MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simoncion | 2025-05-08 01:49:46+00:00
They absolutely did deny mass collection (among other things).

The most charitable interpretation of the claims would be that what NSA calls "collection", every other English-speaking human would call "analysis" (or -maybe- "post-collection preprocessing"). This horseshit was reported in many places at the time, but here's the first vaguely-reputable place I could find talking about this sort of thing today [0]:

> Take, for example, the definition of the term “collection.” What qualifies as intelligence collection is critical to the scope of intelligence activity because it determines when intelligence gathering begins. Although it never provides its own definition, EO 12333 repeatedly refers to collection as the beginning of the intelligence gathering cycle. The agencies themselves elaborate on EO 12333’s general guidance by defining collection in their internal procedures. As we chart in greater detail in our article, the Defense Department’s and the NSA’s definitions of collection vary significantly, even though the NSA is a subordinate agency of the Pentagon.

> The Defense Department defines collection as intelligence gathering at a much earlier point than the NSA’s. Under DoD 5240.01, the department’s current manual, “information is collected when it is received by a Defense Intelligence Component,” regardless of how that information is “obtained or acquired.” By contrast, the NSA’s current version of USSID 18 states that collection “means [the] intentional tasking or SELECTION of identified nonpublic communications for subsequent processing aimed at reporting or retention as a file record.” As a result, collection for the Defense Department’s purposes appears to involve no processing or action; information is collected as soon as it is received. For the NSA, however, collection begins only once the information has been “selected” and put to further use.

> ...Under the NSA’s attorney general guidelines, for example, vast amounts of intelligence could be gathered without technically being collected. This means that, on paper, none of the guidelines’ subsequent protections for or limitations on the use of that intelligence apply when the information is first received. In theory, the NSA’s guidelines might permit the agency to gather significant amounts of unprocessed intelligence and then store it indefinitely.

[0] <https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-does-collection-me...>
by keepamovin | 2025-05-08 01:50:21+00:00
I think there’s that side to it, it may be correct to swoop in and profit, if you can outsmart them.

But then there’s another side where the fad has real value and the people investing have money because they’re smart and they recognize the value. And you have to be to make value in the fad.

But on some level, it’s also stupid to pursue the fad because it’s so hyper competitive and effect of luck is going to be magnified.
by weq | 2025-05-08 01:50:22+00:00
The reason you feel safe now is because of the marketing tactics of AI companies in pushing their phished goods on the world. LLMs have done anything yet other then reduced the barrier of entry into the software field. Like what google search and stackoverflow did 10yrs ago. The same principles apply, if your only skill is using an LLMs (or google searching) then you will be the first replaced when the markets turn. The ability to reason about options of a company in making money over the short term, vs long term, should be fairly easy to reason about based on the availibility of news. AI companies already know this. The stratergy has been played out. They make more money this way. They get to suck up all the info from your corperation, because they will get that data. Once they build these models, they will replace you too. Sure your saving time and money today, but thats just the cost of building the model for them.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-08 01:50:23+00:00
Engagement-driven personalized “algo” feeds need to be banned in general, by any countries that don’t want to continue swinging rightward. I would feel a lot more confident about the future of liberal democracy if this were under serious discussion in at least some countries, but, afaik, it’s still not even now (it should have been years ago!) which is worrisome.
by bombela | 2025-05-08 01:51:02+00:00
What matters in this discussion is the outcome.

For the exact same logs:

journalctl takes 10s to search through 4GiB. And misses most of the matches.

(rip)grep takes (0.1)0.5s to search through 605MiB.

In other words. journalctl consumes much more space, and a lot more time, to return an order or magnitude less results to the same query.

What does journalctl offers, that makes this resource, time and correctness tradeoff worth it?
by rtpg | 2025-05-08 01:51:24+00:00
I don't get why so many people go to bat for pyright, my experience with it has been pretty miserable. Open enough instances of it and you're in OOM city. It works, but often gets confused... and of course the absolute audacity of MSFT to say "let's go over to pyright, and by the way we're going to carve up some stuff and put it into pylance instead", meaning that it's totally not within the actual spirit of open source.

I would like to just not use it, but the existence of pyright as a _barely_ functional alternative really sucks the air out of other attempts' continued existence. Real "extend/extinguish" behavior from MSFT.
by echelon | 2025-05-08 01:51:42+00:00
100%, though I still feel as though open training data will eventually become a thing. It'll have to be mostly new data, synthetic data, or meticulously curated from public domain / open data.

Synthetic training data sets, even robotically-acquired real world "synthetic" data, can rapidly create training sets. It's just a matter of coordinating these efforts and building high quality data.

I've made a few data sets using Unreal Engine, and I've been wanting to put various objects on turn tables and go out on backpack 3D scan adventures.

Someone will have to pay for it, though.
by stevenAthompson | 2025-05-08 01:52:51+00:00
>The ban is the government retribution.

No it isn't. China has already admitted they hacked us all the major US telecoms to spy on American citizens, and shown no indication that they intend to stop doing that sort of thing. We simply can't trust them to install applications on devices that store the most sensitive secrets of our politicians, military leaders, and citizens.

See Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon for more information. China admitted that Salt Typhoon was them, and Volt Typhoon is relatively obvious. It's worth also noting that they used the backdoors that were put in place for CISA requests, which is a perfect example of why government mandated backdoors are a bad idea.
by const_cast | 2025-05-08 01:53:17+00:00
The reason that’s okay is because you aren’t competing against the initial source material. A thumbnail on Google for “Revenge of the Sith” is not a replacement for watching the movie.

But, a lot of AI products are specifically and explicitly designed to obsolesce the thing they trained off. No need to go to Encyclopedia X or the NYT, this has the same content.
by umvi | 2025-05-08 01:53:52+00:00
> Since FoundationDB is hard to understand, there is (and will be) strong resistance to adoption. That's just how things are: we do not enjoy thinking too hard.

More like: we all have limited time, and if it's hard to understand you are asking for a big upfront time investment for a thing that may not even be the best fit for your use case.

Anything can be made easier to understand with the right abstractions. The theory of relativity was super hard to understand when it was first developed; you basically had to be an elite physicist. But now non-physicists can understand it at a high level thanks to YouTubers like veritasium and minute physics. Maybe FoundationDB just needs better marketing.

Also: your description of FoundationDB reminds me of ZeroMQ, which basically just dumps MQ legos at your feet and tells you to build your own MQ system (as opposed to a batteries included solution like RabbitMQ)
by downboots | 2025-05-08 01:54:35+00:00
Similar interface idea echoed:

Unity

https://game-ace.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Bolt5.gif

Blender

https://blenderartists.org/uploads/default/original/4X/3/0/c...

Chemcad

https://img.informer.com/screenshots/3390/3390423_1.gif

Even KiCad if we stretch the analogy

Would be good to see this for general programs, or with modular AI agents, or for ODE compartment models.

Also of note: https://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations
by esperent | 2025-05-08 01:54:37+00:00
Funny you should say that about toasters... Because I've been down a toaster buying rabbit hole over the past year and toasters are not all the same. I mean sure, a €20 toaster is gonna be the same as all other €20 toasters. But beyond that they have massively different build quality and toasting speed, and don't get me started on how hard it is to find a toaster designed for real bread instead of square supermarket slices(+).

My recommendation is actually to buy a commercial toaster. It'll toast twice as fast and last for years. Downside is that it will probably look ugly. I've heard good things about Dualit too though.

(+) On the other hand if all you eat is white sliced pan, then go ahead and buy any €20 toaster. You're in luck, they were built for you.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-08 01:56:18+00:00
Yeah the cross-platform situation makes things hard, but in a way it's the protocol's fault if it's hard to agree on things.

Also, I really remember Wiimotes failing to pair a lot of the time, but it was so long ago that I could be wrong. All I know for sure is last time I was at someone's house and they wanted to play Switch, it took like 10 minutes to get the controllers set up, but most of that was bad UI.
by const_cast | 2025-05-08 01:56:27+00:00
> That's because you would be redistributing the actual material, just in a really roundabout way.

Right, which I’m arguing is what LLMs do just in an even more roundabout way.

The technical details of LLMs don’t actually matter. We don’t really care if they’re a database or not. The question is do they reproduce the source material? And yeah, pretty much they do, in a lot of instances. Not all, but a lot.

To produce yet another analogy, imagine I have a service X. You can pay and I will give you any movie you want. You don’t know how I do it. Is this copyright infringement or not? I would say yes. Now let’s say I reveal the secret - I open up photoshop and painstakingly recreate the movie frame by frame. I might make a mistake here or there. Is this still copyright infringement? I think it is.
by int_19h | 2025-05-08 01:57:13+00:00
Honestly I'm not even sure that Java checked exceptions are so bad in general compared to Result<T, E>. The amount of verbiage is roughly the same.

Where Java failed is the inability to write generic code that uses checked exceptions - e.g. a higher-order function should be able to say, "I take argument f, and I might throw anything that f() throws, plus E1". But that, as you rightly point out, is a Java problem, not a checked exception problem. In fact, one of the more advanced proposals for lambda functions in Java tackled this exact issue (but unfortunately they went with a simpler proposal that didn't).
by gruez | 2025-05-08 01:58:30+00:00
>There was no mistaken identity. They knew it was an American ship and attacked it on purpose. It was witnessed and documented that they made the decision to deliberately attack an American warship, then tried to excuse themselves from responsibility.

What evidence is of this? The article you linked only has an "anonymous source", and hearsay supposedly from a diplomat. If this is the bar for believing that a conspiracy is real, you should probably believe the moon landing is faked as well.
by Retric | 2025-05-08 01:59:30+00:00
Personally when I notice the acting the movie has already failed at something else. The Lighthouse’s acting stands out to me because the movie’s attempts at suspense fail. I quickly found it hard to avoid engaging with nuances of the films creation as an intellectual exercise rather than the film itself.

At the other end of the spectrum there’s a ton of movies with child actors where the kids are just vastly less talented, so the film simply demands less of them. It’s just as true of Let the Right One In a low budget foreign film as it is high budget films such as Harry Potter or classics like The Shinning. Characters come to life not through great acting but because all the elements line up so you forget you’re looking at puppets at the puppet show.

IMO, Great movies are all about understanding the limitations of the medium, the audience, characters, budget, script, etc. That’s why the snap at the end of Avengers: Infinity War was spectacle but didn’t have the emotional impact of a single deer being shot at the beginning of Bambi.

/soapbox

Again not that you’re wrong, but I was thinking about your response for a while.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-08 01:59:48+00:00
> Isn't this just a pot calling the kettle black?

New expression to me, thanks.

But yes, and no. I’d agree in the sense that the null hypothesis is crucial, possible the main divider between optimists and pessimists. But I’ll still hold firm that the baseline should be predicting that transformer based AI differs from humans in ability since everything from neural architecture, training, and inference works differently. But most importantly, existing AI vary dramatically in ability across domains, where AI exceeds human ability in some and fail miserably in others.

Another way to interpret the advancement of AI is viewing it as a mirror directed at our neurophysiology. Clearly, lots of things we thought were different, like pattern matching in audio- or visual spaces, are more similar than we thought. Other things, like novel discoveries and reasoning, appear to require different processes altogether (or otherwise, we’d see similar strength in those, given that training data is full of them).
by rezmason | 2025-05-08 02:01:32+00:00
> Yea but why use a mac at that point?

I ask myself that with increasing frequency. Looking at all the Linux options feels like wandering through Akihabara, but one day the macOS that remains will be so unlike the macOS I enjoyed, that I'll jump the fence.

Anyway, if someone does make a new Mac desktop environment, it'd probably be for fun more than anything. Or a Terry Davis scenario.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-08 02:02:44+00:00
It’s mainly useful for getting good surround. If you don’t care about that, sure, not really necessary. That’s like the whole point of it.

Side benefits include:

- Adding more ports to often port-starved TVs or projectors.

- Providing alternative port-switching interface if you hate your TV’s UI and want something simpler.

- An organizational aid—you can put all your stuff somewhere away from the TV, and all that needs to reach it is a single HDMI cable. This can create interesting room layout options that are otherwise impractical.

All of these can also be accomplished by a simple HDMI port switch, but still, it’s handy.
by freeqaz | 2025-05-08 02:02:58+00:00
How do Serverless GPU Cloud Providers deal with that then? Do they go down the Infiniband-to-NAS rabbit hole to build all of their infrastructure? Or do they just setup an NVME RAID cache to hold the models locally? (Maybe an LRU? With the system memory also being used?)

I imagine in the real world that model usage follows a zipfian distribution, ie, a small number of models (<10) represent 95% of the machines for inference workloads. And, for those machines, you can just load the weights off of your ~40gbit ethernet connection since they're never cycling.

But for that last 5%, I feel like that's where it becomes important. If I'm running a weird, custom model and I want Lambda-like billing... what's the stack? Is the market big enough that people care? (And do most people just use LORAs which are much easier to hot swap?)

Training I imagine is a totally different ballpark because you're constantly checkpointing, transferring data at each step, etc, versus inference. That's a world I know a lot less about though!
by int_19h | 2025-05-08 02:03:39+00:00
Currying is just syntactic sugar for a lambda that binds the first argument and passes the rest unchanged, and you can achieve the same level of conciseness in other ways - e.g. "pipeline" operators - but with a syntax that is more readable and more extensible. E.g. https://docs.rs/piping/latest/piping/
by const_cast | 2025-05-08 02:04:14+00:00
C++ is at least somewhat strictly typed and - again - most types cannot be null.

Make std::string null. You can’t. Make std::vector null. You can’t. It’s one of the benefits of a value types.

That, alone, eliminates a whole class of bugs that’s JS has. Yes, there’s edge cases in C++ too. The edge cases are the common cases in JS in this regard and that’s why I class them differently. Really, every language can do everything, basically. But how easy is it, and how common is it?

Also, for the record, using an initialized variable will result in a warning or compilation error.

None of this is to say that C++ does not have other glaring problems that JS does not. But, in my experience, it’s slightly more difficult to create logic bugs in C++. I also have worked with PHP - similar situation to JS. Too footgunny that in practice the codebase is riddled with bugs that rarely manifest, but are there. Everything you do has, like, a dozen implications and edge cases you need to consider.
by isaacimagine | 2025-05-08 02:04:47+00:00
Yes, Wasm components rock! I'm amazed to see how far you've taken Wasm and run with it. I'm at a new email address now, apologies if I've missed any mail. We should catch up sometime; I'll be in SF this summer, I might also visit a friend in Fort Collins, CO. (Throwing distance from Boulder :P)
by nwlotz | 2025-05-08 02:05:55+00:00
I'd expect LLMs to continue making bloat significantly worse. When the cost of a thing craters, in this case generated lines of code, then you'll inevitably get way more of that thing.

Also my observations so far of "vibe coding" include a lot of copy and pasting errors that are then fixed with installing yet more libraries until you have a massive, glued-together mess.
by iheartblocks | 2025-05-08 02:06:11+00:00
Location: Austin, TX

Remote: Preferred but open to hybrid or on-site

Will to relocate: Maybe

Technologies: C#, C++, C, Dart/Flutter, Python, Unity3D, Unreal, CUDA, Go, Embedded, EE/PCB design, OpenGL, HLSL, Networking, Gstreamer

Resume: http://brendan.lockh.art/Resume.pdf

Email (in my resume)

---

I've been a founder for 10 years, and built multiple projects through design, implementation, and support. I've solved quite a few very challenging technical problems, and made products that users loved. However, I've had to come to the unfortunate conclusion that I'm a very good engineer but not a good enough entrepreneur, so I'm looking to join a team and focus on what I excel at.

As an example, I recently wrote my own game engine for Flutter in C that was around ~24x as fast as Unity (it wasn't quite a fair fight, but still).

I love learning new things, and I'm an exceptionally hard worker. Even if my background doesn't perfectly align with what you have in mind, please reach out; I will be a great addition to your team!
by tiffanyh | 2025-05-08 02:06:29+00:00
> Meanwhile: to break into a highly-regulated, commoditized market like insurance, you need both a truly differentiated product that incumbents can't easily replicate and an associated distribution strategy that leverages their blind spots.

Having worked in highly regulated industries, I’ve learned that the best way to disrupt incumbents is by creating a product that assumes more business risk than is typically accepted. Large, regulated companies are extremely risk-averse—so if you can take on that risk in a smart, innovative way, you’ll win.
by scarface_74 | 2025-05-08 02:07:04+00:00
I don’t care about the 90% of App Store revenue that comes in app purchases in games (came out in the trial).

I do care about subscription services where at most there should be a one time finders fee and then maybe a slightly higher monthly fee for payments like 5% instead of just enough to cover the processing fees.

Also, I just checked out the Kindle app for iOS. There is a link to the book that takes you to the Amazon web site to let you buy the book directly with one (well two clicks) in all. A much better user experience.
by martythemaniak | 2025-05-08 02:07:07+00:00
> We’ve heard from many countries asking for help in building out similar AI infrastructure—that they want their own Stargates and similar projects.

Who is this for exactly? The thing about reneging on your agreements and treaties and threatening and demonizing everyone around you is that they learn not to trust you. US-led AI sounds terrible, it would never pass muster in Canada. Neither in the EU, China, India, Brazil... Like, you Cannot entrust your governments functioning on the US anymore, you can just get cut off at any point for no reason.

So who's this for?
by kesor | 2025-05-08 02:07:47+00:00
Abuse exists between humans, be it in game environments, or other places. What else is new? As-if such behavior as cherry-picked in this study is not prevalent at home with family members, or at work with colleagues.

This is why you have free will and a choice. You don't like the place you're at and the toxic people yelling at you. Leave. If people stay and take the abuse, does that say something about humans in general or games in particular? Not really, happens everywhere, that is why you have Stockholm Syndrome explained back in the 70s.
by const_cast | 2025-05-08 02:08:09+00:00
IMO jQuery is a symptom, not a cause. It’s the natural end-state of a stringly-typed “do whatever the fuck you want” attitude. You can create just as much spaghetti without jQuery, jQuery just lets you do it with less characters.

The horrors I’ve seen. Constructing a custom string based off of user input and then tacking on () and calling it as a function? We can do that? Apparently yes we can. The most cursed type of polymorphism where nothing makes sense and you’d have more success communing with the dead than deducing the control flow.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-08 02:09:14+00:00
The companies themselves have free speech. It doesn't really matter how those viewpoints ended up highly-ranked on TikTok, it's their right to choose what they want to display, same with Facebook. And given what happened here, I don't expect Facebook to allow this stuff high-up even if they wanted to before.

Another thing we know is that the White House under Biden was pressuring FB and others to downrank anti-covid-vaccine content until a judge ordered them to stop.
by Barrin92 | 2025-05-08 02:10:07+00:00
>What makes it extremely strong or privileged?

The fact that his parents were math and literature professors who entertained him dropping out of school to write poetry. If I had done that my parents would have offered me exactly three choices, get a job, go back to school, or pack your bags and pay your own rent which would have forced me to get a job, understandably so because as working class people they didn't have the resources to sponsor me for another decade while I go soul searching
by int_19h | 2025-05-08 02:10:16+00:00
As noted in other comments, a bunch of languages has it, but the problem with this syntax is that it doesn't generalize well. For example, let's say we have:

foo(%1, bar(%1, 42))

does this desugar to:

|x| foo(x, |y| bar(y, 42))

or to:

|x| foo(x, bar(x, 42))

and do you trust the person reading this code later to remember which one it is?