MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmb99 | 2025-05-12 04:11:16+00:00
> It's not practical to produce a car that never needs updates. That would be a bug-free system, which is impossible.

Hmm, I disagree. Bug-free systems are expensive and hard, and get more expensive and harder as complexity increases, but you can absolutely produce a car that never needs updates. The vast majority of computer-controlled cars from the 80s to the early 2010s never needed updates, and the ones that did were performed at dealers (and were usually for non-critical things, because the critical things were simple).

GM had a good run in from the mid-90s to the mid-00s producing bug-free cars, even with some complexity. I don’t know of any software issues on any cars with LT1 or 3800 engines, nor with any of the tech in the Northstar Cadillacs. Displacement-on-demand could be considered a buggy implementation, but it was working as designed, and never got patched out, so I don’t think it counts.

That’s of course ignoring the decades of cars that had no computers at all. No software bugs being patched out with OTA updates in a carburetter (you have other problems obviously though, namely terrible fuel economy and emissions, and generally lower reliability).

If you make it a hard requirement for a car to be bug-free (maybe outlaw OTA updates and force physical recalls on any software problem?) I can guarantee manufacturers can make a bug-free car. It’ll just be way less complex and have way fewer flashy features, and will either cost more or have lower margins. It’s been done in the past, it can be done again.

There is a sweet spot for the level of computerization in cars. We had it somewhere around the year 2000, then waaaaay overshot, and haven’t corrected back.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-12 04:11:20+00:00
> I strongly doubt

Oh indeed; I definitely agree that his reasoning and motivation are merely an inch deep, and we must scrupulously avoid, when playing "inside baseball" with the Catholic Church, avoid going beyond the words which come out of his lips; we must avoid ascribing any deeper meanings or searching for enduring symbolism which has broader implications.

The mainstream media is certainly the best, and perhaps only true interpreter of soundbites such as this one, and of course the most important link to a name such as "Leo" is a mostly obscure dude who lived 100 years ago. After all, the Catholic Church is only 2,000 years old and only comprises like 1.3 billion human beings.

She is extremely superficial, and we mostly forget frivolous, silly things like the patterns of stars and the track of our local star, because those are now the realm of hard science, and nothing to do with mysticism or symbology, which again, must be discounted when we pay attention to the words coming out of his mouth and being relayed by the experts in mainstream media.

Thank you for dispelling my ridiculous speculation: I was going to take it even further by exploring the Leo-"Lion" imagery and how powerful that can be, but of course we're examining a man and not a feline!
by 7speter | 2025-05-12 04:11:44+00:00
There was Australian… professor(?) Whose youtube videos I can’t find right now who quite comfortably claimed Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Robin Williams were autistic.

Best I could find is a Temple Grandin blurb about Jobs and Wozniak being autistic and still different sorts of thinkers:

https://youtu.be/L2NTVEU7IaI?si=7RVienyhYWEdLrGo
by hliyan | 2025-05-12 04:11:49+00:00
I think of something similar every time I use the Uber Eats 'track order' screen. All I need is a simple textual history:

7:40 - Bob was delayed by 5 minutes. ETA 7.45 7:35 - Bob is heading your way. ETA 7:40 7:20 - Bob has picked up your order from Pizza place
by nine_k | 2025-05-12 04:12:21+00:00
A family is small enough to allow for reasonable planning. (Imperfect still, as you know if you ever tried to run a family.)

Indeed, a private company usually operates in a way a centralized monarchy / oligarchy would operate: the bosses determine a plan, the subordinates work on implementing it, with some wiggle room but with limited autonomy.

Larger companies do suffer from inefficiencies of centralization, they do suffer waste, slowdowns, bureaucracy, and skewed incentives. This is well-documented, and happens right now, as we facepalm seeing a huge corp doing a terrible, wasteful move after wasteful move, according to some directives from the top. This is why some efficient corporations are internally split into semi-independent units that effectively trade with each other, and even have an internal market of sorts. (See the whole idea of keiretsu.)

But even the most giant centralized corporations, like Google, Apple, or the AT&T of 1950s, exist in a much, much larger economy, still driven mostly by market forces, so the whole economy does not go haywire under universal central planning, as did the economy of the late USSR, or the economy of China under Mao, to take a couple of really large-scale examples.
by hnfong | 2025-05-12 04:12:34+00:00
I still think it was different in the early 2000s, even after the dot com bubble.

"Big Tech" had not been assembled yet. Microsoft was the only tech megacorp in town, and they were _hated_ back then. Apple was still recovering from shambles. Google was a startup nobody heard of. Facebook wasn't a thing yet.

Tech investment money wasn't on the same scale as today. Money was measured in millions instead of the billions today. Most of the money I think was still towards finance at the time. If you look at the public companies with largest market cap before 2010 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... ), you'll see there's quite a couple banks on the list.

You're absolutely correct though that this trend was foreseeable in the 1990s. Which is kinda why the dot-com boom/bust happened -- everyone knew it was the future, I guess people were just a bit too excited for the future, and the companies who'd actually create that future weren't even founded yet, leading to all the mis-investment and subsequent bust.
by notfed | 2025-05-12 04:12:56+00:00
Side note but as a buyer looking to buy used tools from locals, Craigslist's UX could not be better. I just started using it recently (after forgetting about it for a decade). Absolutely the opposite of shit.

Though I think maybe if one is using it for a different purpose, like looking for apartments or roommates then that's probably shit.
by robwwilliams | 2025-05-12 04:14:46+00:00
Great to refocus in this important topic. So cool to see this bridge being built across fields.

In wet-ware it is hard not to think of “time” as linear Newtonian time driven by a clock. But in the cintext of brain- and-body what really is critical is generating well ordered sequences of acts and operations that are embedded in thicker or thinner sluce of “now” that can range from 300 msec of the “specious present” to 50 microseconds in cells that evaluate the sources of sound (the medial superior olivary nucleus).

For more context on contingent temporality see interview with RW Williams in this recent publication in The European Journal of Neuroscience by John Bickle:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40176364/
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-12 04:16:45+00:00
Well I suppose they could. But as we've seen, there are plenty of 2nd level domains under .va, and in fact, many if not most of those, especially vatican.va, actually refer to the Holy See.

It's very common and understandable for folks to conflate the Holy See with the Vatican, but they are distinct entities with two different functions and purposes.

If we're discussing the administration/governance of the Church and the organs which make up the Roman Curia, then we're definitely looking at the Holy See. It's the Holy See, not the Vatican, which is a Permanent Observer to the U.N.

But again, if we're looking at any sort of physical presence, it's the Vatican City State. The actual territory that's an enclave and microstate is the Vatican. It's where people live, work, and worship. "The Vatican" is the entity selected for the ".va" ccTLD simply because of the way the rest of the world works. But only a few of those 2nd level domains can properly be considered more "Vatican" than "Holy See".
by moonhive | 2025-05-12 04:16:57+00:00
The human in the loop won’t disappear it will evolve.

AI agents still need someone who understands context, prioritizes goals, manages trade-offs, and spots misalignment across outputs. That’s not just orchestration, that’s judgment.

Clients may think they can manage agents directly, but most won’t have the clarity or system thinking to turn AI output into coherent outcomes. That’s where founders, strategists, and builders still add real leverage.

The future isn’t agent vs human it’s high-leverage humans using agents better than anyone else.
by pizlonator | 2025-05-12 04:17:44+00:00
It’s a dynamically typed capability system.

So, if you store a pointer to a location in memory and then load from that location using pointer type, then you get the capability that was last stored. But if the thing stored at the location was an integer, you get an invalid capability.

So Fil-C’s “type” for an object is ever evolving. The memory returned from malloc will be nothing but invalid capabilities for each pointer width word in that allocation but as soon as you store pointers to it then the locations you stored those pointers to will be understood as being pointer locations. This makes unions and weird pointer casts just work. But you can ever type confuse an int with a pointer, or different pointer types, in a manner that would let you violate the capability model (ie achieve the kind of weird state where you can access any memory you like).

Lots of tricks under the hood to make this thread safe and not too expensive.
by Arnavion | 2025-05-12 04:17:46+00:00
Any mobo will let you download the firmware file to a FAT32-formatted USB drive etc, and then use that to update the UEFI within the UEFI UI.

Yes some mobos have the feature in their UEFI to connect to the internet and download the update, but it's best to not rely on that since you have no idea how securely that is implemented. Considering how the submitted article is about a shitty implementation in a regular Windows program, you can be sure the implementation in UEFI is even shittier (may not check certs, may not even use HTTPS, etc). Asrock used to have an "Internet Flash" feature in their UEFI and then suddenly removed it, probably because it was too insecure to fix.
by poincaredisk | 2025-05-12 04:18:42+00:00
>This is an area where government regulation is actually required, all transaction fees should be disclosed and charged as a surcharge on the base purchase price, whether it's a credit card or BNPL

Btw. in Europe the card thing was solved differently. First, most people use debit cards, not credit cards. Second, card fees are capped at 0.2% which makes it actually a cost saving measure (cash processing is not free).
by userbinator | 2025-05-12 04:19:09+00:00
Besides the usual DEI stuff, some of those titles sound like the output of a stochastic generator trained on buzzwords:

"HSI Implementation and Evaluation Project: Using Peer-Enhanced Blockchain-Based Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement and Retention"

"Blockchain-Based Learning Environments". That's my WTF of the day.
by nickevante | 2025-05-12 04:20:18+00:00
Agree. Ideas about what to build are dime a dozen but ideas about how to execute them successfully are not that broadly shared except when the founder becomes a big success and gets their own biography written by someone.

Perhaps I should have clarified I meant bouncing off ideas about execution and coffee chat on sharing inspiration on how they landed them against all odds.

People are busy struggling with their own execution challenges including myself. My point is they may not have to struggle alone by 1)learning from each other and 2)paying it forward.
by strogonoff | 2025-05-12 04:20:23+00:00
I don’t think you’re deranged. I do think this is a post about using telemetry 1) in (to me) excessive ways that defeat the point of the thing being measured 2) published on the website of a company that sells said telemetry solution.

Furthermore, to me useless or excessive data is very much a reality (if you do not agree that it is a possibility and a thing that happens, we have clearly no way of understanding each other), and per my criteria it is just that sort of data in this use scenario.
by beatthatflight | 2025-05-12 04:20:42+00:00
So what about flight searches where we have to query several 3rd party providers, and can take 45 seconds to get results from all of them (out of my control). I can dynamically update the page (and do) but a scraper would have to wait 20-45 seconds to get the 'cheapest' flight from my site. I can add async the queries and have the fastest pipes, but if the upstream providers take their time (they need to query their GDSs as well), there's not much you can do.
by moron4hire | 2025-05-12 04:20:58+00:00
The section on Web Components is... teeechnically correct. Unfortunately, it's missing a lot of information on hidden pitfalls of doing things in certain ways

As an example, the examples on `connectedCallback()` don't guard against the fact that this callback gets called every time the element gets inserted into the DOM tree. This could happen because you've removed it to hide it and then added it later to show it again, or it could happen because you've moved it to a new location in the tree (different parent, or re-ordering with respect to its siblings). Or maybe you're not manipulating this object at all! Maybe someone else is moving around a parent element of your custom element. Whatever the case, if you're element's ancestor path in any way gets disconnected and then reconnected from `documentElement`, `connectedCallback()` gets called again.

That means that you have to spend extra effort to make sure anything you do in `connectedCallback()` either gets completely undone in `disconnectedCallback()`, or has some way of checking to make sure it doesn't redo work that has already been done.

There are some other pitfalls involving attributes, child elements, styling, behavior with bundling, etc., that they never really get into. And generally speaking, you're probably only going to find out about them from experience. I don't think I've seen anywhere that goes into Web Component best practices.

Which is a shame, because they are incredibly powerful and I enjoy using them quite a bit. Now that my company has decided to go all in on React, I think they've only really seen the beginner path on both. Web Components as a beginner look harder than React as a beginner. Once you start actually building apps, I find they actually end up having to do largely the same level of manual shenanigans. But I find that I'm doing manual shenanigans to work around React, whereas with Web Components there isn't any magic to work around, but there also isn't a lot of "help" that you'd end up ignoring in most cases anyway.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-05-12 04:21:08+00:00
> We include one example in Figure 26, where clear state-tracking behavior is demonstrated.

Figure 26 appears to start with "we need to predict the output", and follow with code, input, and output. Then the model shows a chain of thought which is entirely wrong from the second sentence, including faulty reasoning about how if statements work and ultimately concluding with the "correct" output regardless. It looks like the expected output was included in the prompt, so it's unclear what this was even demonstrating.

Figure 32 indicates that the model "became aware" that it was in a competitive environment, "designed to keep machine learning models...guessing". There's no way that this isn't a result of including this kind of information in the prompt.

Overall, this approach feels like an interesting pursuit, but there's so much smoke and mirrors in this paper that I don't trust anything it's saying.
by jmb99 | 2025-05-12 04:22:15+00:00
Not open source but mostly reverse engineered, and automotive: the PCM code for GM’s LT1 engines. The only thing that could be considered a bug is the behaviour of wide-open throttle fuelling, which was completely acceptable from the factory but made aftermarket tuning a bit tricky. Specifically, the fuel calculation routine would use the most recent BLM (short- and mid-term air-fuel ratio correction factory as measured by the O2 sensors) when calculating fuel delivery when wide-open, rather than locking it to a constant; the “most recent BLM” may be for a completely different area of the tune (like mid-RPM low throttle), where things like vacuum leaks or even just intake runner inefficiencies have a much greater affect on AFRs than when wide-open. This can result in either too much or too little fuel being injected, and under- or over-shooting the target AFR.

The reason for this is a physical limitation: the cars weren’t shipped with wideband O2 sensors, so there’s no way to measure the AFR when wide-open (since it’s targeting a significantly richer mixture, and narrowband O2 sensors can only signal whether a the combustion is stoichiometric, or rich or lean relative to stoichiometric, with no further info). The implantation is probably not a bug but rather a compromise; in an ideal world, the “most recent” BLM will hopefully be from an “almost wide open” part of the map, and the general rich/lean characteristics will be close enough. And, the fuel table in the factory tune is quite safely rich when wide-open, so even with a leaking injector causing the idle BLMs to be way off, the fuel being pulled when wide open will still be completely safe.

Aside from that, 128k of bug-free code.
by theamk | 2025-05-12 04:22:36+00:00
There are options other than "loyal to the company" or "always choose option which pays most"

For example someone might like their co-workers, enjoy the projects they work on, and want to see the current product (that they have invested so many time into) succeed. But at the same time, they might not care about company itself at all. If the project got closed and co-workers left, they will move to a new company with no hesitation.
by hatefulmoron | 2025-05-12 04:23:10+00:00
I've used the deep research features from OpenAI, Grok, and most recently Anthropic. They're super impressive, but I can't shake the feeling that they're mostly giving me a summarized explanation of what the first 2 pages of Google Search is returning.

Also, insofar that they're researching a topic, they're not sufficiently critical. They are highly influenced by what they read, and they tend to take the results they're given more or less at face value.

For instance, I asked about a medical product for my girlfriend. I explicitly asked for a critical look at its efficacy, any studies in the area, etc.. and it seemed like 90% of the sources it considered were from the product's own website. It basically gave me an uncritical reporting of what they said about their own product.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-05-12 04:24:31+00:00
See the picture of Bell Labs, 1966?

Each person, "principal investigator", has a lab which they built.

They only have so much space, and so much budget, but they get a clean slate.

And they're all different. But they all have brilliant ideas they need to work out.

Advantages of doing it like this were proven earlier, and it was still going strong like this in the 1970's.

It was still kind of an academic model.

In these decades there was sometimes special schooling where students were groomed to take their place in this exact lab, starting as pre-teens. Nobody imagined it would ever dwindle in any way.

This is what places like Exxon and DuPont still looked like in 1979 too.

Without being quite an actual monopoly, one thing that's in common is that anything you invent that could be the least bit useful to an employer that size, they can surely afford to make the most of it like few others can.

So the scientists could go wild to a certain extent as long as they were guided by the same "north star" that the org as a whole recognized. Whether it feels like you're getting closer or not, that's the direction you must be drawn to.

You should have seen some of the stuff they built.

Oil companies can have an amazing budget sometimes.

When somebody had a breakthrough, or OTOH scuttled a project or transferred to a different technical center, their lab would be cleared out so a completely different project could get underway with a new investigator building from the ground up. This could take a while, but eventually some very well-equipped labs having outstanding capabilities can develop.

As an entrepreneur, I liked it down in the basement where they would auction off the used gear from about a dozen of those labs at once, after it had sat in storage for a period of time.

After critical mass was achieved, then I had way more fairly current equipment at my immediate disposal than any dozen of my institutional counterparts could benefit from the mainstream way. Turns out I really could get more accomplished and make more progress my own way than if I was actually at a well-funded institution instead. Using equipment they once owned and were successful with to a certain extent, and I usually became only a little bit more advanced, and only some of the time.

Most things are truly the "least bit useful" anyway ;)
by cortesoft | 2025-05-12 04:25:01+00:00
> There are so many way to do commerce both on and offline and if you squint and look closely you'll find interesting people doing interesting things all around you.

Why do I want "interesting" ways to buy things? I want to be able to buy what I want quickly and reliably. I don't get the benefit of making me try to figure out how to buy something I want
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-05-12 04:25:42+00:00
If the system is built externally by vendor, you can change the vendor and it would create pressure on the vendor ecosystem to not create bad system.

If it is built internally you need people to be responsible to create reliable tests and someone to lead the project. In a way it's not very different than if your external system is bad or crashing. You need accountability in the team. Google can't fire "Google Ads" but doesn't mean they can't expect Google Ads to reliably give them money and people to be responsible for maintaining quality.
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-05-12 04:26:12+00:00
There is an underlying assumption there that is certainly incorrect.

So many stupid comments about AI boil down to "humans are incredibly good at X, we can't risk having AI do it". Humans are bad at all manner of things. There are all kinds of bad human decisions being made in insurance, health care, construction, investing, everywhere. It's one big joke to suggest we are good at all this stuff.
by musjleman | 2025-05-12 04:26:25+00:00
By "actual code" I meant the assembly that the application logic compiles down to, not the entire executable. But as far as the entire package goes, compiling it using clang with some flags I can get down to 19.5k without any effort. If I wanted to waste time on this, ripping out the CRT entirely and getting it to 16k would probably take less than an hour.
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