MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hakkotsu | 2025-05-30 16:52:41+00:00
Hard disagree. At FAANG companies, working on problems that "don't matter" is exactly how you get a "Meets Some" or worse at your next perf review. These companies are obsessed with measurable impact - you need to show clear business value, user metrics, or revenue impact. Spend 6 months grinding on irrelevant work and you'll be on a PIP in a blink of an eye
by glenstein | 2025-05-30 16:54:05+00:00
>There's nothing supernatural about a system moving towards increased capabilities and picking up self-awareness on the way

There absolutely is if you handwave away all the specificity. The natural world runs on the specificity of physical mechanisms. With brains, in a broad brush way you can say self-awareness was "picked up along the way", but that's because we've done an incredible amount of work building out the evolutionary history and building out our understanding of specific physical mechanisms. It is that work that verifies the story. It's also something we know is already here and can look back at retrospectively, so we know it got here somehow.

But projecting forward into a future that hasn't happened, while skipping over all the details doesn't buy you sentience, self-awareness, or whatever your preferred salient property is. I understand supernatural as a label for a thing simply happening without accountability to naturalistic explanation, which is a fitting term for this form of explanation that doesn't do any explaining.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-30 16:54:15+00:00
Due process just means following pre-written law. ex. There's no judge involved when a cop shows up to a fight and arrests both people.

It's the same law [1] that everybody is talking about w.r.t. Trump's Tariffs except that global trade isn't emergent while Funnull is a new actor.

[1]: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-201600880/pdf/DCPD-...
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-05-30 16:55:24+00:00
I don't doubt you in the least: I've also seen BS artists who got through interviews without being able to so much as write a for() loop.

But I've never seen anyone fail upwards as far as a Principal/Staff Engineer level. Last time I interviewed at that position, no one even asked anything about code. They were more concerned about my position on architectural choices, pros and cons of various approaches, knowledge of applicable standards and regulations (I'm in the medical device field), mentoring and team leadership issues and how to resolve them, etc.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-30 16:55:41+00:00
Do you have a source? I don't doubt you, I just am looking for good slang sources since I lost my last good one. That is, I used to have a slang dictionary, but I gave it as a gift to someone as a child and have regretted it ever since, as the recipient doesn't seem to have it anymore, and I haven't ever been able to find a decent one before or since, though I haven't really looked very hard. My old one had a lot of old slang common among WWII and other military members and veterans that I've never seen before, for instance.
by glenstein | 2025-05-30 16:56:05+00:00
>emergent >sufficiently complex

These can be problem words, the same way that "quantum" and "energy" can be problem words, because they get used in a way that's like magic words that don't articulate any mechanisms. Lots of complex things aren't sentient (e.g. our immune system, the internet), and "emergent" things still demand meaningful explanations of their mechanisms, and what those mechanisms are equivalent to at different levels (superconductivity).

Whether or not AI's being networked together achieves sentience is going to hinge on all kinds of specific functional details that are being entirely skipped over. That's not a generalized rejection of a notion of sentience but of this particular characterization as being undercooked.
by mrandish | 2025-05-30 16:56:14+00:00
> And when they say it's really here for real, there will still be a year of waiting.

Indeed. Although, there's a surprising number of people claiming it's already here now.

And to describe the typical cycle completely, the final step is usually a few years after most people agree it's obvious it's already been here for a while yet no one can agree on which which year in the past it actually arrived.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-05-30 16:56:16+00:00
I used to do patch operations and hunk-editing for everything and really enjoyed it. It definitely helps to put a fresh view on the code and see anything missed.

Eventually I moved on to going line-by-line with a GUI tool. In my case Git-cola, but I'm not positive I'd recommend it because it's quite slow on Windows.
by hobofan | 2025-05-30 16:56:36+00:00
Exactly my thoughts when I read the headline, after having read a similar one every few months.

However, by looking at it and playing with a few simple examples, I think this is the one that looks the closest so far.

Definitely interested to see the FS support, and also some instruction on how to customize the images to e.g. pre-install common Python packages or Rust crates. As an example, I tried to use the MCP with some very typical use-cases for code-execution that OpenAI/Anthropic models would generate for data analysis, and they almost always include using numpy or a excel library, so you very quicly hit a wall here without the ability to include libraries.
by ath3nd | 2025-05-30 16:56:50+00:00
My point is: when was the last time when K-means clustering or the Bayesian theorem got a cult, spawned a 10000 fake currencies and were touted as a panacea for all societal problems? The hype behind blockchain, which is just a distributed mathematically sound log of stuff, is just a bunch of misinformation shouted loudly by charlatans and uninformed enthusiasts.

It's the same thing with LLMs, they are basically an extremely sophisticated autocomplete, but I'll be damned if I don't see 1911 articles per day that claim they are sentient, and Sam the perv needs just a couple more billion dollars to reach AGI, just behind the corner. The average pundit's critical thinking is just so disappointing.
by acquisitionsilk | 2025-05-30 16:57:43+00:00
This response is quite the surprise - I am explicitly saying that I think this article reduces travel to "a pissing competition", as you put it, and that it is shocking to me to see it done so shamelessly.

The author will be describing interesting things about the place in a neutral or respectful tone for a line or five, and then suddenly switch to a sort of review-and-compare-mode, as if it were not a real place with 12 million people in it, but a product that just arrived in the post with this feature and that.

Or like a pokemon card, as I said, but for grown-ups. I have a Tunisia, it does xyz. It's good at this and bad at that. I mean that metaphor seriously, I think it really applies.

I mention the idea of putting in the extra effort to interact with locals - through volunteering, or whatever - not to make some comment about myself, or make some appeal to purity, but rather because it's a very good way to avoid turning travelling into stamp-collecting. It's a way of forcing yourself to see the subtlety and variety in a place.

The one assumption I felt myself to be making was that he reads Wikipedia, but that's hardly a heinous crime or anything. It was of no relevance to my point anyway.

Otherwise, regarding ranting - that's just, like, your opinion, man
by JoshCole | 2025-05-30 16:58:22+00:00
> Only if you create new reward models for C, the output for D will improve, and so on.

Again, tons of false claims. One is that 'you' have to create the reward model. Another that it has to be human-curated at all. Yet another is that you even need to do that at all: you can instead have the model build a bigger model of itself, train using its existing resources or more of them, then synthesize itself back down. Another way you can get around it is to augment the existing dataset in some way. No other changes except resource usage and yet the resulting model will be better, because more resources went into its construction.

Seriously notice: you keep making false claims again and again and again and again and again. You're not stating true things. You really need to reflect. If almost every sentence you speak on this topic is false, why is it that you think you should be able to persuade me to your views? Why should I believe your views, when you say so many things that are factually inaccurate, rather than my own views?
by guerrilla | 2025-05-30 17:00:22+00:00
I've implemted this several times before (years ago), but somone tell me, why don't we just consider variables unique. Each instance of a name* should have an absolute (i.e. global) sequence number associated with it. That seems simpler than this relative sequence numbering and the complexity that comes from it.

Scrolling comments, I see somone else nentions this as well. I feel like this is something that got stuck in academia hell but in practice could be solved in more oractical ways. I remember various papers on fresh naming and name calculi from the 00's but why? We have a parser and we have numbers.

The reason I bring this up is because I recall it being easy to introduce bugs into de Bruijn calculi and also adding symbolic debugging to real-world languages was annoying for reasons I have no memory of.

* Note I said name not variable. (\ x . x (\x . x)) Would be (\ x#0 . x#0 (\x#1 . x#1)) similar to de Bruijn indices but could differ in other situations.
by lenerdenator | 2025-05-30 17:01:00+00:00
That's true, to a point.

Everyone's happy to get software in exchange for nothing from a project with only a handful of people working on it, until there's a problem in the code that is a real bear and causes massive vulnerabilities, and on a long enough horizon, that will happen to any sort of code running on machines connected to the internet.

If your entire business model relies on that code, it'd be wise to back the project, even with token support. I'm talking about less than cost of one team building outing.
by godshatter | 2025-05-30 17:01:40+00:00
I'll occasionally hear things when falling asleep, just as I'll also see some imagery when falling asleep (I'm also unable to visualize). So I assumed the snippets of sound I would hear was what people heard normally, just as I'm assuming the snippets of imagery would match what people normally see when they visualize. The sounds I hear (infrequently) sound like something in the environment, though it's clearly not.

So now I need to rework my assumptions. Thank you for letting me know. Language is terrible for conveying this type of information.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-05-30 17:01:43+00:00
"If the CEO of a soda company declared that soda-making technology is getting so good it's going to ruin the global economy, you'd be forgiven for thinking that person is either lying or fully detached from reality.

Yet when tech CEOs do the same thing, people tend to perk up."

Silicon Valley and Redmond make desperate attempts to argue for their own continued relevance.

For Silicon Valley VC, software running on computers cannot be just a tool. It has to cause "disruption". It has to be "eating the world". It has to be a source of "intelligence" that can replace people.

If software and computers are just boring appliances, like yesterday's typewriters, calculators, radios, TVs, etc., then Silicon Valley VC may need to find a new line of work. Expect the endless media hype to continue.

No doubt soda technology is very interesting. But people working at soda companies are not as self-absorbed, detached from reality and overfunded as people working for so-called "tech" companies.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-30 17:01:51+00:00
> Define the mission in plain language.

I miss when people did this, instead of writing in stunted sentences as ostentatious engagement-bait. You don't need to make a new line every time you take a breath, it's okay to put a paragraph or two on the page. We're adults, we can handle it. Flooding an article with newlines tells an educated reader that you are either writing poetry or refuse to respect standard information density.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-30 17:02:03+00:00
They said that for self driving cars for over 10 years.

10 years later we now have self driving cars. It’s the same shit with LLMs.

People will be bitching and complaining about how all the industry people are wrong and making over optimistic estimates and the people will be right. But give it 10 years and see what happens.
by wwilson | 2025-05-30 17:02:34+00:00
There have historically been two giant adoption challenges for DST.

(1) Previously, you had to build your entire system around one of the simulation frameworks (and then not take any dependencies).

(2) It’s way too easy to fool yourself with weak search/input generation, which makes all your tests look green when actually you aren’t testing anything nontrivial.

As you say, Antithesis is trying to solve both of these problems, but they are very challenging.

I don’t know of anybody else who has a reliable way of retrofitting determinism onto arbitrary software. Facebook’s Hermit project tried to do this with a deterministic Linux userspace, but is abandoned. (We actually tried the same thing before we wrote our hypervisor, but found it didn’t work well).

A deterministic computer is a generically useful technology primitive beyond just testing. I’m sure somebody else will create one someday, or we will open-source ours.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-30 17:02:57+00:00
Same statement could be said about you no?

You're the one that was defrauded. The bank processed the transfer exactly as you told them to. So therefore, if person X isn't providing the service you expected then you should have to go to the courts to get it back?

The general problem is that it takes a lot of leg work. Often Customer X was being defrauded through some payroll scam (they take out ~500 and forward the remaining 1500). So now you have to recover $500 from them and then trace the 1500 again. Possibly through multiple countries and their courts (who may see this as beneficial for their country; jury nullification goes both ways).
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-30 17:03:17+00:00
Whenever I make food or drink, my cat insists on getting a whiff. She continues to insist this, even though she's no fan of my coffee. She also insists on sniffing my alcoholic beverages, which is funny because cats hate both ethanol and citric acid so she has quite the negative reaction. But she will be back the next time I mix it up.

At one point she would sniff our backpack straps, with over a decade of accumulated sweat and human residue and go absolutely mental, rolling around in them like it was catnip.

She's also just an extremely attentive cat so it might all just be a game to her.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-05-30 17:03:36+00:00
Ah, in that case, you're right, it would make sense to use all 64 bits for the top limb. Still, making them all equal-sized can have benefits if you use SIMD or similar techniques to operate on them uniformly. One project of mine has been trying to work with large integers in CUDA by distributing their limbs across a warp.
by avidiax | 2025-05-30 17:03:43+00:00
> The proof of work (implemented here) is a certain verifiable delay function (VDF) known as "sloth". VDFs are cryptographic primitives which prove that a nontrivial amount of time has passed by requiring a long, serial computation. This computation outputs a proof which can be (relatively) quickly verified. Because the computation is serial, scaling to more computational resources (such as more CPU or GPU cores) does not reduce the runtime.

Maybe this sort of thing is a market opportunity for the CPU makers?

Add two special instructions, one that iterates a sloth given the seed value, and the final instruction that signs the result cryptographically to prove that it was produced by this model of CPU. Perhaps have hardware rate limiting to prevent overclocking.

Another idea would be to monitor CPU uptime and sign the uptime + a challenge. The uptime is cleared after signing. This is more like proof of stake, where we are proving that we dedicated n seconds of CPU ownership, while allowing the CPU to be used productively otherwise.
Ask HN: Feeling uninspired as a programmer, could I get some advice?
by Allyedge | 2025-05-30 17:05:20+00:00
Hello!

I am a programmer at the age of 18, and I've been coding since a few years. I initially started with Android apps, and then translated into the Web and now I work mostly with fullstack Web and backend using TypeScript, Rust, Go and Elixir. Even some embedded with STM32s and C.

For the last few months to a year, I've been noticing that I feel empty. I don't have any project ideas, I don't know what to work on, half the time I open my terminal and just stare at it.

I "tried trying to" just code something or focus on one specific framework or language instead of being so diverse (which I kind of am), but both failed as I simply had no ideas or know anything to work on.

Is there anything you can suggest to fix that? Perhaps a diferent way to discover things to work on, or any other idea? I simply feel very uninspired and am scared that I might never leave this state and forever lack behind while others keep improving.

Thanks in advance.
by trod1234 | 2025-05-30 17:06:04+00:00
It can be a self-healing system, and capitalism is generally self-healing, but the former is not necessarily the case in all economic systems.

There is a critical point where factors, and producers leave the market because requirements cannot be met in profit in terms of purchasing power (invariant to inflation). You might think those parties are all that there is, but that's not the case, there is a third-party, the state and its apparatus.

With money-printing, any winner chosen by the state becomes its apparatus. Money printing takes many forms but the most common is debt, more accurately non-reserve debt.

That third-entity is not bound by profit constraints and outcompetes rising in the wake of the destruction it causes, and this is not self-healing, its self-sustaining, and slow, and it does collapse given sufficient time.

New jobs aren't being created in sufficient volumes to provide for the population. If anything, the jobs have been removed en-masse on the mere perception that AI can replace people.

You seem to rely heavily on fallacy in your reasoning. Specifically, survivorship bias. Things are being done that cannot be undone. There are fundamental limits, after which the structures fail.

This is what is coming.
by LiquidSky | 2025-05-30 17:06:46+00:00
Elder abuse is certainly a real problem, but the guardianship/conservatorship system also does address a real problem: many seniors actually do become mentally unable to manage themselves.

You're worried about falsely being forced into a guardianship, but what happens if you actually do develop Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia and your family legitimately needs access to your assets to care for you? It's easy to say you'd just give them access before it gets really bad, but an insidious part of the problem is that someone suffering from such a decline either doesn't, or refuses to, recognize it happening.
by mrandish | 2025-05-30 17:07:31+00:00
> picking up self-awareness on the way

To me, the first problem is that "self-awareness" isn't well-defined - or, conversely, it's too well defined because every philosopher of mind has a different definition. It's the same problem with all these claims ("intelligent", "conscious"), assessing whether a system is self-aware leads down a rabbit hole toward P-Zombies and Chinese Rooms.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-05-30 17:08:11+00:00
I don’t see how that example refutes their point. It can be true both that there have been disagreeable bans and that the bans, in general, tend to result in higher quality discussions. The disagreeable bans seem to be outliers.

> They're set in their opinions and think everyone else is dumb.

Well, anyway, I read and post comments here because commenters here think critically about discussion topics. It’s not a perfect community with perfect moderation but the discussions are of a quality that’s hard to find elsewhere, let alone reddit.
by p0deje | 2025-05-30 17:08:14+00:00
It's quite stable on simple applications, but the flakiness definitely increases with more complex apps. I think there is a lot to do to fix it, one idea is to trim the accessibility tree to a narrow region that is relevant, then use it in a prompt. For example, if you want to "sort by price", the LLM doesn't really need to know about anything beyond the filters region of the app.
by ideal_gas | 2025-05-30 17:08:38+00:00
For in-process go scheduling, some progress has been made here; see: https://go.dev/blog/synctest

But `synctest.Wait` won't work for non-durably blocked goroutines (such as in the middle of a TCP syscall) so requires memory-based implementations of e.g. net.Conn (I've plugged in https://pkg.go.dev/google.golang.org/grpc/test/bufconn with good success)
Show HN: Merunit – Visual-first unit test generator (waitlist)
by laguerdo | 2025-05-30 17:08:59+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been frustrated with how repetitive and tedious writing unit tests can be, especially when you’re just trying to ship fast.

So I’m building Merunit, a visual-first unit test generator that helps you create and export tests without boilerplate or syntax. You define test cases with inputs/outputs, and it generates framework-ready test code.

It runs locally in the browser, no uploads or sync.

The MVP is focused on devs who are tired (or afraid) of repeating logic just to test it.

Would love feedback or ideas from the community.

Join the waitlist here: https://merunit.io
by jstummbillig | 2025-05-30 17:09:26+00:00
I think that's mostly nostalgia talking or not paying attention?

For example, for me:

- My current MB Air (M2 I think) might be best product I have ever owned. I have zero daily use complaints about the product, it's fantastic. I remember vividly how obviously shitty aspects of any of the previous laptops I owned were (screens, fans, heat). At the same time, that Framework can exist and what they do is absolutely amazing.

- Absolutely everyone has a access to a really good smart phone, because bad smart phones don't exist anymore

- I find it intolerable to leave the house without a good set of headphones with good ANC. The idea that I ever tolerated that level of noise and the negative health effects that it has feels silly.

- Similarly, electric cars have made care noise bearable and car exhaust actively offensive to me

- You can reasonably cover your electricity needs with solar panels (and a battery, which also exists) at home

Idk. Just off the of my head. I feel fairly confident I could take branches down the tree and just keep going.
by rollcat | 2025-05-30 17:09:37+00:00
Of course it depends on what you consider "low end" - it's relative to your expectations. I have a G4 TiBook, the definition of a high-end laptop, by 2002 standards. If you consider a $300 laptop a good daily driver, I'll one-up you with this: <https://www.chrisfenton.com/diy-laptop-v2/>
by engineer_22 | 2025-05-30 17:09:44+00:00
I had a hard time understanding. At first I thought it meant babies born near Superfund sites were riskier CEOs.

Then I thought it meant managers who were in charge of divisions that created Superfund sites before being promoted to CEO made riskier decisions as CEO.

And now I'm back to "pollution babies take greater risks". Which to my surprise was a surprisingly reasonable hypothesis.