MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-20 00:59:12+00:00
From time to time I see a press release to the effect that some movie star (Alyssa Milano was one) got an IQ score around the max of Raven's Progressive Matrices. I bet somewhere there is a psychologist who will coach you on it, across the street one will test you, and on the next block a PR agency that will make the press release.

I mean, there aren't that many questions on Raven, you could memorize them all, particularly if you've got the kind of intelligence that actors have -- being able to memorize your lines. (And that's something, I have a 1950-ish book about the television industry that makes a point that people expect performers to be a "quick study", you'd better know your lines really well and not have to be told twice that you are expected to do this or that. That's different from, say, being able to solve really complex math problems.)
by TGower | 2025-06-20 00:59:22+00:00
The only way to include a book in a training dataset for LLMs without violating copyright law is to contact the rights holder and buy a license to do so. Buying an ebook license off Amazon isn't enough for this, and creating a digital copy from a physical copy for your commercial use is also against the law. A good rule of thumb is if it would be illegal for a company to distribute the digital file to empolyees for training, it's definetally illegal to train an AI the company will own on it.
by lmm | 2025-06-20 01:00:04+00:00
> Who is "they" exactly

Rationalists, mostly self-identified.

> how can they estimate the probability of a future event based on zero priors and a total lack of scientific evidence?

As best as they can, because at the end of the day you still need to make decisions (You can of course choose to do nothing and ignore the risk, but that's not a safe, neutral option). Which means either you treat it as if it had a particular probability, or you waste money and effort doing things in a less effective way. It's like preparing for global warming or floods or hurricanes or what have you - yes, the error bars are wide, but at the end of the day you take the best estimate you can and get on with it, because anything else is worse.
by s5300 | 2025-06-20 01:00:34+00:00
>> You're telling me you can just go to a Walgreens in the USA and get a bag of estrogen and start injecting it without the advice and monitoring of a doctor? Even though hormone replacement therapy can lead to all kinds of problems? Is this normal?

Go chug a quarter of a McBurgerStan sized bottle of Tylenol available at near every cornerstore in our country and you’ll literally fucking die a harrowing death. I do not even mildly see your point. Quite frankly those against open access to all medicine need to die. The harm a lack of accessibility causes to society at large is incalculable, because the disabled go unseen rotting away in their homes – if they’re so lucky to even have that.
by acdha | 2025-06-20 01:01:15+00:00
People have been doing that since roughly 2010, so the failures are important to learn why it’s not a weekend project.

Adoption is critical for alternate roots, so the first question has to be how something gets enough users for anyone to feel it’s worth the trouble of using: the failure mode of DNS is that links break, email bounces, and tons of things which do server-side validation reject it, so this really limits usage.

The other big problem is abuse. Names are long term investments, so there are the usual blockchain problems of treating security as an afterthought but you also have the problem that third-parties have a valid need to override the blockchain (e.g. someone registers Disney.bit and points it at a porn site or serves malware from GoogleChrome.eth). Solving that means that you’re back to trusting the entity which created the system or maybe a group of operators, so the primary appeal is going to be if you can make it cheaper than owning a traditional domain.
by tomhow | 2025-06-20 01:02:00+00:00
> we should not be nice

It's not about being nice, but on Hacker News we operate according to guidelines and norms that have evolved over more than 15 years, which keep discussions focused on substance and prevent it from burning to the ground the way most online communities do.

Please do your part to make this place better not worse. The point you made above was a valid and valuable one, but the way you expressed it means its value is lost.
by trealira | 2025-06-20 01:02:12+00:00
Slave owners would cite Ephesians 6:5-6.

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.
by kbolino | 2025-06-20 01:02:40+00:00
If the threat model is BGP hijacking, is DNSSEC actually the answer? If you can hijack a leaf server, can't you hijack a root server? As far as I can tell, the root of DNSSEC trust starts with DNSKEY records for the "." zone that are rotated quarterly. This means every DNSSEC-validating resolver has to fetch updates to those records periodically, and if I can hijack even one route to one of the fixed anycast IPs of [a-m].root-servers.net then I can start poisoning the entire DNSSEC trust hierarchy for some clients, no?

Now, this kind of attack would likely be more visible and thus detected sooner than one targeted at a specific site, and just because there is a threat like this doesn't mean other threats should be ignored or downplayed. But it seems to me that BGP security needs to be tackled in its own right, and DNSSEC would just be a leaky band-aid for that much bigger issue.
by jrm4 | 2025-06-20 01:03:11+00:00
I legitimately can't tell if this is satire.

Anyway, as a Black Christian, I always tell people on both sides -- know what religion is most responsible for slavery in the US?

Christianity.

And also, know what religion is most responsible for freedom for Black folks in the Us?

Also Christianity.

It's just complicated.

Not "western" of course, but the traditions/organization of Black churches.
by anitil | 2025-06-20 01:03:27+00:00
This was all very interesting, but that polyglot json/yaml/xml payload was a big surprise to me! I had no idea that go's default xml parser would accept proceeding and trailing garbage. I'd always thought of json as one of the simpler formats to parse, but I suppose the real world would beg to differ.

It's interesting that decisions made about seemingly-innocuous conditions like 'what if there are duplicate keys' have a long tail of consequences
by tacticalturtle | 2025-06-20 01:04:35+00:00
That’s not what happened here though.

In the video I saw, Lander wasn’t asking the agents to prove that they were law enforcement. He was asking if they had a judicial warrant to detain the person he was holding onto. He did seem to believe they were law enforcement.

The problem is, ICE doesn’t need a judicial warrant to detain someone suspected of immigration offenses in a public space. Lander didn’t seem to know this, or at least feigned ignorance.

What do you do with someone who doesn’t know the law, and is actively interfering with a planned arrest? Briefly detaining them seems like a reasonable path to get the job done.
by fluidcruft | 2025-06-20 01:05:43+00:00
A better analogy is memorized poems or music and I think there's actually considerabe case law on whether performing songs infringe on the author's copyright.

Movies are maybe less intuitive because most people won't reproduce a movie. There supposedly are people with "photographic memories" for example. And infringement is possibly not so much the capacity as what is actually done. Someone with a photographic memory could duplicate a movie but unless they actually do their capacity is not infringement. But you also have to consider that if it was viewed "lawfully" in the first place then the copyright holder has decided to let people view them. So the act of a brain seeing Jurassic Park is what the copyright holder authorized. Generally I don't think copyright holders have agreed to have LLM ingest their works.

Plays and opera are maybe more similar, because people to copy productions etc. But those don't feature encryption so the blob of unknown data doesn't feature in the analogy.
by tptacek | 2025-06-20 01:06:34+00:00
The much-more-important problem is that the most important zones on the Internet are, in the DNSSEC PKI, irrevocably coupled to zones owned by governments that actively manipulate the DNS to achieve policy ends.

This is a problem with TLS too, of course, because of domain validation. But the WebPKI responded to that problem with Certificate Transparency, so you can detect and revoke misissued certificates. Not only does nothing like that exist for the DNS, nothing like it will exist for the DNS. How I know that is, Google and Mozilla had to stretch the bounds of antitrust law to force CAs to publish on CT logs. No such market force exists to force DNS TLD operators to do anything.

My (ahem) "advocacy" against DNSSEC is understandably annoying, but it really is the case that every corner of this system you look around, there's some new goblin. It's just bad.
by juliangmp | 2025-06-20 01:06:54+00:00
I'm not sure who first coined this idea or put it in a book or where I've read it, but for code comments I generally like the "explain why, not what" philosophy. The "what" is answered by the code itself and should be easy enough to comprehend if your design is simple and your names meaningful. The "why" is much more important. Why does this parser check for some magic numbers at this specific offset and change some parameters if it finds them? If you don't explain that its because of e.g. compatibility with some legacy format, its gonna be a mystery to the reader.
by rbits | 2025-06-20 01:07:15+00:00
This might be off-topic, but I really want to use Helix. I've been using Vim keybindings for a few years now but it's so unintuitive, there's still so many things I can't do efficiently in Vim. Helix just makes so much more sense for my brain. But I don't use Vim/Neovim by itself, I always use an integration with an editor like VSCode or Obsidian (Obsidian's Vim emulation isn't great, but it's good enough). Helix just isn't there yet with VSCode or Obsidian.

I wish more "Vim successors" would focus more on integrating with existing IDEs, rather than becoming one themselves. I don't want to have to set up an entirely new workflow when I change how I edit text.

That's also why I haven't tried using Neovim as a standalone IDE. It looks like I'd really like it, but I don't want to be locked in to using Vim.
by whatarethembits | 2025-06-20 01:07:36+00:00
I'm curious where this ends up going.

Personally I think its a mistake; at least at "team" level. One of the most valuable things about a software or framework dictating how things are done is to give a group of people a common language to communicate with and enforce rules. This is why we generally prefer to use a well documented framework, rather than letting a "rockstar engineer" roll their own. Only they will understand its edge cases and ways of thinking, everyone else will pay a price to adapt to that, dragging everyone's productivity down.

Secondly, most people don't know what they want or how they want to work with a specific piece of software. Its simply not important enough, in the hierarchy of other things they care about, to form opinions about how a specific piece of software ought to work. What they want, is the easiest and fastest way to get something done and move on. It takes insight, research and testing to figure out what that is in a specific domain. This is what "product people" are supposed to figure out; not farm it out to individual users.
by tptacek | 2025-06-20 01:08:14+00:00
No, I'm sorry, that's not the case. You're focusing on DNS servers as the target for BGP4 attacks because if you didn't, you wouldn't have a rebuttal for the very obvious question of "why wouldn't BGP4 attackers just use BGP4 to intercept legitimate ALPN challenges".

The thread is right here for everyone to read.
by taeric | 2025-06-20 01:10:28+00:00
I think this certainly happens a fair bit. Not at all uncommon to have a section that largely says what is going to happen next, which, fair that what is going to happen is what happens.

I think where it shines, is where it helps you break the code up, without having to break it up in a way that makes sense for the computer. Show an outline, but then drill into a section. The overall function can then be kept as a single unit, and you can sort of punt on sub sections. I tried this just recently in https://taeric.github.io/many_sums.html. I don't know that I succeeded, necessarily. Indeed, I think I probably should have broken things into more sections. That said, I did find that this helped me write the code more than I expected it to. (I also was very surprised at how effective the goto style of thinking was... Much to my chagrin.)

I will have to look again at some of the code I've read this way.

To directly answer the question of if it helped keep the documentation in sync, as it were, that is tough. I think it helps keep the code in a section directly related to the documentation for that section. All too often, the majority of code around something is not related to what you were wanting to do. Even the general use of common code constructs gets in the way of reading what you were doing. Literate programming seems the best way I have seen to give the narrative the ability to say "here is the outline necessary for a function" and then "this particular code is to do ..." Obviously, though, it is no panacea.
by Twey | 2025-06-20 01:11:01+00:00
This parallel has been drawn. Charlie Stross [0] in particular thinks the main difference is that pre-digital AIs are capable of behaving much faster, so that other entities (countries, lawmakers, …) have time to react to them.

[0]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

Similar claims can be made about any structure of humans that exhibits gestalt intelligence, e.g. nations, stock markets, etc.
by bilalq | 2025-06-20 01:13:07+00:00
I actually did some small hobby projects using Literate Coffeescript a long time ago. Looking at the source code today, and I can't help but feel like the proponents of literate programming were really onto something. I'm coming back a decade later, but I can easily see what's going on and why at a glance. Compared to many other projects that I've written in the past without documentation, it's a completely different vibe. The Gulpfile in particular is such a treat to read.

Yeah, it can look a bit repetitive if the code is already clear, but the context of why a thing is being done is still valuable. In the modern era with LLM tools, I'm sure it could be even more powerful.
by diputsmonro | 2025-06-20 01:14:02+00:00
It depends on where the money changes hands, IMO (which is basically what I think youre getting at). If you pay someone to perfectly recite a copywrited work (as you pay ChatGPT to do), then it would definitely be a violation.

The situation is similar with image generation. An artist can draw a picture of Mickey Mouse without any issue. But if you pay an artist to draw you the same picture, that would also be a violation.

With generative tools, the users are not themselves writers or artists using tools - they are effectively commissioners, commissioning custom artwork from an LLM and paying the operator.

If someone built a machine that you put a quartner in, cranked a handle, and then printed out pictures of the Disney character you choose, then Disney is right in demanding them to stop (or more likely, force a license deal). Whatever technology drives the machine, whether an AI model or an image database or a mechanical turk, is largely immaterial.
by etbebl | 2025-06-20 01:14:10+00:00
Thanks for the link, I had forgotten this existed. Well, the university's technology roadmap officially states there is no support for Windows 10 after 2025. Yet as far as I know there is no program in place to help individual labs cover the cost of upgrading equipment. Maybe we will still be able to purchase an ESU package for our computers on an individual basis, but I'm not sure it will be made available by our software licensing office.
by jayd16 | 2025-06-20 01:14:41+00:00
Conceptually you didn't hit after they moved. You hit at the right moment in your timeframe. That is sent to the server 1 second later and you were rewarded for the hit from 1 second ago because it calculates the results based on when you made the input, not when it was received. This can even change the result of an encounter (ie rollback).
by anyfoo | 2025-06-20 01:15:21+00:00
I have not looked at this project, but my guess would be: x86 is a widely available platform that, because of its history and relentless compatibility, contains a lot of legacy interfaces that make implement a very simple, thin-layer and “DOS-like OS” without the need to parse device trees, set up MMUs, deal with complex busses like PCI(e) and so on.

It is much harder to bootstrap a simple OS in ARM, and it won’t stay very simple unless you accept significantly more limitations than you would under x86. (For example, you can’t do very much with the MMU off on ARM, and you also don’t have convenient BIOS interfaces that allow you to, say, read a sector, or wait for a keypress, with just a few lines of assembly).
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-06-20 01:15:43+00:00
> Once you're on the management track, you get infected with the same MBA bullshit as the rest of management, and your brain rewires itself around that culture and those incentives.

Not necessarily. The problems rather are:

- Those who are mostly immune to this will hardly ever be put on a management track.

- Those who are resistent regarding this kind of infection won't make any further career in management (incentives matter).
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by more_corn | 2025-06-20 01:20:05+00:00
That’s when I burned my Elon fan club card.

When he baselessly accused a hero rescue driver of a terrible crime and then refused to back down (if it’s not true sue me for defamation) then hid behind a technicality… yeah that’s the end.

That’s the behavior of a childish bully shithead not a leader. I can’t believe people still think he’s the man to lead the companies he runs.
by aliasmaya | 2025-06-20 01:21:29+00:00
I totally agree that most people underestimate the complexity of building a successful UX. I think the impact to the UI/UX was mainly in Vibe Coding, they can build a similar thing just by upload a picture, that save lots of time on me to tune the css! Although we cannot rely on it as it really a nightmare on building a maintainable code base product, but it do show me the PoC on how. Time is money, so the AI Era did help me a lot, cheers~
by codebje | 2025-06-20 01:22:25+00:00
I write a bit of literate Haskell, sometimes. It's one of the most well supported literate programming systems out there: the compiler supports it, the language server supports it, using VSCode as an "IDE" means full support for all the things you mentioned. Haskell code formatters don't seem to support literate Haskell, though, and GitHub Copilot, at least, gets confused between prose and code (but that's fine, if I'm taking the time to make my code extra readable and understandable the last thing I want is for an AI to get involved).

Maybe a tool like the one presented here could work as a language server proxy to the underlying language's server. The presence of literate text alone doesn't seem to be the main issue, it's getting the code portions parsed, checked, and annotated with references that matters.
by acdha | 2025-06-20 01:23:07+00:00
I understand but do not agree with your point. I think two things are being conflated: the difficulty of learning HCL itself and the domain complexity of what almost everyone is learning HCL to do. I’ve seen people bounce off of Terraform and make lengthy rants about how HCL is hard, write thousands of lines of code in their preferred Real Programming Language™, and only eventually realize that the problem was that they thought they were learning one thing (IaC) but were actually learning two things at the same time (IaC and AWS/GCP/etc.) without taking time to formalize their understanding of both.

I have no objections to protobufs, but I think that once you’re past a basic level of improvements over YAML (real typing, no magic, good validation and non-corrupting formatters) this matters less than managing the domain complexity. YAML is a bad choice for anything but text documents read by humans because it requires you to know how its magic works to avoid correct inputs producing unexpected outputs (Norway, string/float confusion, punctuation in string values, etc.) and every tool has to invent conventions for templating, flow control, etc. I think HCL is better across the board but am not dogmatic about it - I just want to avoid spending more time out of people’s lives where they realize that they just spent two hours chasing an extra space or not quoting the one value in a list which absolutely must be quoted to avoid misinterpretation.
by SalmonSnarker | 2025-06-20 01:24:48+00:00
That's fine, you don't have to apologize to me.

To put it into terms that may hit closer to home:

Remember Vatican 2? you may have heard about it. pretty big deal, lots of changes in the catholic church, made a whole bunch of news, put the latin mass out to pasture and also pulled back on the doctrine of deicide, ruffled a lot of feathers, etc.

There are some people who yearn for the aesthetics and cultural heritage of the latin mass. They miss the funny words in a language they don't speak, the historical continuity of the latin liturgy, etc. For these types, it's purely innocent aesthetic yearning, mostly harmless.

There are also some people who both miss the latin mass and feel very strongly about the perfidy of the jews being a theologically important teaching. These anti-semitic sedevacantist types share the same information ecology with all of the more harmless latin mass types. Dog whistles are a tool that can be used to disambiguate between the two types of latin-mass-enjoyers.

Fetishizing "western christian values" communicates different things when one of the most prominent far-right groups, the proud boys, makes this a central doctrine. If a latin-mass-enjoyer were to tell me they deeply valued western christian values, before airing their favorite anti-semitic conspiracies, I'm likely to predict they're not into latin mass for purely aesthetic reasons.