MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by layer8 | 2025-06-12 00:45:13+00:00
The many-worlds theory says that the time-evolution of the (universal) wave function according to the Schrödinger equation is what's real. Different "slices" ("branches") of the wave function correspond to different "worlds". (A "world" is basically defined by what is quantum-entangled together.) The wave function thus decomposes into the different worlds.

Collapse theories, in contrast, state that at specific points in time (the "measurements"), the wave function stops following the Schrödinger equation, and instead collapses to a single slice/branch/world, thus upending the natural proliferation of branches implied by the normal time-evolution of the wave function according to the Schrödinger equation.

Even in many-worlds, however, the wave function doesn't necessarily contain all conceivable worlds. It only contains the worlds, following from some initial quantum state, that follow from the Schrödinger equation. While it's true that all possible outcomes of a quantum measurement become real (because they are all contained in the wave function in superposition), "possible" here means specifically what the equations allow, not any imaginable world.
by dangus | 2025-06-12 00:45:50+00:00
The elephant in the room is that Amazon sucks to work at.

Every ex-Amazon employee I’ve worked out talked about their burnout culture.

They under-compensate compared to their peers and as this article touches on with the discussion about customer focus, their corporate culture is the most draconian and abnormal.

I did an early stage Amazon interview and they basically wanted me to memorize every detail of their company culture and relate every single one of those aspects to a piece of work I did in the past. They wanted me to demonstrate that I had essentially joined their cult before I even had the opportunity to join it!

I have no idea how someone is supposed to honestly complete that interview process without outright lying.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-06-12 00:45:50+00:00
In your chain of tools are any of the tools themselves LLMs? Because that's the same problem except now you need to hijack the "parent" LLM to forward some malicious instructions down.

And even if not, as long as there's any _execution_ or _write_ happening, the input could still modify the chain of tools being used. So you'd need _heavy_ restrictions on what the chains can actually do. How that intersects with operations LLMs are supposed to streamline, I don't know, my gut feeling is not very deeply.
by cwyers | 2025-06-12 00:47:54+00:00
My employer can't go out and get me three actual people to work under me for $30 a month.

EDIT: You can quibble on the exact rate of people's worth of work versus the cost of these tools, but look at what a single seat on Copilot or Cursor or Windsurf gets you, and you can see that if they are only barely more productive than you working without them, the economics are it's cheaper to "hire" virtual juniors than real juniors. And the virtual juniors are getting better by the month, go look at the Aider leaderboards and compare recent models to older ones.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-06-12 00:48:19+00:00
I wish I were still at Apple. Probably most people here know that Apple uses an internal tool called "Radar" since, forever. Each "Radar" has an ID (bug #) associated with it.

Radars that were bug #1,000,000, etc. were kind of special. Unless someone screwed up (and let down the whole team) they were usually faux-Radars with lots of inside jokes, etc.

Pulling up one was enough since the Radar could reference other Radars ... and generally you would go down the rabbit hole at that point enjoying the ride.

I was a dumbass not to capture (heck, even print) a few of those when I had the opportunity.
by mjh2539 | 2025-06-12 00:48:47+00:00
If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it lies outside of the realm of (natural) science and may lie within the realm of mathematics, philosophy, or (gasp) theology.

> There is no law of the universe that guarantees that science is capable of answering all questions.

There's a name for a more nuanced version of this "law" and there's a good amount of work being done arguing for and against weaker and stronger versions of it: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/
by whatevertrevor | 2025-06-12 00:49:29+00:00
I agree. It's not the _method_ of the output that matters as much as what kind of operations the LLM has write/execute permissions over. Fundamentally the main issue in the exploit above is the LLM trying to inline MD images. If it didn't have the capability to do anything other than produce text in the client window for the user to do with as they please, it would be fine. Of course that isn't a very useful application of AI as an "Agent".
by echelon | 2025-06-12 00:49:32+00:00
Nevermind, this is just ~3/10 open, or not really open at all [1]:

https://github.com/resemble-ai/chatterbox/issues/45#issuecom...

> For now, that means we’re not releasing the training code, and fine-tuning will be something we support through our paid API (https://app.resemble.ai). This helps us pay the bills and keep pushing out models that (hopefully) benefit everyone.

Big bummer here, Resemble. This is not at all open.

For everyone stumbling upon this, there are better "open weights" models than Resemble's Chatterbox TTS:

Zeroshot TTS: MaskGCT, MegaTTS3

Zeroshot VC: Seed-VC, MegaTTS3

These are really good robust models that score higher in openness.

Unfortunately only Seed-VC is fully open. But all of the above still beat Resemble's Chatterbox in zero shot MOS (we tested a lot), especially the mega-OP Chinese models.

(ByteDance slaps with all things AI. Their new secretive video model is better than Veo 3, if you haven't already seen it [2]!)

You can totally ignore this model masquerading as "open". Resemble isn't really being generous at all here, and this is some cheap wool over the eyes trickery. They know they retain all of the cards here, and really - if you're just going to use an API, why not just use ElevenLabs?

Shame on y'all, Resemble. This isn't "open" AI.

The Chinese are going to wipe the floor with TTS. ByteDance released their model in a more open manner than yours, and it sounds way better and generalizes to voices with higher speaker similarity.

Playing with open source is a path forward, but it has to be in good faith. Please do better.

[1] "10/10" open includes: 1. model code, 2. training code, 3. fine tuning code, 4. inference code, 5. raw training data, 6. processed training data, 7. weights, 8. license to outputs, 9. research paper, 10. patents. For something to be a good model, it should have 7/10 or above.

[2] https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-video/arena?tab=leader...
by AngryData | 2025-06-12 00:49:52+00:00
Seems kind of silly, but at the same time, with the width of modern combines and tractor implements, it isn't really a big deal. The labor cost of people driving a row crop tractor or combine is barely even a blip in the cost of food. I would be surprised if this even came out represent even a single percentage of food costs for row crops.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-12 00:50:50+00:00
HN isn’t a platform for expressing hatred, and that’s an unqualified good thing. I’m reminded of some writer, who wrote about how happy families are all alike, and how unhappy families are unhappy in their own unique way. There are so few things it takes to make it go right, and there are so many ways that good things can go wrong.

If tone policing limits the Overton Window of acceptable speech because it is not sufficiently positive, that becomes a kind of expectation for self-censorship, which is contrary to the HN guidelines which promote curious, free expression. Negative expressions can inflame the passions and can be antithetical to building a healthy community, but if the only acceptable negative expressions must be clinical in tone at worst, many legitimate expressions of content will be disqualified due to unauthorized discontent.

Thanks for the reference, by the way. I should collect a list of them. My current favorite is in my bio on here.
by thadt | 2025-06-12 00:50:55+00:00
I get that reference! Having done this with Lua and C++, it’s easy to do, but just tedious repetition. Something that Swig could handle, but it adds so much extra code, plumbing and overall surface area for what amounts to just a few lines of glue code per function that it feels like overkill. I can definitely see the use for a bespoke code generator for something like that.
by ensemblehq | 2025-06-12 00:51:07+00:00
Thanks. It’s great insight. Yeah trying to balance for sure but wanted to see how extensive folks get to. The parental controls that individual apps/sites seem terribly weak. And yes, kids are incredibly smart at figuring stuff out but it sounds like the DNS layer might be the simplest. I wonder if I have to lock things down like how InfoSec teams do.

Will check out an MDM. Is that like Kandji that gets deployed on corporate devices?
by lmm | 2025-06-12 00:51:24+00:00
> That’s precisely why unpublishing an entire package/crate/gem is not a supported operation on any mainstream repository.

Every competent repository has a process for unpublishing. Sooner or later someone will upload something that someone else claims the copyright to, and then either you take it down when you get a DMCA notice or you lose your safe harbour.

Maybe you replace it with some sort of tombstone. Maybe you warn all the reverse dependencies first. But you have to have a way to remove content.
by macintux | 2025-06-12 00:51:52+00:00
Around 1998 I snagged an abandoned 486 and installed Linux on it for use at work; the corporate software I used the most, a ticketing system, could be run using X from a Solaris server. I don't remember what I did for Lotus Notes.

Anyway, the IT department spotted it but since I was using SMB it thought it was just another Windows server. No one ever checked up on it despite being plugged into the corporate network.

This was a Fortune 500 company; things have changed a wee bit since then.
by refulgentis | 2025-06-12 00:52:14+00:00
Sabine Hossenfelder cast herself out from academia and took a recent turn to monetizing laundering peoples vague understanding string theory is a waste of time (cannot be proven empirically) into academia is doing fake work and if they'd apologize and own up to it, maybe we would trust them again.

Most famously, through a bizarrely written letter from an anonymous whistleblower pleading that she not topple the academy, as it would ruin the lives of thousands of academics making up things to get grant money to survive.
by leakycap | 2025-06-12 00:53:37+00:00
High paying jobs come and go over the decades. Mortgages and associated lifestyle expenses are very hard to get rid of in the short time a major pay change can occur.

If the price is off-putting, let your senses guide you and be off-put by it and find somewhere that makes you excited and filled with a sense of opportunity for you -- and be sure it's well within your resources so it doesn't pinch immediately the second taxes go up, something leaks, another thing breaks, and the retaining wall needs work.

Home ownership costs so much more than you expect; buy well within your means if you want a happy home lifestyle.
by cypherpunks01 | 2025-06-12 00:55:32+00:00
You can go a little bigger than a town in northern Norway - the US Department of Health and Human Services is outputting tokens which cite non-existent studies too.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/05/29/maha-rfk-jr...

https://archive.is/TFUSl
by reasonableklout | 2025-06-12 00:55:40+00:00
That's true. From the quanta article it looks like many affected researchers went on to work on LLMs successfully.

I do wonder how people are adjusting to similar, ongoing shocks across other industries. For instance, the ArtStation protest against AI art a couple years ago showed widespread hostility towards the technology. In the time since, AI art has only gotten better and been adopted more, but from articles like [1] it doesn't seem like concept artists have much benefitted.

[1]: https://aftermath.site/ai-video-game-development-art-vibe-co...
by watersb | 2025-06-12 00:57:34+00:00
Just now I was trying to find a microcontroller that would match the performance of the original Cray 1.

But of course, it's complicated.

Throughout of various floating point operations can vary by a factor of 100 on a simple machine. Which is why the standard benchmarks perform a combination of typical calculations. There's the "Gibson Mix" abd "Livermore Loops".

Roy Longbottom is perhaps the most comprehensive compilation of results from testing via these benchmarks.

https://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20...

Essentially, the Raspberry Pi 4 is about 100 times as fast as a Cray 1.

I can find tiny chips that can do specific DSP applications at 160 MFLOPS via fixed-function units, but it's difficult to know if that's comparable.

The FPU on some ARM Cotex-M4+ devices can rival a Cray 1 in general-purpose floating point, and their fixed function units can exceed that 100x. Mostly these are control units for LIDAR devices in automotive applications. They can pull more power than the Apple M1 on my iPad, 20 Watts or so.

How many Cray 1 computers does it take to sit there and listen for me to say "Hey Siri..."?
by paxys | 2025-06-12 00:57:40+00:00
Big AI disasters have most definitely already happened. We are just terrible at identifing them unless there's something exploding (literally) in our face.

As an example, the recent "Make America Healthy Again" report released by the White House and the Health Secretary (RFK) was found to be AI generated, and was full of dubious science and made-up citations. How many people are going to directly die because of this? Definitely more than a plane crash's worth.
by mdaniel | 2025-06-12 00:58:27+00:00
Well, based on the API enumeration mentioned in sibling comments, surely one doesn't have to estimate

https://docs.gitlab.com/api/projects/#list-all-projects (for dumb reasons it seems GL calls them Projects, not Repositories)

https://codeberg.org/api/swagger#/repository/repoGetByID (that was linked to by the Forgejo.org site, so presumably it's the same for it and Codeberg) and its friend https://gitea.com/api/swagger#/repository/repoGetByID

Heptapod is a "friendly fork" of GitLab CE so its API works the same: https://heptapod.net/pages/faq#api-hgrc

and then I'd guess one would need to index the per-project GitLab instances: Gnome, GNU (if they ever open theirs back up), whatever's going on with Savannah, probably Sourceforge, maybe sourcehut (assuming he doesn't have some political reason to block you), etc

If I won the lottery, I'd probably bankroll a sourcegraph instance (from back when they were Apache) across everything I could get my hands upon, and donate snapshots of it to the Internet Archive
by leakycap | 2025-06-12 00:59:11+00:00
Linux can seem overwhelming, but it shouldn't. There are just so many more choices that it can feel like you don't know where to jump in.

I really liked some parts of Windows' desktop and window management, so I went with Debian linux and chose KDE Plasma so I could enable ClearType-like text antialiasing like Windows and a Windows 2000s like Task bar.

Most people will recommend Ubuntu or pop_OS to new linux users, but I found Gnome to be bad for text rendering and overall not natural for me to use after having used other systems for so long.

Since Debian underpins Ubuntu, and Ubuntu underpins so many other OS... I just went to the source. It has been rock stable and very fast. Old hardware is given new life, especially if you have an SSD.

I'll be keeping my 2019 MacBook on Sequoia and use it for my personal web browsing, iMessage, etc. Its nice to keep work and personal separate in my opinion, so linux on desktop and keeping my wallet green and the planet green by using my 2019 longer is my plan.
by layer8 | 2025-06-12 01:00:03+00:00
To make a limping analogy, writing a novel actually requires the writing process. You can instruct an LLM to write prose, but the result won't be the same. I do a lot of thinking by coding, by looking up existing parts of the code base, library documentation and such, to decide how to best combine things, to determine what edge cases have to be solved and implementation decisions to be made. Once I know how things fit, I'm already halfway done. And it's usually more fun to do the rest myself than to instruct the LLM about all the details of the solution I have in mind. There are cases where using the LLM makes sense for truly tedious parts, of course, but it's not the majority of the work.
by balanced2 | 2025-06-12 01:00:18+00:00
It's not surprising at all because I guess as one would expect, schoolyard rules applies in a game, not company rules. Seniority is still going strong at school, perhaps since the age difference is low or because there is lower opportunity for merit-based respect.

At companies, basically everyone should be speaking polite Japanese regardless of seniority. Harassment has been a big deal and companies have gotten a lot stricter on it these past years, so at large corporations there will be far less of senior members talking down to low members as did happen before. One reason companies can change like this is at most, HR is a much stronger org than product, i.e. the ideal career path for a manager tends to be to move from product to HR, at least at the ones we wouldn't refer to as "tech companies".

SMBs will still feel quite old though since they don't have strong HR like the big companies. I don't know much about government but do have the impression that they would also still have these issues. But I think corporate Japan has gotten a lot better than you might be thinking.
by skygazer | 2025-06-12 01:01:14+00:00
If you're willing to forgo the interactive LLM bit, kokoro-tts (just a script using Kokoro-ONNX) takes epubs and outputs a series of wavs or mp3s that need to be stitched together into chapters or audiobook m4a with some ffmpeg fu. I've listened to several generated audiobooks, and found them pretty good. Some nice generic narration-like prosody. It uses espeak-ng to generate phonemes and passes those to the model to render voice, so it generally pronounces things quite well. It comes with a handful of nice voices and several can be blended, but no easy voice cloning, like chatterbox, that I'm aware of.

https://github.com/nazdridoy/kokoro-tts/blob/main/kokoro-tts
by CMay | 2025-06-12 01:01:28+00:00
> But that's not what I'm getting at. What I'm asking you is: what if the President of the United States, in some way shape or form aims to kill Congress. If he succeeds, is that a constitutional crisis?

It depends on what happens afterwards. It's not necessarily a constitutional crisis. If the president was then jailed and new congress members were voted in, then no. It would basically be an isolated event with the constitution continuing to operate the way it should.

> I would say this has easily been happening over the past 10 years. Don't you think that on the road toward a constitutional crisis, a lot of people would point out the inflection points along the way, as they've been doing? But you seem to be dismissing them as hyperbolic, rather then heeding their warnings.

So, there has been a rise in Marxism under different names, some taught to college students. There has also been steady increase in rhetorical temperature over the past 30+ years. The sort of recipe ingredients for discontent have been increasing since the 1970s oil situation, but maybe delayed by technology and cheap goods from China. Then China and technology increasingly became part of the problem rather than the solution.

Hyper-individualism making strong community formation a little harder. Less civic involvement, the decline of civics in schools. Demographic imbalances don't help, housing supply limitations too.

So, some things are more an expected increase in frustration from many dynamics. Others are things we can react to, or resolve. It's not the first time the US has faced some of these issues and come out of them alright, so it's a bit premature to call it a constitutional crisis.

In other ways, we just have to tighten up our ship to prepare for a potential war with China as deterrence. Part of the reason more powers were given to presidents with congressional oversight is out of acceptance that congress can be too slow. Especially now, congress is so bogged down right when we need to be able to take decisive action.

In that sense, it wouldn't be strange in the context we're entering for the US to lean towards more sharper, action oriented usage of power that people can label as authoritarian all they want. Those powers can be taken back by congress or denied by the supreme court if necessary, unless they are constitutional in which case separation of powers comes into play.
by jarend | 2025-06-12 01:01:29+00:00
The article is based on a physics paper (arXiv:2505.23877), not management theory or institutional metaphors.

What the paper actually proposes is that the Big Bang may have been a gravitational bounce inside a black hole formed in a higher-dimensional parent universe. Quantum degeneracy pressure stops the collapse before a singularity forms. From the outside, it looks like a black hole. From the inside, it evolves as a 13.8 billion year expansion. That is general relativity applied across frames.

Simply put this is a relativistic collapse model with quantum corrections that avoids singularities and produces testable predictions, including small negative curvature and a natural inflation-like phase.
by therealfiona | 2025-06-12 01:03:01+00:00
At about the 2 or 3 year mark I've known.

Of course some places I've known sooner, but those are the exception.

If it wasn't for the quality of life my current jobs is providing, I'd probably find something else. I just can't find anything right now that is intriguing enough and pays enough for me to make the jump without losing benefits.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-12 01:04:59+00:00
An apt analogy. Circling back to scientific research, I'm sure an investigator would be more than happy not to spend the time, effort, and grant money on a project that wasn't going to produce worthwhile results. If only we could know in advance without doing the work.

That does not, of course, mean that "most research being produced isn't really research, just people keeping busy" or whatever other nonsense an uninformed outsider feels like spewing.
by gnabgib | 2025-06-12 01:07:16+00:00
Title: Git Koans (2013)

Popular past discussions:

2020 (197 points, 65 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25514238

2017 (194 points, 51 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13379572

2013 (305 points, 141 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5511863
by Aachen | 2025-06-12 01:10:26+00:00
> [retina] it has a very clear technical meaning

Retina does not mean that, not even slightly or in connotation

Even today, no other meanings are listed: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retina

It comes from something that means "net-like tunic" (if you want to stretch possible things someone might understand from it): https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/retina

They could have named it rods and cones, cells, eye, eyecandy, iris, ultra max, infinite, or just about anything else that isn't negative and you can still make this comment of "clearly this adjective before »screen« means it's high definition". Anything else is believing Apple marketing "on their blue eyes" as we say in Dutch

> imperceptible to the average healthy human eye from a typical viewing distance

That's most non-CRT (aquarium) displays. What's different about high DPI (why we need display scaling now) is that they're imperceptible even if you put your nose onto them: there's so many pixels that you can't see any of them at any distance, at least not with >100% vision or a water droplet or other magnifier on the screen