MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by defrost | 2025-05-23 02:23:33+00:00
> I have already read the "Hypotheticals".

The transcripts of the TV show? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3616539-geoffrey-roberts...

That seems dry, but okay.

> Is he saying God is merely a "Hypothetical"?

Which "he"? Islam|Stevens or Robertson .. in either case, no, God being Hypothetical was not a central thesis of the show although it's likely something that was bantered about somewhere in the course of at least one of those scenarios.

Maybe look through the transcripts for some mention of any God(s).

> hehe I liked steve martins take on that egyptian thing

I confess I'm unsure as to how Steve Martin (Banjo playing comedian slash actor Martin?) ties into this .. but yes, Hypothetical is a partially scripted staged drama that explored tricky situations, Trolley Problems, and difficult judgements that creep up on people at the edges of law and morality.

The host literally assigned real people "personas" that matched some aspects of that persons real life experience and then asked them to react as their persona through a series of increasingly conflicting and escalating events of the sort that often end up in court.

What ever Cat Stevens is doing there in the show he is absolutely not independantly taking the stage on his own to declare a Fatwa on Rushdie and to call on all Muslims to hunt him down and punish him .. which was the original up thread claim about his behaviour.
by asciimov | 2025-05-23 02:23:48+00:00
The dice deck has a perfect bell curve of dice rolls, this means the same number of 6’s and 8’s, 4’s and 10’s. If you go on a tear you can pull most of the 6’s from the deck in short order, a flood. Making it difficult or impossible to pull anymore till the deck is reshuffled, the drought. Meanwhile the odds of pulling other cards go up.

This is somewhat mitigated with cards that require you to reshuffle the deck. Even with shuffle cards included the numbers are too evenly distributed or balanced removing any feeling of randomness or luck from the game.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-23 02:24:29+00:00
I only use Linux on servers, so the kind of stuff I need is always traditional apt-get, but yeah I always assumed using it on a PC would involve tons of snap or flatpak apps where they don't want to deal with the complexities of dependencies.

Ok, I do have one spare Linux laptop in my garage that I barely use, and I'm pretty sure how ever I installed Chromium used snap.
by SamBam | 2025-05-23 02:24:40+00:00
Indeed, but, no LLM has ever realized that I don't actually specify that he can only take one thing at a time. It's natural that it would assume that (as would most humans) because it would be so heavily primed to fill that in from every other version of the puzzle it's seen.

I'd give them full credit if they noticed that, but I was also wanting to see if, given the unstated assumptions (one thing in the boat, don't let anything eat anything else, etc) they'd realize it was unsolvable.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-23 02:25:30+00:00
> We've distilled humanity to a grainy facsimile of its most mediocre traits, and now find ourselves alarmed and saddened by what has appeared in the mirror.

I think it's important to point out that this seems to be a near universal failing when humans attempt to examine themselves critically as well. Jung called it the shadow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(psychology) "The shadow can be thought of as the blind spot of the psyche."

There lives everything we do but don't openly acknowledge.
by pen2l | 2025-05-23 02:26:05+00:00
I understand it's cool to slam Harvard these days but it is nonetheless a behemoth when it comes to research output.

https://www.harvard.edu/about/history/nobel-laureates/

https://www.nature.com/nature-index/research-leaders/2024/in...

https://hms.harvard.edu/about-hms/history-hms/timeline-disco...

https://www.harvard.edu/in-focus/innovation/

Roughly a third of the 50-something of Harvard's Nobel laureates were immigrants by the way.
by evo_9 | 2025-05-23 02:26:36+00:00
Maybe so, but we’re teaching it these kinds of lines of thinking. And whether or not it creates these thoughts independently and creatively on its own, over the long lifetime of the systems we are the ones introducing dangerous data sets that could eventually cause us as a species harm. Again, I understand that fiction is just fiction, but if that’s the model that these are being trained off of intentionally or otherwise, then that is the model that they will pursue in the future.
by stego-tech | 2025-05-23 02:27:11+00:00
There's some in the US, but they're often considered "luxury" and significantly more expensive than comparable housing because of their "convenience" factor.

Having never seen the movie myself, I can sympathize to the take in the linked article. Once I finally spent time in a major city as someone who grew up in more rural suburbia, I could see how entire buildings and districts "switched off" for certain parts of the day or week, disused, underutilized, and segmenting society off into neat little pockets of specific activities - just like suburbia does. It's cold and lifeless, compared to the "lived-in" feelings of more international metros (NYC springs to mind as the only American equivalent, and even that's disappearing one building at a time), and I could totally see why a rebellious artist (or several) might protest a building designed to operate for a third of the week just to remain lifeless the other two-thirds.
by cuttothechase | 2025-05-23 02:27:14+00:00
Is counting the number of pull requests a useful measure of engineering performance ergo product performance and company perf?

Isn't it more like a BS counter that keep incrementing and that is indicative of churn but nothing else reliably.

One of the most low effort, easily to game metric that can be skewed to show anything that the user wants to show.
by icpmacdo | 2025-05-23 02:28:17+00:00
"It feels like these new models are no longer making order of magnitude jumps, but are instead into the long tail of incremental improvements. It seems like we might be close to maxing out what the current iteration of LLMs can accomplish and we're into the diminishing returns phase."

SWE bench from ~30-40% to ~70-80% this year
by dgrin91 | 2025-05-23 02:28:28+00:00
This sounds like how PMS sometimes tout the number of tickets per sprint. It's not a relevant metric, and it's easily gamed

How many of those prs were small fixes? How many went to low used services, or services only used internally?

They clearly have strong set of tooling for dev ops stuff, and I do believe that stripe has strong technical chops, but this number does not show that they are delivering value. It just shows they are delivery something... Somewhere
by jdubs1984 | 2025-05-23 02:28:29+00:00
This isn’t a dedicated device for something a phone app replaced though…assuming it even is a pocket or wearable way to interact with chatgpt…it’s going to need some sort of cell/data service and replace an app that already exists with a whole other device.

I also am rolling back in certain areas, like writing instead of phone notes and such, but the idea of a wearable or portable chat bot device makes zero sense to me. It’s an added cost and yet another thing to lug around.

As it turns out though nobody seems to know _why_ they hired Ive or what they intend him to make.
by oefrha | 2025-05-23 02:28:46+00:00
Plus if you want to use functions inside queries, SQLite UDFs can be used from any language. E.g. for Node the better-sqlite3 binding has supported UDFs for ages; the new experimental node:sqlite also appears to have support[1][2], though I haven't used it. For Python UDFs are supported out of box. Etc. I can't see myself loading a js extension with a bundled engine exposing the same UDF capability when I can just use UDFs from the host language (which can be js with v8 already there) with access to whatever application state I want to expose, and arbitrary library code, rather than just the bare bones standard library shipped with QuickJS. What's the use case? Use rather awkward js functions in the sqlite3 CLI?

[1] https://nodejs.org/api/sqlite.html#databasefunctionname-opti...

[2] https://nodejs.org/api/sqlite.html#databaseaggregatename-opt...
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-05-23 02:28:47+00:00
There sort of is, but you can't do anything with it, because you essentially have no user space utilities?

For all of the crap that people gave the term "GNU/Linux" it's even more true today considering there are Linux-based operating systems that don't use GNU utilities.

gjsman-1000 talks about "design flaws" in Linux above, but Linux is just the kernel. There is no "Linux" operating system, despite everyone, and even Linus probably? using that term.

If you call booting init and getting a black screen "an operating system," well... that's cool I guess.

I doubt Linus ever talks to the GTK people in any meaningful way, or any other desktop environment authors. So, what design flaws?

Do you call a ladder a badly designed scaffold because it doesn't have a horizontal platform? No, it's just something entirely different all together.
by rst | 2025-05-23 02:28:48+00:00
You might want to be more specific by what you mean by "modern", because there were certainly machines with demand-paged virtual memory before the VAX. It was introduced on the Manchester Atlas in 1962; manufacturers that shipped the feature included IBM (on the 360/67 and all but the earliest machines in the 370 line), Honeywell (6180), and, well... DEC (later PDP-10 models, preceding the VAX).
by brudgers | 2025-05-23 02:29:14+00:00
we're paying ReplIt $1500 now

In a lot of organizations, it is pretty easy to burn a significant multiple of $1500 switching systems you use 0% of because the business does not stick.

What I mean is the question reads (to me) as if the only motivations for switching are irritation with the marketing and not finding additional value in the new features.

That might not exhaust the list of actual problems, but those are the only ones I can suss from the question. If you were going to build rather than buy, maybe they might make a better business case. Good luck.
by m463 | 2025-05-23 02:29:18+00:00
That reminds me of a visit to my eye doctor that required dilating my eyes. I was fortunate that it was at the end of the day, near sunset.

I remember walking around later after the sun had gone down, but my eyes were dilated. Around the outdoor lighting and porch lights, I could see everything. It was like I had superpowers and could see in the dark.
by comp_throw7 | 2025-05-23 02:29:29+00:00
I think this post is sort of confused because, centrally, the reason "AI Alignment" is a thing people talk about is because the problem, as originally envisioned, was to figure out how to avoid having superintelligent AI kill everyone. For a variety of reasons the term no longer refers primarily to that core problem, so the reason so many things that look like engineering problems have that label is mostly a historical artifact.
by ToddLevin | 2025-05-23 02:29:56+00:00
There's nothing remotely deceptive. Everybody understands there is a publicly available printed pre-auction estimate, and everybody understands that there is a reserve existing, only known to the consigner and the auction house, which can be no higher than the low pre-auction estimate. This is all clearly laid out in the auction house's publicly available terms and conditions, which also lay out every single one of these terms (and everything else applicable), what all the different terms mean, and how the auctioneer may and/or may not operate under those specific and crystal clear rules when running the auction. Everything is completely transparent. Now - if you go to an auction, and you don't read the publicly available terms and conditions, then perhaps yes, something might seem deceptive to you – but the reality is you're an idiot for not informing yourself of the readily-available rules and easy-to-understand laws and regulations under which the auction operates. At that point, it's not on the auction house at all, it's on you – caveat emptor.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-23 02:30:07+00:00
Every parent encounters this dilemma. In order to ensure your child can protect itself, you have to teach them about all the dangers of the world. Isolating the child from the dangers only serves to make them more vulnerable. It is an irony that defending one's self from the horrifying requires making a representation of it inside ourselves.

Titration of the danger, and controlled exposure within safer contexts seems to be the best solution anyone's found.
by tomhow | 2025-05-23 02:30:51+00:00
Yes I'm a moderator here. These politics-based threads are the most difficult for us to manage, because, whilst mainstream politics stories are generally considered to be off topic here, if a story contains "significant new information" and the weight of community sentiment supports having a thread about it, we'll yield - which means turning off the flags and flamewar penalties and spending much of the day moderating it. But then too many people treat the presence of a political topic on the front page as an open door to post whatever they want, without any regard for the guidelines at all. Then we have to spend time adjudicating between different people making accusations against other community members about breaking the guidelines, when, really, the entire thread is against the guidelines, so the whole matter is kind of moot.

> I only ever get flagged on HN when I ask clarifying questions on threads like these

We can't know exactly why people flag things, but it may be because it comes across as stirring up controversy with plausible deniability. It looks like you're trying to bait another user into making a comment that is controversial and could be attacked (or considered to be breaking the guidelines), whilst being seen as being a neutral participant yourself.

Of course we can't know your true intention, all we can know is the consequences of this kind of conduct when we see it.

So, given that you seem to care about the guidelines, which we appreciate, we ask you to demonstrate a sincere intent to observe them yourself and also to avoid baiting others into breaking them.
by monero-xmr | 2025-05-23 02:31:00+00:00
If you run a trucking company, or a retail business, or a food company, etc. I believe you can understand to a fairly detailed level the logistics and “secret sauce” involved that makes the business tick, even if you are not the core employees operating with the skills and expertise.

But if you are a non-technical CEO and your core business is, say, enterprise SaaS software, you don’t fundamentally understand what the heck is going on, and if you have a key deadline and blow it, don’t really understand why. So if a new VP says they can cut your costs dramatically by offshoring everything to India, etc., or replace half these expensive engineers with AI, it seems as plausible as anything else. Especially given the fawning press and hype, and salesmen pitching you all day.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-23 02:31:17+00:00
I have never seen anything resembling emergent behaviour, as you call it, in my own or anyone else's use. It occasionally appears emergent to people with a poor conception of how intelligence, or computers, or creativity, or a particular domain, works, sure.

But I must push back, there really seem to have been no incidences where something like emergent behaviour has been observed. They're able to generate text fluently, but are dumb and unaware at the same time, from day one. If someone really thinks they've solid evidence of anything other than this, please show us.

This is coming from someone who has watched commentary on quite a sizeable number of stockfish TCEC chess games over the last five years, marvelling in the wonders of thie chess-super-intelligence. I am not against appreciating amazing intelligences, in fact I'm all for it. But here, while the tool is narrowly useful, I think there's zero intelligence, and nothing of that kind has "emerged".
by alexjplant | 2025-05-23 02:31:24+00:00
> explosion of DevOps bullshit

The fact that somebody can "be DevOps" or work as a "DevOps Engineer" is exemplary of the fact that DevOps as conceived and DevOps as practiced are two very different things. The former would be engineers taking ownership of deployment, collaborating horizontally, and practicing tight feedback loops. DevOps as practiced is the time-honored tradition of a dev team and a cloud team playing tennis with a grenade that is a questionably-stable SaaS that people volley back and forth with rackets like "let's roll the pods" or "it worked on my machine".

> people with no understanding of Linux got jobs

This happens in every industry with every job title. I've worked with Senior+ developers that mutated React props, didn't know how to use Git, couldn't read Java stack traces, etc. I myself have been paid money to do a myriad of things that I have no business doing (like singing or playing guitar or mixing cocktails). It's the way of the world.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-23 02:31:43+00:00
I hope they're not using GitHub; my inbox is unusable from GitHub talking to itself and choosing to stand next to me at the party, and we're not [currently] doing anywhere near that volume

I've gotten some handle on it by some gmail filters but holy hell if you want to make sure I don't see something, smuggle it in a From:github.com email

With the new Copilot makes PRs, I could easily imagine getting to 1145 PRs per day, of which 45 will actually make it across the line and not be filled with horseshit
by somat | 2025-05-23 02:31:53+00:00
As compared to to what? where C and K are 273.15 apart.

But joking aside, While you do point out some of the worst offences, 5280 foot in mile is a special sort of stupid. I do wish we would have metriced around base 12 like a lot of the old measurements were instead of base 10.

Base 10 sort sucks for quantities. I mean, we are all used to it and it works well enough, and having a proper base system is far far better than the alternative coughs roman numbers. but base 10 is a quirk of chance, we very nearly ended up with base 12, and I think we would have been slightly richer for it.

And before you give me the tired ol "BuT yOu HaVe TeN FiNgErS", no, you have 8 fingers and 3 bones per finger, a very common early way of counting for them who had to actually count large numbers(sheep herders) was to use your thumb to mark the spot and count on your finger bones, 12 on one hand, and 12 on the other, this is why 144 (a gross) is so common.

Update: I take back what I said about the mile.

/usr/games/factor 5280 5280: 2 2 2 2 2 3 5 11

It was clearly an enlightened choice, again too bad we are not employing base 12 to really take advantage of it.
by perihelions | 2025-05-23 02:32:43+00:00
> "and the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform algorithm"

Supposedly, at Garwin's scheming, one of the creators wasn't aware the immediate application of the algorithms they were optimizing was nuclear weapons,

> "Tukey reportedly came up with the idea during a meeting of President Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee discussing ways to detect nuclear-weapon tests in the Soviet Union by employing seismometers located outside the country. These sensors would generate seismological time series. However, analysis of this data would require fast algorithms for computing DFTs due to the number of sensors and length of time. This task was critical for the ratification of the proposed nuclear test ban so that any violations could be detected without need to visit Soviet facilities.[4][5] Another participant at that meeting, Richard Garwin of IBM, recognized the potential of the method and put Tukey in touch with Cooley. However, Garwin made sure that Cooley did not know the original purpose. Instead, Cooley was told that this was needed to determine periodicities of the spin orientations in a 3-D crystal of helium-3."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooley–Tukey_FFT_algorithm#His...
by ToddLevin | 2025-05-23 02:33:25+00:00
Just for clarity - this was not an "enhanced hammer" deal. It was a simple fact that the consigner set their reserve at $70 million, and the consigner would not lower their reserve, even knowing the risk that the work would publicly fail at that level. An enhanced hammer deal is an entirely different situation, and it applies to third-party guarantees and/or irrevocable bids (know as IBs) – and neither apply in the specific situation...
by DrewADesign | 2025-05-23 02:33:30+00:00
The movie contains a lot of backstory that describes who they are, the economic forces in Providence at the time, and what lead them to do this.

You could speculate, automatically snapping to the least charitable assumptions, or you could actually watch it and find out.

(Everything in the apartment was purchased, and they anonymously gave money to the mall management every month by slipping an envelope of cash under the office door saying "thanks for the utilities.")
by Aziell | 2025-05-23 02:33:41+00:00
I used to work with someone like this. At first, he really wanted to do things properly. Over time, he gave up. Not because he was lazy, but because he felt like effort didn’t really matter.

Copilot’s fine for boilerplate. But lean on it too much, and you stop thinking. Stop thinking long enough, and you stop growing. That’s the real cost.
by m463 | 2025-05-23 02:33:44+00:00
I'm reminded of the Radio Shack infrared sensor card I have somewhere.

It works like those glow-in-the-dark stickers that you charge up under a light, then take into a dark room to glow.

Except the IR card would not glow until hit by infrared, like from your TV remote. Then it would light up red as the "charged up" energy would kick infrared up into the visible spectrum. (or probably vice versa)
by itake | 2025-05-23 02:33:44+00:00
yeahs, the offline caching got terrible. its text that (rarely) changes. I have no idea why the mobile app couldn't just remember what each url was, even if it was 6 weeks stale.

Also, Pocket couldn't create reader views for many websites (like hacker news discussions), which means the TTS was useless.

Oh and the TTS required an internet connection.
by cherrycherry98 | 2025-05-23 02:34:04+00:00
This has always been an issue with Gecko and the Mozilla codebase. It was a massive blow to the Mozilla community when Safari was released using KHTML instead of Gecko. Google then adopted WebKit (itself an evolution of KHTML) for Chrome, another slight for Mozilla. This despite prominent ex Mozilla developers like Lisa Melton, David Hyatt, Ben Goodger, and others being involved early on with Safari and Chrome development. Even Brendan Eich went with Chromium and not Mozilla technology for Brave.
by agoodusername63 | 2025-05-23 02:34:04+00:00
I think theres still lots of room for huge jumps in many metrics. It feels like not too long ago that DeepSeek demonstrated that there was value in essentially recycling (Stealing, depending on your view) existing models into new ones to achieve 80% of what the industry had to offer for a fraction of the operating cost.

Researchers are still experimenting, I haven't given up hope yet that there will be multiple large discoveries that fundamentally change how we develop these LLMs.

I think I agree with the idea that current common strategies are beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel though. We're starting to slow down a tad.