MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skrebbel | 2025-06-15 17:45:09+00:00
I don't think this is true in practice anymore. Given that most sources are 16 bit wide, and afaik most OSes internally use 24 bits these days in the OS mixer (at least my laptop does), the information loss is negligible (just some rounding errors and that's it).

I'd be much more worried about 44.1khz sources being resampled to 48khz if that's the OS playback rate. I mean you won't be able to hear that either in practice but at least it's not negligible.
by ComplexSystems | 2025-06-15 17:45:20+00:00
That is very different though. You are now saying that for all n, PA proves that it has a proof the Goodstein sequence terminates for that n. But that is very different from the earlier claim:

"And, therefore, there must be a distinction to be made between "PA proves" and "PA proves that it proves"."

It seems that for each standard n, PA proves that the Goodstein sequence terminates for that n. If also proves that it proves that the Goodstein sequence terminates for all n, and so on. But this is very different from saying "PA proves that it proves the sentence 'for all n, the corresponding Goodstein sequence terminates,'" which is what I thought you were saying.
by sanderjd | 2025-06-15 17:46:23+00:00
As much as I'm finding LLMs incredibly useful, this "world where computer languages disappear" doesn't resonate with me at all. I have yet to see any workflows where the computer language is no longer a critical piece of the puzzle, or even significantly diminished in importance.

I think there is an important difference between LLM-interpreted English, and compiler-emitted Assembly, which is determinism.

The reason we're still going from human prompt to code to execution, rather than just prompt to execution, is that the code is the point at which determinism can be introduced. And I suspect it will always be useful to have this determinism capability. We certainly spend a lot of time debugging and fixing bugs, but we'd spend even more time on those activities if we couldn't encode the solutions to those bugs in a deterministic language.

Now, I won't be at all surprised if this determinism layer is reimplemented in totally different languages, that maybe are not even recognizable as "computer language". But I think we will always need some way to say "do exactly this thing" and the current computer languages remain much better for this than the current techniques to prompt AI models.
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-06-15 17:46:39+00:00
Totally possible!

I just like talking about it. I will say that learning outside distribution content while keeping previous knowledge in a "useful" state is a capability that would absolutely supercharge ever AI method we currently have.

It's atleast an honest atempt at a research direction other than "scale infinitely for everything" that we currently do.

Just think about how natural brains do something incredible.

1. They have fixed computation budgets per time step. 2. They continously learn entirely new tasks while still maintaining previous in a useful state.

That's a capability I would very much like in my AI.

Scaling laws are correct but they are also the reason we are nowhere near replacing humans.

Take a simple job maybe admin work. Every timestep depends on the previous timestep. While not a complex job and an AI could do it for awhile but over time the compuation required to "look back" its memory and connect it for the next step grows near exponentially.

RAG is another perfect example of this problem.

I do deeply belive AGI will be solved by a kid with a whiteboard not a supercluster. CL is my best guess at what that means.

Maybe it's a super RL or energy type method but I've never seen it.
by dgellow | 2025-06-15 17:46:42+00:00
I've been playing around with deno over the past weeks. It's definitely an interesting project. However I do find the permission system to lack the granularity I would want. You quickly end up in a "all or nothing" state, where I would really like to instead differentiate between code I consider trusted and code I consider risky.

Still, pretty neat and I do see where I will use it in the future.
by mbesto | 2025-06-15 17:47:35+00:00
> If this were broadly true, Waymo would be everywhere.

It's not everywhere because of regulation and Waymo wanting to strategically roll it out carefully to markets. Remember, this is Waymo's first market to offer Waymo through the Uber app. There's a reason Waymo hasn't tested non-human driving in Chicago but it has in Phoenix, SF and Austin (I could give you a hint as to why but I'm sure its obvious).

> Uber is a publicly listed company with public financials already operating globally with profits.

And wants to create even more profit...what's your point? Also it's operating income is a paltry $2B for a company with $41B in revenue. Most of its current net income is from investing activities.
by davemp | 2025-06-15 17:48:11+00:00
> …to me it looks that in the next century or so humans are going the way of the horse, at least when it comes to jobs.

I’m not sure. I think we can extrapolate that repetitive knowledge work will require much less labor. For actual AGI capable of applying rigor, I don’t think it clear that the computational requirements are achievable without a massive breakthrough. Also for general purpose physical tasks, humans are still pretty dang efficient at ~100watts and self maintaining.
by asdff | 2025-06-15 17:48:19+00:00
I think it is a huge reach to assume the lettuce head isn't suffering when you pluck it. It is pure anthropomorphising at its finest where you can use some in built cognitive dissonance to see a plant as some other not worthy of life whereas something that bleeds red fills one with dread. I hazard a guess that if most people didn't spend a childhood ripping leaves off trees and throwing sticks at plants that they would have similar feelings towards the harvest process of most crops when exposed to the first time like they might with the harvest process for animal crops.

If there are opportunities to do things with more respect and dignity, for either plants or animals, they should be done. But at the same time we shouldn't feel so morose about the reality of the situation of life on this planet where literally everything eats something else, usually in a very brutal manner.
by fredoralive | 2025-06-15 17:48:58+00:00
The article notes Gnome didn't have it's own window manager yet.

I'm slightly surprised it's using TWM, rather than something like FVWM95, I'm sure I used an ancient version of Red Hat that used that, but it might be the author's preference.

(Edit: another poster says FVWM95 was the release after this...)
by giantrobot | 2025-06-15 17:49:20+00:00
IIRC on this version of Red Hat TWM was the default window manager installed. FVWM, WindowMaker, and maybe Enlightenment shipped on the disc. Again IIRC the next version (5.2) used FVWM95 by default. Maybe 6.0 shipped with FVWM95 by default. It's been a minute.
by arp242 | 2025-06-15 17:49:21+00:00
I used to run a mailing list for my blog. I've gotten some pretty hostile responses to people who were adamant they never subscribed to my mailing list.

I have no idea how this happened; I just coded a simple form with a basic Turing test ("please enter the number 9 here" works well enough for small sites). Did they forget they subscribe? Did someone else use their email? Did someone typo the email address? Bots? No way for me to know.
by pyman | 2025-06-15 17:50:37+00:00
You've basically got Einstein, Curie, Tesla, Newton, Charpentier, and Gladys West in your pocket, ready to help. We carry the sum of human knowledge around with us, but no one's teaching us how to actually use it. Schools are more focused on teaching you not to use it. That's the real problem.

Our system still rewards memorisation over reasoning, and when students use AI to solve a problem it's treated as cheating, even if it's the same thing they'll use in the real world.

IMO, teachers should see AI as an extension of a student's brain, not a replacement. Once that clicks, they'll start using it to unlock their students full potential, not shut it down out of fear.

But... let's be honest. It takes skilled teachers to make that work. Letting students use AI without any guidance is just as damaging as banning it altogether.

I told my students once: you're going to build a little app that solves a real problem in our school. It can be anything. You'll demo the app when it's done. But I don't want you to send me the code, I want the prompts you used to build it. The better your prompts, the better your grade.
by kragen | 2025-06-15 17:50:43+00:00
Hmm, I guess I had thought you would implement it with a 2R1W register file by just not writing to the register file in the register-file-writing stage of the pipeline when the condition didn't hold, in such simple implementations, same as for jump or store instructions, or those that write to x0. You do have three read dependencies, but without knowing much, I'd guess that's a much smaller problem than a bloated four-port register file.
by sjducb | 2025-06-15 17:51:45+00:00
Most teams that “use raw SQL” end up accidentally writing ORMs anyway. You have a bunch of similar SQL queries so someone writes a SQL generator. Someone notices that if we are using one field from the account table, then we usually want the others, so they create an Account object and share it to reduce duplication.

You’re usually better off starting with a good standard ORM at the beginning.
by sanderjd | 2025-06-15 17:51:57+00:00
This is well put and something I have tried to express to people.

Long before LLMs came onto the scene, I was telling people (like friends and family trying to understand what I do at work) that the actual coding part of the job is the least valuable, but that you just do still have to be able to write the code once you do the more valuable work of figuring out what to write.

But LLMs have made that distinction far more clear than I ever imagined. And I have found that for all my previous talk about it, I clearly still felt that the "writing the code" part was an important portion of my contribution, and have found it jarring to rebalance my conception of where I can contribute value.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-15 17:52:02+00:00
Telemetry for example.

But the point of the comment was that there are other methods besides ad blockers running in browsers. There are often alternative methods that "tech journalists" rarely if ever mention.

Sometimes, these methods are arguably better. For example, some methods can limit _all_ connections, whether the connections are initiated from (a) browsers, (b) other applications or (c) pre-installed corporate operating systems.
by Retric | 2025-06-15 17:52:39+00:00
Random bad luck is always part of any survival of the fittest situation. A meteor killing few thousand trees isn’t something a given tree at the center of the impact crater can do much about.

Also, it’s “fittest” as category not most fit as a ranking. Perhaps a better conceptual model is people who finish a marathon are a fitter group than those who start a marathon even if someone who failed was potentially in better shape than the winner. Many species have thousands of offspring because the odds any one of them reproduces is very low, a valid strategy not some sign of incompetence.

> Add luck doesn't explain millions either, it would sound the same if thousands dropped to hundreds

The actual cause is the full evolutionary history going back to the first life form and the environment each generation lived in, but we can still examine individual elements of what’s going on.

“Luck” is a multiplier on the number of sperm needed. The ability of an individual sperm to optimize its odds of success is a sign of cellular function. There’s zero contradiction between those statements. ~1:10,000 * ~1:100
by bhaney | 2025-06-15 17:52:49+00:00
Whether or not the effect in the paper turns out to be true and reproducible, the supplements you've seen almost certainly don't do anything unless you're wiping out your established gut microbiota with antibiotics first. Your existing microbiota are entrenched and in a very good position to defend themselves from any weakened intruders you might intentionally introduce. Meanwhile, supplement companies really like to make exaggerated claims.
by vorpalhex | 2025-06-15 17:53:19+00:00
Eating fresh fruits and veggies is a great general health advice but unlikely to shift your gut microbiome meaningfully (unless you are eating some specific fruits or fruit skins in specific conditions).

And randomly eating healthy stuff is probably not going to shift your biome in a particular direction nor eliminate the cause of biome issues.

I eat healthy including a lot of whole fruit, nuts, dried fruits, dark green veggies and grass finished meats and there are still times I have my biome be a bit off.
by nijave | 2025-06-15 17:53:46+00:00
You can usually turn logging on but a lot of the OTEL stack defaults to best effort and silently drops data.

We had Grafana Agent running which was wrapping the reference implementation OTEL collector written in go and it was pretty easy to see when data was being dropped via logs.

I think some limitation is also on the storage backend. We were using Grafana Cloud Tempo which imposes limits. I'd think using a backend that doesn't enforce recency would help.

With the OTEL collector I'd think you could utilize some processors/connectors or write your own to handle individual spans that get too big. Not sure on backends but my current company uses Datadog and their proprietary solution handles >30k spans per trace pretty easily.

I think the biggest issue is the low cohesion, high DIY nature of OTEL. You can build powerful solutions but you really need to get low level and assemble everything yourself tuning timeouts, limits, etc for your use case.
by kilroy123 | 2025-06-15 17:53:56+00:00
I've had a LOT of gut problems in my life. I have a physically broken stomach, have had to have stomach surgery in the past, and probably will have to do it again soon.

Most probiotics I've taken did nothing. The only ones that seem to actually work for me are these: https://drohhiraprobiotics.com/

Not sure why it works, but anecdotally, they do.

Other things that have helped significantly – cutting out alcohol.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-15 17:54:04+00:00
To name just a few costs that aren't worth it for many businesses:

* A much smaller ecosystem of libraries to draw from.

* Much weaker editor tooling than with more established languages.

* An entirely different paradigm for deployments, monitoring, and everything else that falls under "operations" that may be incompatible with the existing infrastructure in the organization.

* When something does go wrong, using a weird stack means you have less institutional knowledge to lean on and fewer resources from people who've been doing the same thing as you.

* A whole new set of foot guns to dodge and UX problems to solve related to what happens when someone's connection is poor. This has come up repeatedly in discussions of Phoenix LiveView—what you get in reactivity comes at the expense of having to work harder to engineer for spotty connections than you would with a request/response model.

* More difficulty hiring people, and an increased tendency when hiring for selecting people who are really just obsessed with a particular tool and unwilling to see when the situation calls for something else.

There are many more, these are just the ones I can think of without having a concrete application with concrete requirements to analyze. In the end for most apps reactivity is so much a "nice to have" that it's hardly worth sacrificing the stability and predictability of the established option for moderately better support for that one aspect of UX, especially given that you can always add reactivity later if you need to at a slightly higher cost than it would have come at with Erlang.

If reactivity is a core requirement, that's a different story. If it's polish, don't choose your architecture around it.
by jdeibele | 2025-06-15 17:54:26+00:00
You could but there are multiple reasons why Uber dethroned taxis and probably the most important ones are that you get a route to your destination and a fixed price to get there.

My first trip to Paris many years ago, I felt that I was getting the "scenic tour" to my hotel from the airport but I wasn't sure where I was and certainly didn't know the best way between the two. There were other variations in other cities.

For a while, I lived near an airport and taxi drivers would be angry because they'd waited a long time to do a short ride and now would have to go back to the end of the line.
by hnlmorg | 2025-06-15 17:55:40+00:00
> OP treats all implementation details as equally valuable parts of "the journey,"

Do they? That wasn’t my take away from the article.

My impression was that the author missed the enjoyment of problem solving because they overused AI. Not that they think all problems are equal.

For what it’s worth though, I do agree with your more general point about AI use. And in fact that’s how I’ve used AI code generation too. “Solve the tedious problem quickly so you can focus on the interesting one”.
by convolvatron | 2025-06-15 17:57:12+00:00
presumably that in HPC you can dump enough money into individual users to make the platform useful in a way that is impossible in a more horizontal market. in HPC it used to be fairly common to get one of only 5 machines with processor architecture that had never existed before, dump a bunch of energy into making it work for you, and then throw it all out in 6 years.
by isaacimagine | 2025-06-15 17:58:11+00:00
TFP: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04168

The DT citation [10] is used on a single line, in a paragraph listing prior work, as an "and more". Another paper that uses DTs [53] is also cited in a similar way. The authors do not test or discuss DTs.

> hardness of the credit assignment ... data sparsity.

That is true, but not the point I'm making. "Bypassing credit assignment", in the context of long-horizon task modeling, is a statement about using attention to allocate long-horizon reward without horizon-reducing discount, not architecture choice.

To expand: if I have an environment with a key that unlocks a door thousands of steps later, Q-Learning may not propagate the reward signal from opening the door to the moment of picking up the key, because of the discount of future reward terms over a long horizon. A decision transformer, however, can attend to the moment of picking up the key while opening the door, which bypasses the problem of establishing this long-horizon causal connection.

(Of course, attention cannot assign reward if the moment the key was picked up is beyond the extent of the context window.)
by flashgordon | 2025-06-15 17:58:52+00:00
So the thing is these anonymous surveys are just a way to "incriminate" managers. Most surveys are structure NOT to ask "Do you think Leader X is bad". It is more about "Do you understand what Leader/Org X is doing". So a "no" here means either "you" are the problem for not understanding or your manager for not clearly "explaining" what Leader/Org X is doing. So managers now have an extra job of selling some top-down vision with very limited data (relative to where there in the ladder) but without using the words "because VP X said so".
by nijave | 2025-06-15 17:59:02+00:00
A span is a discrete event emitted on completion. It contains arbitrary metadata (plus a few mandatory fields if you're following the OTEL spec).

As such, it doesn't really have a beginning or end except that it has fields for duration and timestamps.

I'd check out the OTEL docs since I think seeing the examples as JSON helps clarify things. It looks like they have events attached to spans which is optional. https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/signals/traces/
by lurking_swe | 2025-06-15 17:59:02+00:00
i avoid those stores, i agree it’s very irritating. Stop & Shop is a good example. The checkout machine is constantly weighing the bag! Ugh.

As an FYI there are stores that DON’T have annoying self checkout machines: Target, Walmart, Whole Foods, Costco, Home Depot, and a few more…
by maeil | 2025-06-15 17:59:12+00:00
The title does not do the content justice. Since Snowden it's been known to the entire world, even outside of HN, that the US government has had this capability for decades now, with mass dragnet surveillance of all internet traffic.

What has changed is that now they're actually using this to a degree that even China generally does not do. If a German had written a comment in support of the Hong Kong protests on Facebook at some point in time, they're extremely unlikely to get denied entry to China over this, despite them almost certainly having even stronger capabilities and databases to easily find this out.
by MostlyStable | 2025-06-15 17:59:30+00:00
In the long term, the only thing that _can_ increase wages on average and in general is productivity. Productivity increases mean the pie is bigger, and without that, there is no where for increased wages to come _from_. So by saying that producity only results in increased wages in the case of the worker uprising, that is equivalent to saying that wages can only rise from a worker uprising. The only way this isn't true is for some other proposed mechanism for worker wages to go up, and the only other methods would be short time, single increases where all you are doing is taking from someone else (presumably capital I guess?)

Sustained rates of increase _require_ increasing productivity. So no, they didn't explicitly state it, what they explicitly said was that productivity only results in increased wages if a worker uprising forces it. But that's the logical requirement of that statement.
by netsharc | 2025-06-15 18:00:09+00:00
Makes me think of this anecdote from Linus Torvalds' officemate, from (1)

> At one point, Linus had implemented device files in /dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day.

1) https://liw.fi/linux-anecdotes/
by charlie0 | 2025-06-15 18:00:42+00:00
The solution to this, imo, is to expand the definition of what it means to "program". I'm increasingly realizing that AI tools are the new programming substrate. I've been able to heavily automate workflows and I use the word workflows loosely here.

It's allowed me tackle other parts of the knowledge stack that I would otherwise have no time for. For example, learning more about product management, marketing, and doing deeper research into business ideas. The programming has now gone strictly from coding to automating the flows related to these other jobs. In that sense, I'm still "programming", it just looks different and doesn't always involve an IDE. Bonus is my leverage has dramatically increased.
by emsign | 2025-06-15 18:02:11+00:00
What's new here is that Peter Thiel is a libertarian who wants to destroy democracies because he's a christian lunatic who believes in armageddon and the anti-christ and sees democracies and multi-national organizations like the UN and the EU as tsaid anti-christ. This is not a joke, even though I wish it was because it sounds so ridiculous. Palantir is not our friend. And they probably WILL read my comment.
by bhaney | 2025-06-15 18:02:46+00:00
I did this years ago and it seemed to work, but n=1. It took two cycles of antibiotics and intentional introduction of "good bacteria" before I landed on something that seemed to fix most of my food intolerances. Didn't seem to have any impact on anxiety.

I learned later that this is pretty dangerous to attempt, since you're very likely to give yourself c diff or some other infection and end up with persistent IBS before you land on a good microbiome.