MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jamesharding | 2025-06-28 19:35:44+00:00
Thanks! My father being a pilot certainly played a large part, not in the sense that he forced me into it, but rather that I had the opportunity to sit on the jump seat as a kid (pre-9/11) and it planted the seed quite early.

After finishing my degree, British Airways had opened their cadet pilot scheme - windows of opportunity like that are usually short and infrequent, so I went for it! The nice this is that I can still code and keep up on the software engineering trends (what I tell myself while checking HN for the n-th time in a day) on the side, and I think it is also a safe set of skills to have in case I can no longer fly (pandemics, losing my medical, etc)
by nradov | 2025-06-28 19:35:50+00:00
You're missing the point. Those definitions you cite are only relevant to individuals or groups of people, not entire nation states. No one is claiming that imports are "bad" or proposing to do away with all food imports, but countries should be able to produce enough staple foodstuffs to meet the basic caloric and nutritional needs of their population. Otherwise they continue to exist only on the sufferance of others. Do you really believe that the UK could never, ever be blockaded again? Has history come to an end?

Besides the USA there are a number of countries which are at least mostly food secure including Canada, Russia, India, Brazil, France, Ukraine, Australia, and New Zealand. Some of those do depend on imports of fossil fuels and fertilizers to maintain production.
by fsckboy | 2025-06-28 19:35:53+00:00
english usage aside: you could accuse him of handwaving, but he's not complaining, so his comment is not "handwringing". you are complaining (about his comment) so your comment is closer to handwringing.

"find a better user agent" is not handwringing; "i can't find a better user agent" is handwringing.
by robomartin | 2025-06-28 19:37:29+00:00
> A study from 2019 showed that a moderate amount of language learning in adults does not boost things like executive function.

I guess these days a few paragraphs qualifies for an "in depth" article. No links to any of the sources referenced, except to one of their own pages. Not very useful.

That said, sure, as someone who speaks several languages and can mostly understand a few more, I think there are interesting insights gained by having this ability. For me, a lot of it has to do with, perhaps, less-than-verbal communication. Each culture has a certain way to communicate in person during conversations. Spanish spoken in Spain, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and Argentina, while different, also drag along non-verbal cues that are distinct in each culture. Same with English in various parts of the UK, US and other anglo-speaking countries. As much as some Canadians think themselves to be French, there are differences there as well with France. Non-verbal cues in the Arab world (and Middle East in general) are different as well. How you sit, move, pace, use your hands and gesticulate during in-person conversations are linked to both language and culture. Etc.

Who remembers the bar scene in Inglorious Basterds? Yup, very true. Instant communication.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86Ckh80mLlQ
by tforcram | 2025-06-28 19:37:29+00:00
I just had that conversation with a coworker last week, they started with 'I wonder if there is anyone left who isn't using AI daily?', and I had to reply with.. 'um well me actually'.

I only occasionally try it out for specific tasks and have never felt the inclination to try making it a part of any daily process, but his mindset was such that he couldn't perceive of anyone not wanting to fully dive in everyday and that those who didn't were missing out on significant value to their lives.
by gunnarmorling | 2025-06-28 19:37:45+00:00
The other day, I came across a blog post by someone I really value and it sounded very much like written by AI. So I decided to be very explicit and transparent about my own ways of using (and not using) AI for my blog: https://www.morling.dev/ai/.

TL,DR: I don't use it for writing (I want to say something original in my own voice), but I do use it for copy editing (improving wording, helping with title ideas, etc.).
by ahmedtd | 2025-06-28 19:38:15+00:00
It's not enabled by default, but you can --- gRPC Reflection:

* https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/blob/master/documentation/...

* https://grpc.io/docs/guides/reflection/

You can then use generic tools like grpc_cli or grpcurl to list available services and methods, and call them.
by chisleu | 2025-06-28 19:39:07+00:00
I did not say that I don't see the value in training juniors. I said that I don't have a need for them anymore. I can teach Claude in 1 API call what takes a day to walk a junior through.

Furthermore, I think we are going to find less and less work for Juniors to do because Seniors are blasting through code at a faster and faster pace now.

I'm not the only one saying that the entry level market is already getting trashed...
by Scarblac | 2025-06-28 19:40:11+00:00
I don't understand, surely if we assume ZFC is consistent then it's obvious that it won't halt? Even if its consistency can't be proven, neither can its inconsistency, so it won't halt. Or is that only provable outside of ZFC?

I guess it's also hard when we have an arbitrary Turing machine and have to prove that what it's doing isn't equilavent to trying to prove an undecibable statement.
by danenania | 2025-06-28 19:40:21+00:00
I think this gets at a major hurdle that needs to be overcome for truly human-level AGI.

Because the human brain is also non-deterministic. If you ask a software engineer the same question on different days, you can easily get different answers.

So I think what we want from LLMs is not determinism, just as that's not really what you'd want from a human. It's more about convergence. Non-determinism is ok, but it shouldn't be all over the map. If you ask the engineer to talk through the best way to solve some problem on Tuesday, then you ask again on Wednesday, you might expect a marginally different answer considering they've had time to think on it, but you'd also expect quite a lot of consistency. If the second answer went in a completely different direction, and there was no clear explanation for why, you'd probably raise an eyebrow.

Similarly, if there really is a single "right" answer to a question, like something fact-based or where best practices are extremely well established, you want convergence around that single answer every time, to the point that you effectively do have determinism in that narrow scope.

LLMs struggle with this. If you ask an LLM to solve the same problem multiple times in code, you're likely to get wildly different approaches each time. Adding more detail and constraints to the prompt helps, but it's definitely an area where LLMs are still far behind humans.
by skydhash | 2025-06-28 19:40:40+00:00
I forgot where I read it, but the reason that natural languages works so well for communication is because the terms are labels for categories instead of identifiers. You can concatenate enough to refer to a singleton, but for the person in front, it can be many items or an empty set. Some labels may even be nonexistent in their context

So when we want deterministic process, we invent a set of labels where each is a singleton. Alongside them is a set of rules that specify how to describe their transformation. Then we invented machines that can interpret those instructions. The main advantage was that we know the possible outputs (assuming a good reliability) before we even have to act.

LLMs don't work so well in that regard, as while they have a perfect embedding of textual grammar rules, they don't have a good representation for what those labels refers to. All they have are relations between labels and how likely are they used together. But not what are the sets that those labels refer to and how the items in those sets interact.
by hyperpape | 2025-06-28 19:40:58+00:00
This ignores the fact that it is not so easy to find natural interesting statements that are independent of ZFC.

Statements that are independent of ZFC are a dime a dozen when doing foundations of mathematics, but they're not so common in many other areas of math. Harvey Friedman has done interesting work on finding "natural" statements that are independent of ZFC, but there's dispute about how natural they are. https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1924/what-are-some-reason...

In fact, it turns out that a huge amount of mathematics does not even require set theory, it is just a habit for mathematicians to work in set theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_mathematics.
by refulgentis | 2025-06-28 19:41:37+00:00
I think you're touching on something important here.

OP isn't making a ad hominem fallacy in a logical argument sense - it's not saying "Aaronson is wrong because he's not a frontline researcher."

But you're absolutely right to feel uncomfortable with their approach. There's something off-putting about dismissing someone's reporting of research developments, even if you prefer more comprehensive coverage, or there's more interesting things to say.

The thing is, if that's ad hominem, so is any recommendation preferring one second-hand reporting over another -- ex. "if you want the actual news, read Tucker, not Krugman" isn't an ad hominem towards Krugman.

Another example we see often on HN: saying "you should read the actual paper instead of this pop science" is a quite frequent, quite agreeable, and yet dull, contribution on say, a Quanta article. Yet, I imagine we agree this isn't an ad hominem.

The real issue might be that OP conflates two different things: being a primary researcher versus being a good science communicator who accurately reports on others' work.

Both roles have value, and questioning whether someone has filled one role doesn't necessarily invalidate their ability to fill the other.

(this helped me understand my odd frustration with the dull comments on science articles: I emotionally engage with it as being mean / out of bounds, but its true, and in reality, what I'm frustrated with is there could always be a more detailed article, or even paper, but yet we all must publish)
by dangus | 2025-06-28 19:41:42+00:00
The last two paragraphs sure contorted my face into an…interesting expression.

I’m confused at how Zuck has proven himself to be a particularly dynamic and capable CEO compared to peers. Facebook hasn’t had new product success outside of acquisitions in at least a decade. The fact that a newcomer like TikTok came and ate Instagram’s lunch is downright embarrassing. Meta Quest is a cash-bleeding joke of a side quest that Zuck thought justified changing the name of the company.

The kind of customer trustworthiness gap between Meta and competitors like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon is astounding, and I would consider it a major failure by Meta’s management that was entirely preventable. [1]

Microsoft runs their own social network (LinkedIn) and Google reads all your email and searches and they are somehow trusted more than twice as much as Meta. This trust gap actively prevents Meta from launching new products in areas that require trustworthiness.

Personally I don’t think Meta is spending $14B to hire a single guy, they’re spending $14B in hopes of having a stake in some other company that can make a successful new product - because by now they know that they can’t have success on their own.

[1] https://allaboutcookies.org/big-tech-trust
by bo1024 | 2025-06-28 19:42:31+00:00
Many replies don't seem to understand Godel and independence (and one that might is heavily downvoted). Cliff notes:

* ZFC is a set of axioms. A "model" is a structure that respects the axioms.

* By Godel, we know that ZFC proves a statement if and only if the statement is true in all models of ZFC.

* Therefore, the statement "BB(748) is independent of ZFC" is the same as the statement "There are two different models of ZFC where BB(748) are two different numbers.

* We can take one of these to be the "standard model"[1] that we all think of when we picture a Turing Machine. However, the other would be a strange "non-standard" model that includes finite "natural numbers" that are not in the set {0,1,2,3,...} and it includes Turing Machines that halt in "finite" time that we would not say halt at all in the standard model.

* So BB(748) is indeed a number as far as the standard model is concerned, the problem only comes from non-standard models.

TL;DR this is more about the fact that ZFC axioms allow weird models of Turing Machines that don't match how we think Turing Machines usually work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_model_of_arithmet...
by tromp | 2025-06-28 19:42:49+00:00
People on the bbchallenge Discord server are keen to speculate on how many Turing Machine states are needed to surpass Graham's Number, which is vastly larger than the 2^^2^^2^^9 achieved by the latest BB(6) champion.

We know from the functional busy beaver [1] that Graham behaviour can come surprisingly early; a 49-bit lambda term suffices. There are only 77519927606 closed lambda terms of at most that size [2], compared to 4^12*23836540=399910780272640 unique 6-state Turing Machines [3].

With the achievement of pentation in only 6 states, several people now believe that 7 states should suffice to surpass Graham's. I would still find that rather surprising. A few days ago, I made a large bet with one of them on whether we would see proof of BB(7)>Graham's within the next 10 years.

What do people here think?

[1] https://oeis.org/A333479

[2] https://oeis.org/A114852

[3] https://oeis.org/A107668
by ronsor | 2025-06-28 19:43:05+00:00
1. I'm OK with no GPL if there's no copyright, because then proprietary programs can be copied and reverse engineered without restrictions from law or EULAs.

2. I generally don't like the BSL.

3. No comment. I think OSS projects that exist incidentally versus being the company's main product have always been more reliable (and less susceptible to the company pivoting to closed-only offerings).

4. Copyright has perhaps been the most evil in the music industry; books, less so. I'd rather not even talk about movies or TV right now. Nonetheless, I'd tolerate an extremely limited duration copyright, if no copyright at all isn't an option.

5. Trademarks are mostly fine, because they're primarily supposed to serve customers, not the companies. I'd like to get rid of patents now, however.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-06-28 19:43:17+00:00
What is "good for one's brain" (apart from proper nutrition and absence of concussions) is a strong education and healthy lifelong social interactions. Human language is essential for these interactions. Having multiple human languages opens more books, interactions, and cultures.

The opposite is to remain closed. This is a dangerous state of mind and culture.

From TFA:

all these studies take for granted the uncontroversial mental superpower that you get from language study: being able to talk to people you could not have otherwise.

Not just to talk to people, but to unlock an understanding of their culture and perspectives.

Talking to more people in more contexts is a practical affordance: having more tools in the shop means being able to handle new and different types of problems effectively. People solve problems working together with people.

Having the cognitive adaptability to use new and different tools is certainly a valuable quality. We can nurture it as a learning objective, but it may may not be as universalisable as we have hoped. That said, the cost of not trying to educate people is to fail even worse.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-28 19:44:06+00:00
> these are clearly illegal orders and MUST be refused by any IDF soldier who listened during training.

They must train them differently these days. Multiple IDF soldiers have reported being asked to fire on their own comrades circumstantially: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive

I suppose that's the sort of trouble you should expect staffing an army with hardline theocratic officers and conscripted civilian infantry.
by waveforms | 2025-06-28 19:44:07+00:00
it is. There are many websites and applications that I use, like wikipedia and linux / kde that could help if they picked an application like Mastodon and promoted it on their site. I only use social media about once a month so I am far from expert but an ad supported open source facebook clone that stayed non profit by sending its profits to other open source sites would be ideal.
by goosedragons | 2025-06-28 19:44:08+00:00
I have zero student loans FYI. Never had any either. Nor do I have a lesbian dance theory degree. I have been lucky not to need them. I don't think you're engaging in good faith.

My questions are related to get you to realize there are things you probably use every day funded through taxes, that there are members of society that don't use those things or benefit from them but still pay for them.

People shouldn't be bound to debt because the second they legally turn 18 they get roped into financial matters they absolutely don't have the experience to fully comprehend. Nor are they fortune tellers that can tell if the in demand degree they are starting now will be still be in 4 years. Other debt can be discharged through bankruptcy. Yet, not student loans. Why are other bad investments treated differently?

Not everyone graduates high school either, yet we bare the costs of the personal investments of everyone that does. Education is both personal and an investment in society.
by Xcelerate | 2025-06-28 19:44:17+00:00
> obviously we could simply take every true sentence of Peano arithmetic as an axiom to obtain a consistent and complete system

If you’re talking about every true sentence in the language of PA, then not all such sentences are derivable via the theory of PA. If you are talking about the theorems of PA, then these are missing an infinite number of true statements in the language of PA.

Harvey Friedman’s “grand conjecture” is that virtually every theorem that working mathematicians actually publish can already be proved in Elementary Function Arithmetic (much weaker than PA in fact). So the majority of mathematicians are not pushing the boundaries of the existing foundational theories of mathematics, although there is certainly plenty of activity regardless.
by d_silin | 2025-06-28 19:44:34+00:00
Any time I see such results from computation complexity theory, I realize that any current zeitgeist of "super-intelligent AI are gods" is complete bullshit.

You can convert every atom of observable Universe into a substrate for supercomputer, you can harness energies of supermassive black holes to power it, but running a humble BB(6) to halting state would be forever out of its reach.
by charcircuit | 2025-06-28 19:44:36+00:00
It's not about addiction. It's about providing value.

>The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.”

It's more like limiting themselves to just sharing a single photo per day is limiting to how much value they can provide users and advertisers.

>Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and X aren't neutral tools. They're carefully crafted slot machines engineered to get you hooked. Pull to refresh. Tap to like. Scroll forever. Random rewards. Notifications timed to spike your cortisol. The same behavioral loops that addict gamblers now hook children and adults alike.

This is quite a stretch. Users finding immense value is not the same as addiction.

>Subscription models, cooperatives, or public funding could prioritize user wellbeing over engagement metrics.

Even if YouTube forced people to have premium they would still optimize for engagement. Loading up the home page and getting terrible recommendations is a terrible experience. Finding the best content for user provides the most value.

>Instead of measuring daily active users and time-on-platform, what if platforms were evaluated on user wellbeing, relationship quality, or real-world connections facilitated? What if we measured social platforms like we measure hospitals?

Feel free to use those metrics if you want, but most people will continue to use the apps that provide them the most value.
by jenadine | 2025-06-28 19:45:14+00:00
In Rust you know there is no memory issue because there is no unsafe block. In C you don't know if there is no memory issue, there are many way to write a hello world that has memory issue.

char hello[5] = "Hello";

Oops, forgot the \0, memory issue when printing that string.

Even complex driver in rust will have very little amount of unsafe because of correct use of (often zero cost) abstractions. And it is much less mental drain to check only that, than when every single line is a minefield that could hide undefined behavior
by afro88 | 2025-06-28 19:45:47+00:00
The author is missing the bit that the LLM provides: automatically mapping input parameters to things the user wants to do, and responses to the way the UI displays them.

Take out the LLM and you're not that far away from existing protocols and standards. It's not plugging your app into any old MCP and it just works (like the USB-C example).

But, it is a good point that the hype is getting a lot of apps and services to offer APIs in a universal protocol. That helps.
by packetlost | 2025-06-28 19:45:49+00:00
I don't really buy that shell / awk is "too weak" to deal with JSON, the ecosystem of tools is just fairly immature as most of the shells common tools predate JSON by at least a decade. `jq` being a pretty reasonable addition to the standard set of tools included in environments by default.

IMO the real problem is that JSON doesn't work very well at as a because it's core abstraction is objects. It's a pain to deal with in pretty much every statically typed non-object oriented language unless you parse it into native, predefined data structures (think annotated Go structs, Rust, etc.).
by sltkr | 2025-06-28 19:46:34+00:00
My standard code for doing this looks like this:

#include <algorithm> #include <array> #include <random> std::mt19937 InitializeRng() { std::array<unsigned int, 624> seed_data; std::random_device dev; std::generate_n(seed_data.data(), seed_data.size(), std::ref(dev)); std::seed_seq seq(std::begin(seed_data), std::end(seed_data)); return std::mt19937(seq); }

This generates seed_seq with 19968 bits of random data, which is enough for the 19937 bits of Mersenne Twister internal state.

Note that 19668 bits of random data is overkill; something like 256 or 128 bits would probably enough for practical purposes. But I believe there is no real need to limit the amount of data extracted from a random source. Modern operating systems are pretty good at generating large amounts of random data quickly. But if this is a concern, just change 624 to 4/8/16/32 for 128/256/512/1024 bits of entropy. In practice, I don't think you'll notice a difference either in randomness or initialization speed.

edit: also, if performance is a concern, consider changing mt19937 to mt19937_64, which is the 64-bit variant of mt19937 that is incompatible (generates different numbers) but is almost twice as fast on 64-bit platforms (i.e. most platforms today).
by akavi | 2025-06-28 19:47:24+00:00
> All they have are relations between labels and how likely are they used together. But not what are the sets that those labels refer to and how the items in those sets interact.

Why would "membership in a set" not show up as a relationship between the items and the set?

In fact, it's not obvious to me that there's any semantic meaning not contained in the relationship between labels.