MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by klabb3 | 2025-06-21 00:28:19+00:00
> Programmers aren't deterministic either.

No but programs are. An LLM can be a programmer too, but it’s not a program the way we want and expect programs to behave: deterministically. Even if a programmer could perform a TLS handshake manually very fast, ignoring the immense waste of energy, the program is a much better engineering component, simply because it is deterministic and does the same thing every time. If there’s a bug, it can be fixed, and then the bug will not re-appear.

> If I ask ten programmers to come up with a solution to the same problem, I'm not likely to get ten identical copies.

Right, but you only want one copy. If you need different clients speaking with each other you need to define a protocol and run conformance tests, which is a lot of work. It’s certainly doable, but you don’t want a different program every time you run it.

I really didn’t expect arguing for reproducibility in engineering to be controversial. The primary way we fix bugs is by literally asking for steps to reproduction. This is not possible when you have a chaos agent in the middle, no matter how good. The only reasonable conclusion is to treat AI systems as entirely different components and isolate them such that you can keep the boring predictability of mechanistic programs. Basically separating engineering from the alchemy.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-06-21 00:28:39+00:00
Few shows are relentless about it.

In the future, everything will be like that vapid chicken wing podcast (the one where they bring on an interesting, talented person and then waste half an hour interviewing her about sriracha)

So Ira Glass will be narrating This American Life while simultaneously reviewing different varieties of Doritos, etc.

...or the producers of The Rest is History will add the Planters Peanut Man as a third host

...or Marques Brownlee will review every product in relation to how well it works with Bose headphones
by eddythompson80 | 2025-06-21 00:29:14+00:00
Yep. It's been pretty funny actually both here but especially on r/youtube.

Pretty much since YouTube started cracking down on adblockers, r/youtube top post Every. Single. Day. is usually someone complaining that they just got hit with "adblock detected" and comments split between "Yeah it sucks, hit me last month" and "Huh, uBlock Origin works fine for me. I must be super smart. YouTube can't defeat me"
by legitster | 2025-06-21 00:30:17+00:00
Analyzing anonymous traffic patterns are arguably one of the least problematic uses of this technology. It's at an order of magnitude less problematic than ordinary traffic or speed cameras at least.

The thing that bugs me more is the obsession with finding and punishing speeders. The average driver is simply responding to their environment, and areas of chronic speeding is symptom of an engineering mistake, not a crime spree.

A lot of speed limits are arbitrary and not evidence-based. And the finances of ticketing give State Troopers perverse incentives to pursue regressive policing.
by ASalazarMX | 2025-06-21 00:30:25+00:00
The comforts of modern life will take a very significant hit if we really want to undo our polluting way of life. It can be done, but many people will vote with their wallets to keep those comforts as long as possible, and companies will fight to earn that profit as long as they can.

I think nothing short of a global catastrophe will change people's minds.
by frollogaston | 2025-06-21 00:30:31+00:00
Yeah, I was reading this and thinking wut, TV sucks. Like half the time watching a show (most likely a rerun) is ads, even if it's a paid cable channel. And even after that 2010 law, pretty sure the ads are louder than the shows. And the ads are even worse nowadays because the ads exclusively target old people, so 90% are drugs or gold-buying scams. Somehow the cable STBs are super laggy nowadays too, like they rewrote the video decoder in Javascript or something, cause it used to be fine.

The only thing I miss at all is being able to leave a TV on and have it keep playing something reasonable, not convince itself that watching a car review means I want to watch a screaming kid trolling in Minecraft followed by the Syrian Civil War.
by eitally | 2025-06-21 00:31:10+00:00
My family, too. My oldest is hoping to cover at least some college costs as a middle distance runner and my riding 9th grade daughter is a starter on a top team in a top league and also wants to play collegiately.

We are clear with both of them that sports are not a career and they need skills and experience beyond competition to set them up for a comfortable life. The House deal makes it even harder for all athletes outside of basketball and football (excepting a very select few additional sports at specific schools, like LSU baseball or BYU track & field or UVA swimming, etc).
by jiveturkey | 2025-06-21 00:31:33+00:00
seems a bit of a joke. it's written in C, which I found surprising for something trying to be novel in 2025, with the label `security-first`.

it's v0.5 but it doesn't have a single authz primitive AFAICT.

I guess I liked tempo.

> Claude AI Military Grade - Navy SEAL Level Security

ok. (spoiler: there's no AI here)
by tristan957 | 2025-06-21 00:33:46+00:00
The state government in Texas is a complete disaster. Government overreach in this state is incredible to behold. Corruption goes all the way to the top.

Greg Abbott's largest donor is someone in Vermont that owns a private school system, so what did Greg Abbott do about it? He funded Republican opponents in the primaries to remove those who voted against his school voucher bill last session. He held billions of dollars back from Texas students and school staff as an incentive for people to vote the bill this session, and of course it passed.

Dan Patrick's largest donor is the tobacco and alcohol lobby, so what did he force down the legislature this session? Making THC illegal even though something like 70% of the state wants it legalized.

I can safely say that you should not move to Texas.
by dv_dt | 2025-06-21 00:37:42+00:00
Looking it the first link https://www.lesswrong.com/w/epistemology - it has frankly a comically shallow description of the topic, same with https://www.lesswrong.com/w/priors. In just about every discussion, I may be just the entirely wrong audience, but to me they don't even begin to address the narrow topic of choice, let alone form competent building blocks to form any solid world view.

I support anyone trying to form rational pictures of the universe and humanity. If the LessWrong community approach seems to make sense and is enriching to your understanding of the world then I am happy for you. But, every time I try to take a serious delve into LessWrong, and I have done it multiple times over the years, it sets off my cult/scam alerts.
by lacker | 2025-06-21 00:38:13+00:00
It's not impossible, that's the whole point of a theorem prover. You write a computation, but you don't actually have to run the computation. Simply typechecking the computation is enough to prove that its result is correct.

For example, in a theorem prover, you can write an inductive proof that x^2 + x is even for all x. And you can write this via a computation that demonstrates that it's true for zero, and if it's true for x, then it's true for x + 1. However, you don't need to run this computation in order to prove that it's true for large x. That would be computationally intractable, but that's okay. You just have to typecheck to get a proof.
by nomel | 2025-06-21 00:40:23+00:00
Again, it's a system. Anything learned that prevents that system from literally disintegrating is of value to all components of the system.

I'm sorry, but fittings don't just leak. It's not something that "just happens". A leaking fitting means a design or process flaw exists, and must be fixed, or the whole thing blows up again. It may not be interesting to you, but it's now very very interesting to every other team working at SpaceX, who just had all their shit blown to pieces. It's a (I hope this is obvious to you) critical component of the system, just as critical as, say, the control system and fuel pumps. Serious innovation may be required (yes, things like gaskets still involve PhD's), and was probably already required.

It's really interesting seeing software perspectives of a hardware world. A mech-e would have a stroke reading your comments.
by quantadev | 2025-06-21 00:42:02+00:00
Sure it is. Especially when talking about relative sizes of existing anatomy rather than completely new anatomy.

For example: Women's feet have gotten considerably larger over the past several decades. For example, in the 1960s, the average size was around a 6.5, in the 1970s it was 7.5, and today it's often cited as between 8.5 and 9. That's a whopping 30% (according to Gemini) increase in them whoppers, in my lifetime alone.

I think it's well know also that when there's a certain type of environmental condition that puts different stressors on something evolution can happen only in a few generations. Look it up. There's countless examples of rapid evolution that's well known to happen.
by bavell | 2025-06-21 00:42:08+00:00
> Ie “use it or loose it” kind of vibe.

> That’s why one of the possible threats of AI is if one would “forget” how to reason. Or even worse: brain rewires itself to never being able to reason again.

The "WALL-E/Idiocracy"-ification of humanity. It won't get so bad that we lose our ability to reason, but we're definitely losing something. Perhaps it's just our inevitable evolution.
by sva_ | 2025-06-21 00:42:11+00:00
> Soon we’ll be told they are also present in the fruits and vegetables

Old news https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512...

> maybe even in milk

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-03458-7

https://journals.lww.com/kleu/fulltext/2024/17020/qualitativ...

> eggs

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35930965/
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-21 00:42:45+00:00
There wasn't a "theory" because this wasn't some garbage that aloof academics cooked up.

At the time thins were privatized (50s through 80s) the misalignment of incentives was plain as day obvious fact. People looked at <shuffles cards> New York City, and said "do not want" and they attempted to break the feedback loop between public agencies and the parties they were making work for and tried to resolve it by putting more of the decisions of what work needed to be done under the umbrella of the agencies doing it. With proper competition, this can work. But people like you have spent the last 70yr erecting barriers to competition and so in an environment where things are only ever getting bid on by the same few players the costs rise and the values go down.
by geor9e | 2025-06-21 00:42:51+00:00
I knew they were about to launch a new model, by how aggressively they were advertising the old stock at sale prices the last few weeks.

I won't be buying it though - I tried talking to Meta AI in voice mode from my phone, and it's response to anything STEM related is basically "tee hee I'm just an AI I cant do that". My current assignee to my phone's AI hardware button is microsoft's. I assume it's an OpenAI model, but it lets you speed their voice up, which I value greatly.
by econ | 2025-06-21 00:43:48+00:00
Have an agent monitor what is going on and raise dialogs explaining why something is not okay, question the need for something, have email or sms confirmation, extra passwords or bluntly refuse to do the destructive task right now (ask me again in 36 hours) Then, when you have the blood oath and the certifications, it can continue to monitor as an extra layer.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-06-21 00:45:48+00:00
> you can write an inductive proof that x^2 * (x^2 - 1) is divisible by 4 for all x

my friend you should either read the article more closely or think harder. he's not proving that the recurrence relation is correct (that would be meaningless - a recurrence relation is just given), he's proving that DP/memoization computes the same values as the recurrence relation.

the obvious indicator is that no property of any numbers is checked here - just that one function agrees with another:

theorem maxDollars_spec_correct : ∀ n, maxDollars n = maxDollars_spec n

this is the part that's undecidable (i should've said that instead of "impossible")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richardson%27s_theorem
by ConspiracyFact | 2025-06-21 00:46:39+00:00
There’s definitely a tension between having a low tolerance for crankery and being open to fresh perspectives. If I’m being charitable to the critics of Rationalism (big “r”), I suppose that they have encountered arguments from Rationalists that struck them as wrong specifically in a way that would have been avoided if the person making the argument had read any of the relevant literature.
by shaldengeki | 2025-06-21 00:49:59+00:00
> One of the AI 2027 authors joked to me in the comments on a recent article that “you may not like it but it's what peak AI forecasting performance looks like”. Well, I don’t like it, and if this truly is “peak forecasting”, then perhaps forecasting should not be taken very seriously. Maybe this is because I am a physicist, not a Rationalist. In my world, you generally want models to have strong conceptual justifications or empirical validation with existing data before you go making decisions based off their predictions: this fails at both.

This is really, really great. I hope it gets as many eyeballs on it as AI 2027 did.

The same post on the author's Substack is here: https://titotal.substack.com/p/a-deep-critique-of-ai-2027s-b...
by jtagliabuetooso | 2025-06-21 00:50:07+00:00
Mhmm, it doesn't resolve to empty but the full SecureFrame monitoring: https://security.bauplanlabs.com/#resources-b2152df0-4179-48... - if you wait a second, this is the entire report: https://www.loom.com/share/7cfc9c2f020645ddab2b1850b9c47619?...
by squigz | 2025-06-21 00:51:31+00:00
> Why should they serve you the video if you refuse your part of the agreement?

I've held the position that, if YT wants to, they can block me from their platform for using an adblocker, and I would have no moral ground to stand on.

However, that isn't what they do. They try to circumvent it. They try to make it technically impossible. They try to mislead users into thinking their extensions are malicious.
by jtagliabuetooso | 2025-06-21 00:51:51+00:00
Yeah, terms are confusing sometimes! "Data lakehouse" is weirdly enough a "technical term". The canonical reference is from CIDR https://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2021/papers/cidr2021_paper17.pdf, but we have our own version from VLDB https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.05368
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-06-21 00:52:00+00:00
The most pressing issue to me currently regarding LLMs is the blatant, flagrant change in tone of the "leadership/ownership" class towards employees.

It comes off as little other than thinly veiled contempt for the people that actually make the business function.

We've seen, most recently, Jassy come out and say "we're gonna need a lot less people", Zuckerberg doing his "replacing engineers" shtick on several occasions, all the commentary from the Anthropic CEO/Altman etc.

Even if none of this comes to pass, I've never witnessed such open "threats" in my lifetime.

I can't square this perspective with that of the LLM advocates that run to defend every legitimate criticism of LLM use--unless you're one of the aforementioned or in a similar position, why would you want to defend software that's primary purpose is to displace you?

They are literally telling you that's why they're investing in it. I don't get it.
by jhbadger | 2025-06-21 00:52:10+00:00
I used to work at a research institute that had two campuses on either coast and we had those "iPad on a stick" type telepresence robots so people on one coast could attend (physical meetings) on the other. They eventually went away because more and more meetings either became virtual or were hybrid-virtual physical and so a laptop could work just as well as telepresence.
by sandworm101 | 2025-06-21 00:52:35+00:00
No. Without any driver many devices will fall back to generic drivers. An old driver is usually far better than none. Think of a graphics card. With an out-of-date driver your screens should at least function at their designed resolution/number. With literally no driver, you will likely be back at VGA on a single screen. Have fund finding and updating drivers from a website in 640x480.
by ekimekim | 2025-06-21 00:53:25+00:00
Twitch puts the ads directly in the HLS stream, but as seperate segments from the content (a HLS stream is made of many small video files, on twitch they're about 2s long). They're trivial to recognize and filter out (they're actually explicitly tagged as ad segments) but it still won't serve you the actual stream you were trying to watch - the ad segments override it. The best you can do is just block until the first non-ad segment arrives.
by lurk2 | 2025-06-21 00:53:54+00:00
> but trying to dispute that the Tea Party was founded and fueled by an intense racism laser focused on Barack & Michelle Obama

The statement I replied to was:

> It was a visceral emotional response to the most powerful man on earth being a black man.

This isn’t true. The racists you’re describing were (literally) dying out by the time Obama was elected. The resurgence of white identity politics in America was a reaction to a series of riots (e.g. Ferguson, Baltimore, Kenosha, Seattle, Minneapolis), affirmative action policies in higher education as well as in the public and private sectors, and renewed activity in the grievance industry (e.g. Anita Sarkeesian, Ibram Kendi, etc.).
by godelski | 2025-06-21 00:54:17+00:00
I think you should have continued reading from where you quoted.

>> Aren't we trying to understand things? ***You can really only brute force new and better things if you are unable to understand. We can make so much more impact and work so much faster when we let understanding drive as much as outcome.***

I'm arguing that if you want to "deliver business units to increase shareholder value" that this is well aligned with "trying to understand things."

Think about it this way:

If you understand things: You can directly address shareholder concerns and adapt readily to market demands. You do not have to search, you already understand the solution space. If you do not understand things: You cannot directly address shareholder concerns and must search over the solution space to meet market demands.

Which is more efficient? It is hard to argue that search through an unknown solution space is easier than path optimization over a known solution space. Obviously this is the highly idealized case, but this is why I'm arguing that these are aligned. If you're in the latter situation you advantage yourself by trying to get to the former. Otherwise you are just blindly searching. In that case technical debt becomes inevitable and significantly compounds unless you get lucky. It becomes extremely difficult to pivot as the environment naturally changes around you. You are only advantaged by understanding, never harmed. Until we realize this we're going to continue to be extremely wasteful, resulting is significantly lower returns for shareholders or any measure of value.
by dh2022 | 2025-06-21 00:55:08+00:00
Yes and no. A large national firm like Starbucks has a national annual plan. However, this national plan is made up of a lot of little regional plans which are then combined together. This national plan is then executed. Execution relative to plan is assessed every quarter; and every quarter the plans (both national and regional) are adjusted. This assessment and these adjustments are done at both national level and also at regional level.
by jtagliabuetooso | 2025-06-21 00:55:34+00:00
Thanks for checking out bauplan (which also supports BYOC, so I guess it is indeed hostable by you in a sense!).

We've done quite a lot of open source in our life, at Bauplan (you can check our github), and before (you can check me ;-)), so the comment seems unfair!

We understand the importance of being clear on how the platform works, and for that we have a long series of blog posts and, if you're so inclined, quite a few peer-reviewed papers in top conferences, ranging from low-level memory optimizations (https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06151), columnar caching (https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08203), novel FaaS runtimes (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17465), pipeline reproducibility (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.13682) and more.

We are also always happy to chat about our tech choices if you're interested.
by saghm | 2025-06-21 00:56:37+00:00
I'm not sure how much sense this argument makes. Most of the big sports schools are public, and I'd argue the budgets for academics at public schools should come from the states they're in, not from donations. I don't think it's obvious that private universities are raising that much money from their sports programs, but I'm open to being convinced if you have sources indicating this isn't the case.

As an aside, I don't think telling people that they haven't thought of things sufficiently is a particularly effective way of convincing them. There are a lot of potential other reasons someone might not agree with your point of view, and it's a bit hypocritical to tell someone else they're "not thinking things through" when you haven't actually figured out the reasoning behind their opinions.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-06-21 00:59:07+00:00
My dad called me recently asking why some NBC web site told him he couldn't watch their videos with Edge unless he turned his adblocker off, when he hadn't installed one. It turns out Edge configures their builtin one aggressively by default. I'm happier to help him with tech support for overly aggressive ad blocking than the alternative.
by parineum | 2025-06-21 00:59:55+00:00
> 64% of Americans live within 2 miles of a public charging station.

If this includes AC chargers, leaving your car for 8 hours 2 miles away is an absolute pain.

If it doesn't, the question becomes are the chargers occupied? Are they operational?

Waiting at a gas station takes a minute, waiting at a charger takes 30.

I've been driving an EV for more than 5 years and pretending that charging isn't a significant hindrance to EV ownership is disingenuous. It's actually gotten worse because more EVs are on the road and the chargers haven't kept pace with the rising demand.
by sodality2 | 2025-06-21 01:00:21+00:00
> the agreement you make with YouTube is that you watch an ad in exchange for the video

I never made that agreement. And if some software on my computer somehow gets YouTube to deliver me the content anyway, that's not my fault. In my view, it's a cat and mouse game, they can do whatever they want to try to stop me, and vice versa. If they win, I won't complain; but if I do, so be it.
by acdha | 2025-06-21 01:00:43+00:00
> The racists you’re describing were (literally) dying out by the time Obama was elected. The resurgence of white identity politics in America was a reaction to a series of riots

This is both inaccurately describing the protests and also way off on timing – for example, Ferguson was 2014 but the white identity politics was on display before the first time he was elected.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-06-21 01:01:30+00:00
> Mostly because you don’t know if it’s correct unless you know SQL. It’s entirely too easy to get results that look correct but aren’t ...

This is the fundamental problem when attempting to use "GenAI" to make program code, SQL or otherwise. All one would have to do is substitute SQL with language/library of choice above and it would be just as applicable.