MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sReinwald | 2025-05-20 16:10:51+00:00
No, what's "ridiculous" is this simplistic, black-and-white framing that deliberately ignores any nuance, the concept of contextual integrity or reasonable user expectations.

Of course, no one expects absolute secrecy in a public-facing Discord server. That's a straw man. The issue isn't about some naive belief that messages are invisible. It's about the scope, permanence, and method of access and archiving.

People participating in public Discord spaces have reasonable contextual expectations about how their words will be accessed and by whom. They expect their messages to be seen by current and maybe future server members - not extracted, permanently archived, and made globally searchable by entirely unrelated third parties.

This is similar to how conversations in a public park are technically "public," but most people would be rightfully disturbed if someone recorded everything, transcribed it, published it online with their names attached, and made it all searchable forever. Just because something isn't strictly private doesn't mean any and all forms of collection, republication, and indexing are ethically justified.

If you can't see the distinction between "not perfectly private within this specific semi-public space" and "archived indefinitely, and globally searchable forever by anyone, anywhere, for any reason," then you're either arguing in bad faith or your understanding of these issues is so superficial that further engagement is pointless.
by rz2k | 2025-05-20 16:10:55+00:00
1886 is after The Compromise of 1877 which ended Reconstruction and lead to the rise of largely white supremacist Redeemer governments.

Though versions of the Convict Lease System had started earlier, even before the Civil War, it was in full force by 1886 and even accounted for a significant portion of many states’ annual revenue.

The supply of this labor was dramatically influenced by new laws that were selectively enforced, such as vagrancy laws that might apply to anyone traveling without immediate proof that they had an employer, “pig laws” that made petty thefts often convicted with poor standards of proof subject to extended prison sentences, and in some cases offenses like “mischief” and “insulting gestures”. There were even people who were impressed into this system as a result of violating the terms of a labor contract, which possibly becomes even more difficult to distinguish from slavery.

If you were caught up in this system, you were virtually powerless. Federal troops were long gone, there were instances of lawfully elected governments that had been overthrown by insurrection, and if you exposed the absurdity of this system and threatened it, you could easily be publicly lynched with no chance of repercussions for your murderers.
by calvinmorrison | 2025-05-20 16:11:06+00:00
WSL is amazing. Nothing short of it. My laptop SSD controller died on a conference. I bought a 200 dollar netbook running windows, installed WSL, downloaded the MDADM packages, was about to mount the encrypted drive with cryptsetup, mount the ext4 partition, then chroot into it, then my home drive was like working on my old laptop.

I did this in about 20 minutes, with the help of chatgpt.

In the end I was able to keep working through the trip and provide some demos to clients which landed us some big deals.

Go WSL!
by treis | 2025-05-20 16:11:17+00:00
Exporting business ownership when seen on a national level is just another form of debt. You're trading future production for stuff now.

The fundamental problem is that the balance of goods flows into the US today. If debts and profits are going to be paid out eventually that will have to reverse. But it's going to be politically impossible for the US to ever send out 5-10% of its GDP in goods. That's the fundamental problem.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-20 16:11:34+00:00
Also, I've been using Deno Deploy for hobby projects and it is a delight to work with so far. In terms of finding a product that is a good complement to the open source Deno, they seem to have good ideas. Though I'm still in the VC-subsidized freeloader category in my hobby usage today, so I haven't experienced it yet as a paid product.
by guywithahat | 2025-05-20 16:12:14+00:00
> Musk performed two fascist salutes at a political rally. He did it deliberately and he did it twice.

To say this means you consume misinformation on a regular basis. If you watch the whole video he's extending his heart to the crowd. Further the "double our H1B" guy obviously isn't a fascist, he shares no ideals or political interests with fascism.

Claiming all your political opponents are fascist/socialist/demons/etc is a low-IQ argument and not conducive to meaningful discussion.
by theahura | 2025-05-20 16:12:21+00:00
Possible. AGI/ASI are poorly defined. I tend to think we're already at AGI, obviously many disagree.

> For example, human intelligence (the closest thing we know to AGI) requires extremely complex sensory and internal feedback loops and continuous processing unlike autoregressive models' discrete processing.

I've done a fair bit of connectomics research and I think that this framing elides the ways in which neural networks and biological networks are actually quite similar. For example, in mice olfactory systems there is something akin to a 'feature vector' that appears based on which neurons light up. Specific sets of neurons lighting up means 'chocolate' or 'lemon' or whatever. More generally, it seems like neuronal representations are somewhat similar to embedding representations, and you could imagine constructing an embedding space based on what neurons light up where. Everything on top of the embeddings is 'just' processing.
by energy123 | 2025-05-20 16:12:25+00:00
> It completely hallucinated the API calls, but what was interesting is that the invented API was much more pythonic than the real one. It created a better API.

Something I realized when refactoring is it's easier to vibe refactor a codebase that was itself vibe coded because all the code is "in distribution". If I try to vibe refactor a codebase I wrote, it doesn't cohere with what it expects to see and hallucinates more.
by vidarh | 2025-05-20 16:12:26+00:00
I'd try to post it against after a reasonable time - or at least when you have a writeup. The writeup might well get the best traction.

I think what's most interesting to me is how you ensure the consistency. The "cascade" of generating a high-level plan, and then drilling down is something I've experiented with ad-hoc, but seeing it come together so nicely with the combination of multiple tools is fantastic, and so concrete examples of prompts going from the high level, to the songs, ads, etc. would be great in a writeup.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-20 16:12:27+00:00
I've tried this point before but it always fails because the argument is, if I may contrive a straw man, that the government can simply machine gun everyone at the exits, take all the gold reserves, and cancel the notes. Therefore any government enforced asset is basically as good as gold in this regard because the government can and has (circa great depression) simply cancelled the trustless or bearer properties of gold.

Although you're right that this is historically a large element of gold exists it won't be accepted as reasoning, and it's not worth bothering on places like HN.
Tell HN: Got a dev project? Have my premium .dev domain
by pavlov | 2025-05-20 16:12:54+00:00
Many moons ago the .dev TLD was brand new, and I grabbed these premium domains thinking surely very soon I would be making use of them. They are:

air.dev kit.dev easy.dev

Wouldn't you know, years have passed and I never did anything with these (while paying the premium registration fees)... So now I'm figuring that probably there is someone on HN working on something where these could be a good fit.

Do you have a developer-oriented open source project that needs a short and sweet .dev domain? Get in touch, I'll consider donating names to anything that seems relevant.

Or if your project is commercial and bootstrapped, I could sell you the domain name at cost.

You can find my email in my HN profile.
by kurthr | 2025-05-20 16:12:58+00:00
I don't know, man. I also find AI slop to be uncanny and strangely repulsive, but the other side is that, if there's not enough information in your API and documentation for an LLM, then there's a clever intern that will get it just exactly wrong.

The challenge with making things idiot proof is the ingenuity of idiots. Remember 50% of people are "bellow" median.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-05-20 16:13:13+00:00
What I mean is that if the CNY properly appreciates relative to the US dollar, that CNY60k ($8,000) EV becomes a CNY60k ($16,000) EV. The median Chinese wage goes from CNY 34k ($5,000) to CNY 34k ($10,000). Meanwhile imports of agricultural products and other things into China becomes cheaper, and the cost of food gets lower.

Most expenses an average Chinese worker pays might be unaffected given how self-reliant China is, but in theory at least the wage gap between Chinese and US workers would close significantly this way, even if the gap in living standards do not.
by bluera | 2025-05-20 16:13:14+00:00
Hey HackerNews, for the past few years I've been exploring machine learning, from modeling all sorts of things, to language and vision models, all the way up to the other "consumer" end of the spectrum: using and crafting agentic apps. The learning curve has been steep, and the field moves fast. It's a lot for anyone to absorb.

I thought, having gone through this, can I use what I learned to make it easier for the person that comes next? That's where I am today.

With that in mind, I've started with open sourcing a project aimed at *simplifying and standardizing the usage of models, tools and agents*, so anyone can start coding and deploying cross-platform AI apps on day 1, without any prior AI experience, without learning engines or frameworks, and *on any hardware* (model, quantization, engine, backend all dynamically set by default, optimized for your device). The interface is later customizable, so it grows with you as you learn, up to production readiness.

This is all you need to get started:

=====================================================

from universal_intelligence import Model

model = Model()

result, logs = model.process("Hello, how are you?")

=====================================================

- Both local and cloud-based models are available, with the same simple interface. Can be instantly swapped.

- Similar APIs are made available for tools and agents —all of which are composable, interoperable, and capable of sharing hardware resources to scale at virtually no cost.

- Available in Python or JS/Typescript, usable anywhere (desktop, mobile, web, cloud).

- Can work with your favorite agent framework and MCP tools if you'd like.

Also, no more managing tokens or fetching “['choices'][0]['message']['content']”.

I'd love to hear about your experience and challenges, to think about where to take this next.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-20 16:13:23+00:00
In my humble opinion, the middle ground is "anyone can drag connectivity to the building meet up room and residents can pick their provider with a cross connect" but that doesn't create the same profitability as "you can only pick who we have signed an agreement with." This is an interim solution while they fight their building to have the local city muni fiber provider bring service, which (based on pricing and service) will likely be the long term provider compared to for profit offerings.

For aesthetics, buildings could provision some space on their roof for dish and antenna gear colocation (unsure what a healthy unit:pad/mount ratio would be for this) with conduit to the meet up room for cross connect to units, but I find this rarely to be a consideration. Probably easier to have a condo or living space built next to a datacenter for some of us.

(strong coop/muni internet provider advocate, built a hosting provider in a previous life, know people in the NANOG/IX space, etc, etc)
by chickenbig | 2025-05-20 16:14:23+00:00
> In Australia it was calculated that the extra grid upgrades for renewables comes out to $15B.

AEMO report from 2024 [1] page 13 note 2 very carefully draws the line around what the extra 16B AUD will pay for.

This value is the net present value of capital costs for transmission augmentation up to 2049-50 only, and does not include the cost of commissioned, committed or anticipated projects.

Committed and anticipated ISP projects :- Project EnergyConnect cost has ~doubled to 4.1B AUD [2] Central West Orana REZ is around 5.45B AUD [3] CopperString has escalated to 14B AUD although that might be partly due to general inflation [4]

> Gas turbine emergency reserves would be $1B.

Gas turbines are now about 2400 USD/kW (3750 AUD/kW), so 1B AUD results in ~267 MW of capacity.

[1] https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/isp/202... [2] https://reneweconomy.com.au/deja-vu-on-transmission-project-... [3] https://www.energyco.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-05/... [4] https://www.energyco.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-05/... [5] https://gasoutlook.com/analysis/costs-to-build-gas-plants-tr...
by reikonomusha | 2025-05-20 16:14:27+00:00
Related context: The 2025 European Lisp Symposium [1] was just wrapped a few hours ago in Zurich. There was content on:

- Static typing a la Haskell with Coalton in Common Lisp

- Dependent typing with Deputy in Clojure (this post)

- The Common Lisp compiler SBCL ported to the Nintendo Switch

- Common Lisp and AI/deep learning

- A special retrospective on Modula and Oberon

- Many lightning talks.

[1] https://european-lisp-symposium.org/2025/index.html
by unclad5968 | 2025-05-20 16:14:28+00:00
This is awesome! At the end you mention the 27k dragons and 10k lights just barely fits in 16ms. Do you see any paths to improve performance? I've seen some demos on with tens/hundreds of thousands of moving lights, but hard to tell if they're legit or highly constrained. I'm not a graphics programmer by trade.

I need a renderer for a personal project and after some research decided I'll implement a forward clustered renderer as well.
by gocsjess | 2025-05-20 16:14:42+00:00
> Honest question: how do you deal with with those minor but insufferable Windows' quirks like 0d0a line endings, selective Unicode support, byte-order-marks and so on.

exactly why I use WSL, lf-only line endings, UTF-8, everything a basic debian bookworm iso can provide, plus docker with GPU Access
by levkk | 2025-05-20 16:14:47+00:00
There are lots of things that neither the code nor the docs cover, so I suspect that's not quite possible, yet.

For example, if you're deploying a Postgres proxy, it will have a TCP timeout setting that you can tweak. Neither the docs nor the code will tell you what the value should be set to though.

Your engineers might know, because they have seen your internal network fail dozens of times and have a good intuition about it.

Software complexity has a wide range. If you're thinking of simple things like Sendgrid, Twilio or Stripe APIs, sure, an agent can easily write some boilerplate. But I think in certain sectors, we would need to attach some more inputs to the model that we currently don't have to get it to a good spot.
by exabrial | 2025-05-20 16:14:55+00:00
We used to have things called WSDLs and XSD schemas that made it _extraordinarily_ easy to make remote calls. Granted, a bunch of ding dongs never loaded their own WSDL to look at it, creating a bad rap.

We do have:

* WADLs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Application_Description_La...

* JSON Schema:https://json-schema.org/learn/miscellaneous-examples

And when they are available they're incredible, but nobody uses them.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-20 16:15:00+00:00
The CPU is an eZ80 clocked at 48MHz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_eZ80#Use_in_commercial_p...

which uses 24 bit pointers for a 16M address space. I like it as it is clearly superior to the '8-bit' machines of the 1980s but a step below ARM.
by neogodless | 2025-05-20 16:15:21+00:00
StarCraft 2 definitely works on Linux, with a relatively simple act of adding it to Steam as a non-Steam title, and then letting the Proton layer do its thing.

And this is coming from a very Linux-hesitant newbie who mostly uses Windows.

I have not tried Fortnite.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ppgk04/starcr...
by theahura | 2025-05-20 16:15:25+00:00
I'm pulling directly from Chris Olah's blog post with that example. But I will say that in practice, its always surprising how increasing the dimensionality of a neural network magically solves all sorts of problems. You could use a kernel if you don't have more computation available, but given more computation adding a dimension is strictly more flexible (and is capable of separating a much wider range of datasets)
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-20 16:16:35+00:00
Thanks!

Actually I am planning on shifting it towards importing 'https://' URLs directly.

Honestly, the main difficulty I have is keeping full TypeScript support of remote modules. It's actually easier to do this if I import https:// modules directly, though it's not as convenient as it could be[1].

But I'm also trying to figure out whether I should continue to compile TSX to JS in the service worker[2], which requires no special dev-time setup and allows publishing raw .tsx files anywhere on the net such as github, or require users to compile TSX -> JS ahead of time, which would require a build step.

On top of that, I'm considering going further and making it so packages can import bare-specifiers like `import "somelib"` and publish a plugin to compile this into an https:// import specifier.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79628025/is-there-a-way-...

[2] I currently use a service worker to map imports like `/os/fs/{ghb,npm}/...` to `jsdelivr.net/{gh,npm}/...` and compile them and return with the right content-type.
by fmap | 2025-05-20 16:17:05+00:00
The reason deep learning is alchemy is that none of these deep theories have predictive ability.

Essentially all practical models are discovered by trial and error and then "explained" after the fact. In many papers you read a few paragraphs of derivation followed by a simpler formulation that "works better in practice". E.g., diffusion models: here's how to invert the forward diffusion process, but actually we don't use this, because gradient descent on the inverse log likelihood works better. For bonus points the paper might come up with an impressive name for the simple thing.

In most other fields you would not get away with this. Your reviewers would point this out and you'd have to reformulate the paper as an experience report, perhaps with a section about "preliminary progress towards theoretical understanding". If your theory doesn't match what you do in practice - and indeed many random approaches will kind of work (!) - then it's not a good theory.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-05-20 16:17:10+00:00
OK so under your though experiment we are chopping of too-tall buildings?

I would expect unit prices to go up, but land prices to go down. There are ugly bidding wars as people try to stay, but also much less revenue per building as the number of units shrinks. The increase in per-unit rents will not be as great as the decrease in per-building units, and thus per-land revenues will go down, and the land will be less valuable.

What actually happens depends a bit on the inequality makeup of society. In UWS / UES apartments are combined into a larger apartments more than people realize. That is somewhat similar to the zoning change, except it is market driven.

At the same time, the fact that rich UES/UWSers live in apartments at all is clear evidence that the rich can afford less land than they can in the suburbs, and they are OK with this.

There is a famous quote "a developed country is not one where the poor own cars, but the rich take public transportation". By the same token "a developed country is not one where the poor own houses, but the rich live in apartments".

Density is very egalitarian in that higher densities allow masses of less-rich people to compete with richer people for land. Arguably the inequality-driven apartment-merging-during-housing shortage is downstream of having a housing shortage, and if Manhattan didn't in fact have stupid zoning constraints too (yes, I know!) we would not be seeing these apartment merges / bigger units would be accompanied by taller buildings so not net fewer units.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-20 16:17:14+00:00
You can do GPU passthrough in a Gnome box, as in, your VM can see the host's GPU (let's say Nvidia) and it works exactly the same as on the host? Or another metric is if you can run Photoshop in a VM with full hardware acceleration. I haven't tried Gnome box in particular, but this isn't what I'm seeing when I search.
by akkartik | 2025-05-20 16:17:48+00:00
Anything is possible to fix; the question is why bother. Every fix cuts into the benefit of compatibility. The fundamental model of a wrapping/scrolling teletype isn't a good fit for the way we use computers today. (It does make sense if you work in a real text mode console. Then you are really avoiding all the complexity of a graphics stack by using hard-coded capabilities your hardware provides.)

A simple flat array of pixels seems like a much more timeless mental model to build durable software on top of. You don't have to wonder how different computers will react to a write just off the bottom right of the screen, and so on.
by ferguess_k | 2025-05-20 16:18:23+00:00
I'm not really anti-AI. I use AI every day and is a ChatGPT pro user.

My concerns are:

1) Regardless of whether AI could do this, the corporation leaders are pushing for AI replacement for humans. I don't care whether AI could do it or not, but multiple mega corporations are talking about this openly. This is not going to bode well for us ordinary programmers;

2) Now, if AI could actually do that -- might not be now, or a couple of years, but 5-10 years from now, and even if they could ONLY replace junior developers, it's going to be hell for everyone. Just think about the impact to the industry. 10 years is actually fine for me, as I'm 40+, but hey, you guys are probably younger than me.

--> Anyone who is pushing AI openly && (is not in the leadership || is not financially free || is an ordinary, non-John-Carmack level programmer), if I may say so, is not thinking straight. You SHOULD use it, but you should NOT advocate it, especially to replace your team.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-05-20 16:18:30+00:00
> AI agents can't even do very basic things without causing absolute mayhem.

Agreed.

> Do you really think it makes sense for your basic assumption to be that your user is dumber than a token generator?

Absolutely. Users will fuck up basic things. I wrote a simple inotify wrapper and half of the issues I got were that it didn't work on Windows and MacOS.