/im/0/9990/z9990270IHG,W-srode-Jarek-Kowal...

When this picture was taken the trains would skip this station, but were otherwise functioning as normal.
by theamk | 2025-05-06 20:12:02+00:00
> help people who run "curl | sudo bash" to install a random program from the internet.

I don't think you can help those people, unless you seriously lock down the machine to the level of iPhone. Neither Android nor Windows have "sudo" for example, and yet they can get malware just fine... all the difference is instead of the password, user clicks on confirm button a few times.

I advice to (1) think about how you use sudo (2) think what would you replace it with and (3) think how the replacement can be abused by malware.

Here is one example:

(1) Today I used "sudo" to run docker: "sudo -Eg docker docker run..."

(2) the sudo-less replacement would be to add myself to docker group, or switch to rootless docker

(3) If I add myself to docker group, malware can trivially escalate by starting a privileged container. If I switch to the rootless docker, I am weakening security boundary between my primary user and the docker containers I run.
by input_sh | 2025-05-06 20:12:09+00:00
Soviet union definitely condititioned them to sign the neutrality initially, but like I said, every single opinion poll going back 70 years was always decisively in favour of keeping the neutrality.

They also could've joined the EU somewhat earlier, but have refused to do so until the EU changed its rules about NATO membership. Up until 1995, every EU member was also a NATO member.
by nearbuy | 2025-05-06 20:12:20+00:00
> I think the chance they're going to create a "superintelligence" is extremely small.

I'd say the chance that we never create a superintelligence is extremely small. You either have to believe that for some reason the human brain achieved the maximum intelligence possible, or that progress on AI will just stop for some reason.

Most forecasters on prediction markets are predicting AGI within a decade.
by vaibhavdubey97 | 2025-05-06 20:12:24+00:00
Plexe analyzes your data and task description, then builds custom ML models using standard Python libraries (like scikit-learn, XGBoost, etc.). If your problem is best solved by a regression model, it will build that. If classification is more appropriate, it will implement that instead.

Fine-tuning existing language models is also an option in Plexe's toolkit. For example, when we needed to classify prompt injections for LLMs, Plexe determined fine-tuning RoBERTa was the best approach. But for most structured data problems (like forecasting or recommendations), Plexe typically builds lightweight models from scratch that are trained directly on your dataset.
by philsnow | 2025-05-06 20:12:45+00:00
Don't miss the link thrown in the second to last paragraph to https://x.com/Mick_Gordon/status/1918146487948919222 , a demo Mick Gordon put together, to which @anukarimusic replied

> Lol on the second day it's out, you have already absolutely demolished all of the demos I've made with it and I've used it every day for two years
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-05-06 20:12:57+00:00
Using reference counts is a real issue.

The idea with Rust is that you get safety...not that you get safety at the cost of performance. The language forces you into paying a performance cost for using patterns when it is relatively easy for a human to reason about safety (imo).

You can use `unsafe` but you naturally ask yourself why I am using Rust (not rational, but true). You can use lifetimes but, personally, every time I have tried to use them I haven't been able to indicate to the compiler that my code is actually safe.

In particular, the protections for double-free and free before use are extremely limiting, and it is possible to reason about these particular bugs in other ways (i.e. defer in Go and Zig) in a way that doesn't force you to change the way you code.

Rust is good in many ways but the specific problem mentioned at the top of this chain is a big issue. Just saying: don't use this type of data structure unless you pay performance cost isn't an actual solution to the problem. The problem with Rust is that it tries to force safety but doesn't have good ways for devs to tell the compiler code is safe...that is a fundamental weakness.

I use Rust quite a bit, it isn't a terrible language and is worth learning but these are big issues. I would have reservations using the language in my own company, rather than someone else's, and if I need to manage memory then I would look elsewhere atm. Due to the size of the community, it is very hard not to use Rust too (for example, Zig is great...but no-one uses it).
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-06 20:13:37+00:00
Like codebases or trees, organizations grow unevenly and end up overstaffed in places or under in others. AI is political cover to trim and prune a company to operate more lean without freaking everyone out.

No one is gonna fire ALL the devs. It’ll be a race: each company will have their devs managing more and more agents.

Every agentic coding agent incurs management overhead - yes, it’ll go down, but at the same rate for everyone.

More humans still means more capability.

To say nothing of the hard won knowledge in engineers’ heads; if we can’t get that out in the era of cheap and easy documentation (Notion etc) why would we be able to in the era of AI?
by Nasrudith | 2025-05-06 20:13:53+00:00
Am I an alien or something? Because smartphones have no addictive effect on me and are just a subpar way to browse. I can set it down for days leaving it mostly unused, keeping it stuffed in my pockets when going out as a 'just in case', and I have ADHD for that matter.

All the talk about smartphones as a source of dopamine just convinces me that people think they understand what dopamine is but don't know the first thing about it and are using it as a synonym for literally any form of pleasure.
by sph | 2025-05-06 20:13:58+00:00
Oh that might be it! Of course I couldn't find it, what with the rename and now it's part of Eclipse (?)

Seemed quite promising to me at the time, though it seem they've changed the scope of the project a little bit. Here's an old post about it: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introducing-hirte-determinist...
by akomtu | 2025-05-06 20:14:51+00:00
Sometimes I think that the big tech corporations are soul extraction factories that only incidentally vacuum money. This article says, in essense, that millions of very bright college grads in the US fly to big tech hoping to make the world a better place, but instead their skill of recognizing truth gets perverted by corporate politics, and the sum of their work simply manufactures and monetizes addiction.
by conradludgate | 2025-05-06 20:15:04+00:00
It is slow, and yes it is a problem, but given that typical Rust code generally needs fewer full compiles to get working tests (with more time spent active in the editor, with an incremental compiler like Rust Analyzer) it usually balances out.

Cargo also has good caching out of the box. While cargo is not the best build system, it's an easy to use good system, so you generally get good compile times for development when you edit just one file. This is along made heavy use of with docker workflows like cargo-chef.
by thrwyexecbrain | 2025-05-06 20:15:51+00:00
The C++ code I write these days is actually pretty similar to Rust: everything is explicit, lots of strong types, very simple and clear lifetimes (arenas, pools), non-owning handles instead of pointers. The only difference in practice is that the build systems are different and that the Rust compiler is more helpful (both in catching bugs and reporting errors). Neither a huge deal if you have a proper build and testing setup and when everybody on your team is pretty experienced.

By the way, using "atoi" in a code snippet in 2025 and complaining that it is "not ideal" is, well, not ideal.
by overfeed | 2025-05-06 20:16:08+00:00
> You may think of these symbols as "Latin" because they're how people writing in Latin script happen to write mathematical expressions

No need for scare-quotes, Latin script is a proper noun and a technical term with precise meaning wrt text encoding - not "what I think."

> the exact same symbols are also used by Mandarin speakers, as well as in numerous other scripts. Writing math in Chinese

Which unicode code points do the Mandarin speakers and "numerous other scripts" use to write "12 + 89"? Could it be the very same code points as Latin script, which then are tokenized to the same vectors that the LLMs learn to associate more with English text rather than CJK in the latent space?

> i.e. easily distinguishable from their English descendants.

You're making broad assumptions about the tokenization design here that do not apply universally.
by burntsushi | 2025-05-06 20:16:22+00:00
> The maintainer also has been pretty rude to me about this on HN.

This is AFAIK the only other interaction we've had: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41051587

If there are other interactions we've had, feel free to link them. Then others can decide how rude I'm being instead of relying only on your characterization.

> but it's still crazy to think people won't be caught off guard by this behavior

Straw-manning is also crazy. :-) People have and will absolutely be caught off guard by the behavior. On the flip side, as I said 9 months ago, ripgrep's default behavior is easily one of the most cited positive features of ripgrep aside from its performance.

The other crazy thing here is... you don't have to use ripgrep! It is very specifically intended as a departure from traditional grep behavior. Because if you want traditional grep behavior, then you can just use grep. Hence why ripgrep's binary name is not `grep`, unlike the many implementations of POSIX grep.

> Its name is literally indicating it's a grep replacement.

I also tried to correct this 9 months ago too. See also: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/FAQ.md#pos...

For anyone else following along at home, if you want ripgrep to search the same files that GNU grep searches, then do `rg -uuu`. Or, if you don't want ripgrep to respect your gitignores but ignore hidden and binary files, then do `rg -u`.

It makes sense that folks might be caught off guard by ripgrep's default filtering. This is why I try to mitigate it by stating very clearly that it is going to ignore stuff by default in the first one or two sentences about ripgrep (README, man page, CHANGELOG, project description). I also try to mitigate it by making it very easy to disable this default behavior. These mitigations exist precisely because I know the default behavior can be surprising, in direct contradiction to "but it's still crazy to think people won't be caught off guard by this behavior."
Ask HN: Static Site (not blog) Generator?
by zvr | 2025-05-06 20:16:34+00:00
I've looked at a number of "static site generators", but it seems all of them are oriented towards producing a blog site. I mean, they usually talk about "posts" (and also have "pages"), they automatically create index pages, ordering the "posts", and provide a number of other features (RSS, etc.).

Does anyone know of a "general" static site generator, where there are no such preconceived notions?

I only want to generate a number of HTML pages, based on an arbitrary number of templates.
by mrlongroots | 2025-05-06 20:16:42+00:00
I was confused for a while about where this discussion was going, and what was the broader point. Will try to consolidate thoughts in the interest of making it clearer.

You seem unhappy with POSIX because its guarantees feel incomplete and ad hoc (they are). You like databases because their guarantees are more robust (also true). DBMS over POSIX enables all the guarantees that you like. I'd want to invoke the end-to-end systems argument here and say that this is how systems are supposed to work: POSIX is closer to the hardware, and as a result it is messier. It's the same reason TCP in-order guarantees are layered above the IP layer.

Some of your points re: how the lower layers work seem incorrect, but that doesn't matter in the interest of the big picture. The suggestion (re: microkernels) seems to be that POSIX has a privileged position in the system stack, and that somehow prevents a stronger alternative from existing. I'd say that your gripes with POSIX may be perfectly justified, but nothing prevents a DBMS from owning a complete block device, completely circumventing the filesystem. POSIX is the default, but it is not really privileged by any means.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-06 20:17:07+00:00
Linux is a perfectly good operating system. If you're motivated enough, you can boot Linux straight into your software without any other dependencies at all. Linux operates the system just fine all by itself.

There's this weird definition of "operating system" which means "some sort of platform with a shell and little commands like cp, ls, etc.". That's just what POSIX tells people an operating system is, not the ultimate truth. It doesn't have to be that way.
by raydiak | 2025-05-06 20:17:21+00:00
I'm in the exact same boat as you describe, except it was some other precompiled local-only project instead of this one that I tried a few months ago. That's why I said I like projects like these, because it's a fully private hassle free way to try out LLMs. Haven't really figured out any good purposes for it in my life, but I like to see these tools being made available to people without the time/motivation/savvy to jump through a bunch of hoops.

The Clippy character specifically is the part I find off-putting, but perhaps that's just an excess of relevant experience. How many times I had to explain to confused people that it's not saying anything you have to care about, or disable it for them when they're cursing at their screen because the "hide" option doesn't actually disable it you have to go into the settings for that or it keeps popping up. Which made it just another config burden when I'd be installing office on many computers in a day.

Now, a strong argument could be made that those experiences have made me unreasonable and bigoted against animated paperclips, because this is not the original Clippy. I can live with that.
by liam-hinzman | 2025-05-06 20:17:32+00:00
Deduplication is mainly driven by LLMs with search results as context. Our entity resolution works well because Exa’s main business is crawling and indexing the web at scale, and we can control how we search across that within Websets.

As far as I know ChatGPT’s search is primarily a wrapper around another company’s search engine, which is why it often feels like it’s just summarizing a page of search results and sometimes hallucinates badly.
by rlpb | 2025-05-06 20:17:35+00:00
> My team's current favorite is the upgrade process itself suddenly having new interactive prompts breaking our scripts.

This is how dpkg and apt have worked in Debian and Ubuntu pretty much since their inception. Look into debconf, dpkg and ucf configuration to learn how to integrate these with your automation. The mechanisms for this have existed for decades now and have not substantially changed in that time.
by d4mi3n | 2025-05-06 20:17:51+00:00
Since everyone is sharing shells written in Rust, I've become quite fond of Nushell: https://www.nushell.sh/

I'd love to see more shell exploring things beyond POSIX. Text based stdin/stdout will always have its place, but having ways to express, serialize, and pass along data in more structured ways is quite nice.
by Zambyte | 2025-05-06 20:18:25+00:00
I didn't realize fish was written in Rust, and it was my primary shell for a few years. Looks like they couldn't resist the rewrite it in Rust meme :-D

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/tree/c2eaef7273c555...

vs the C++

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/tree/d9d3557fcfbce1...
by conradludgate | 2025-05-06 20:18:56+00:00
Not the same person, but I first try and figure out an API that allows me to not panic in the first place.

Panics are a runtime memory safe way to encode an invariant, but I will generally prefer a compile time invariant if possible and not too cumbersome.

However, yes I will panic if I'm not already using unsafe and I can clearly prove the invariant I'm working with.
by sneak | 2025-05-06 20:19:04+00:00
As far as “enablers” of fascism - would we have the same amount of fascism if they didn’t participate? I posit that the answer is yes.

Furthermore, you are dead wrong on the last point. The “dispute” between the FBI and Apple is a fiction designed to restore public trust in Apple’s privacy stance following the Snowden revelations about FAA702 (aka PRISM) that shows that companies allow the USG warrantless access to their data in realtime via special APIs or portals.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

The tech executives came to DC to meet with Obama in the wake of the whole Snowden thing to discuss it, though it was widely reported as being a consult on fixing healthcare.gov (lol) a few outlets reported it correctly. There are photos of the meeting kicking around.

I imagine the Apple-vs-the-FBI narrative (which is widely regarded as true and has resulted in mainstream false belief, such as yours demonstrated here) was borne directly out of these meetings.

Apple intentionally maintains access to the majority of their users’ data by the USG and the CCP (in their respective zones). It is required for them to continue operating in their current fashion. Every iMessage and (basically) every file in iCloud (photos included) is readable by Apple and the government. Apple has the technical capability to prevent this by migrating their userbase to e2ee systems, and they do not.

I firmly believe that this is by design, and that they would be very severely punished, legally or extralegally, if they changed the status quo.
by davidsainez | 2025-05-06 20:19:48+00:00
I use LLMs for coding every day. There have been significant improvements over the years but mostly across a single dimension: mapping human language to code. This capability is robust, but you still have to know how to manage context to keep them focused. I still have to direct them to consider e.g. performance or architecture considerations.

I'm not convinced that they can reason effectively (see the ARC-AGI-2 benchmarks). Doesn't mean that they are not useful, but they have their limitations. I suspect we still need to discover tech distinct from LLMs to get closer to what a human brain does.
by toast0 | 2025-05-06 20:20:04+00:00
I suspect it's more of a problem for the data center's energy bill. My understanding is that large electric customers pay a demand charge in addition to the volumetric charge for the kWh's use at whatever rates given time of use / wholesale rates. The demand charge is based on the maximum kW used (or sometimes just the connection size) and may also have a penalty rate if the power factor is poor. Smoothing over small duration surges probably makes a lot of things nicer for the rate payer, including helping manage fluctuations from the utility.

There's probably something that could be done on the individual systems so that they don't modulate power use quite so fast, too; at some latency cost, of course. If you go all the way to the extremes, you might add a zero crossing detector and use it to time clock speed increases.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-06 20:20:09+00:00
> Well it's clearly some kind of strange requirement to require a relatively low power and specifically the RK3588 instead of any other chip or even Desktop chip.

RK3588 has 4K @ 60Hz HDMI input built in to the chip. Install the Linux distribution, attach HDMI cable, and you can pipe HDMI input into v4l2 or any other destination. No messing with capture cards, powered USB hubs, or 3rd-party drivers.

> Who needs to do this but doesn't want to use a far more powerful cell phone or laptop processor?

It's a fast chip. Fast enough. Convenience of the small all-in-one solution is more important than using the fastest chip you can find.