MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marcusverus | 2025-06-19 20:24:35+00:00
I would never want to work for an Elon, but I understand the allure. Like most of us, I'm giving a solid ~75% effort most days, just punching the clock. My work life balances is fine. I have time for my family and hobbies, etc. It's a nice, steady way to live. But every once in awhile, circumstances will conspire to provide me with hard work with an aggressive, drop-dead delivery date. It makes me mad at first--there are things I'd rather do than work, after all--but there is something to be said for letting go and locking the fuck in for a week of 14 hour a days. It feels good. It doesn't feel like work. It's a drug. It keeps me high until midnight, but makes me sleep like a rock. It makes me sleep like a rock, but has me springing out of bed 5 hours later! I feel like I'm the master of the universe. I'm impervious to stress. Even that's not quite right. It's not just that I'm immune to stress, it's that I start to feed off of it. I welcome it.

And then d-day comes and it's over. The impetus is gone. And every single time, I try to hang on to it. I give myself new projects and fake deadlines. I force myself to get up early and stay up late, but the moment that magic is gone, those things become... work. And like I said, there are things I would rather do than work.

I think a lot of Elon's success stems from his mastery of this "lock in" phenomenon. He is (or at least was) able to induce it in himself to drive himself harder than normal people do. He is able to induce the same state in his workforce as by setting bold and inspiring goals and setting absurd deadlines.

This is not a secret, btw. Nobody goes to SpaceX without understanding that they're signing up to work double the hours for way less than double the pay. For many, this sounds like a nightmare. If you're a young single guy looking to lock the fuck in, to take on huge responsibilities and grow in the company of some of the smartest, hardest working people on earth, it sounds positively amazing.

tl;dr: It's a feature, not a bug.
by astrange | 2025-06-19 20:25:42+00:00
They're a group called "tpot" on twitter, but it's unclear what's supposed to be good about them.

There's kind of two clusters, one is people who talk about meditation all the time, the other is center-right people who did drugs once. I think the second group showed up because rationalists are not-so-secretly into scientific racism (because they believe anything they see with numbers in it) and they just wanted to hang out with people like that.

There is an interesting atmosphere where it feels like they observed California big tech 1000x engineer types and are trying to cargo cult the way those people behave. I'm not sure what they get out of it.
by tome | 2025-06-19 20:25:52+00:00
Interesting conclusion, since I didn't make a claim either way.

Still, for the record, other independent observers have documented the practices and explained why they don't meet the definition of genocide, John Spencer and Natasha Hausdorff to name two examples. It seems by no means clear that it's valid to make a claim of genocide. I certainly wouldn't unless I was really, really certain of my claim, because to get such a claim wrong is equally egregious to denying a true genocide, in my opinion.
by cyberax | 2025-06-19 20:26:52+00:00
I would love:

1. Instead of recreating the "gooey internal network" anti-pattern with CNI, provide strong zero-trust authentication for service-to-service calls.

2. Integrate with public networks. With IPv6, there's no _need_ for an overlay network.

3. Interoperability between several K8s clusters. I want to run a local k3s controller on my machine to develop a service, but this service still needs to call a production endpoint for a dependent service.
by notahacker | 2025-06-19 20:28:00+00:00
Fair. OpenAI totally use those arguments to launder their plans, but that saga has been more Silicon Valley exploiting longstanding rationalist beliefs for PR purposes than rationalists getting rich...

Eliezer did once state his intentions to build "friendly AI", but seems to have been thwarted by his first order reasoning about how AI decision theory should work being more important to him than building something that actually did work, even when others figured out the latter bit.
by astrange | 2025-06-19 20:28:21+00:00
I don't think that podcast has very in-depth observations. It's just another iteration of east coast culture media people who used to be on Twitter a lot, isn't it?

> the fertile soil which is perfect for growing cults

This is true but it's not rationalism, it's just that they're from Berkeley. As far as I can tell if you live in Berkeley you just end up joining a cult.
by thePhytochemist | 2025-06-19 20:29:37+00:00
This is a timely article for me since I'm building an indoor light display and the client specifically mentioned flicker. It's supposed to be a cosy warm light setup (that animates to show the movement of our planets, each represented by a lantern in the building). They were so concerned about flicker they suggested using incandescent but I'd really like to use leds for the obvious reasons (power consumption, fire risk, lifetime, color choice).

What I chose is an ESP32 controller attached to WS1812B LEDs. It turns out these operate at a PWM of nearly 20Khz and my low key tests confirm this. Even at the lowest dim level I can't detect any flicker when I move the led quickly or move something quickly in front of it.

It's amazing to me that you can get off the shelf hardware with WLED installed that works at 20Khz with these cheap RGB LEDs for less than the leading brands like a Philips Hue!
by tome | 2025-06-19 20:30:28+00:00
Interesting presumption. Would you like it if I said "Did you find anything else helpful in your marriage, or was it just choosing to stop beating your wife?"?

And yes, I have some. One is that false claims of genocide are equally reprehensible to denying true genocide. But I'm not sure why my beliefs are particularly relevant. I'm not the one sitting publicly in judgement of a semi-public figure. That was voidhorse.

Did you want to discuss in more detail? I'm happy to, but currently I interpret your comment as an attempt at sniping me with snark. Please do correct me if I've misinterpreted.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-06-19 20:32:08+00:00
> I'm really skeptical of using current LLMs for judging codebases like this.

I'm not necessarily convinced that the current generation of LLMs are overly amazing at this, but they definitely are very good at measuring inefficiency of tooling and problematic APIs. That's not all the issues, but it can at least be useful to evaluate some classes of problems.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-19 20:32:11+00:00
> They are a community—they have an in-group, and if you are not one of them you are by-definition in the out-group.

The rationalist community is most definitely not exclusive. You can join it by declaring yourself to be a rationalist, posting blogs with "epistemic status" taglines, and calling yourself a rationalist.

The criticisms are not because it's a cool club that won't let people in.

> They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opinions different than their own.

Herein lies one of the problems with the rationalist community: For all of their talk about heterodox ideas and entertaining different viewpoints, they are remarkably lockstep in many of their opinions.

From the outside, it's easy to see how one rationalist blogger plants the seed of some topic and then it gets adopted by the others as fact. A few years ago a rationalist blogger wrote a long series postulating that trace lithium in water was causing obesity. It even got an Astral Codex Ten monetary grant. For years it got shared through the rationalist community as proof of something, even though actual experts picked it apart from the beginning and showed how the author was misinterpreting studies, abusing statistics, and ignoring more prominent factors.

The problem isn't differing opinions, the problem is that they disregard actual expertise and try ham-fisted attempts at "first principals" evaluations of a subject while ignoring contradictory evidence and they do this very frequently.
by solatic | 2025-06-19 20:32:16+00:00
I don't get the etcd hate. You can run single-node etcd in simple setups. You can't easily replace it because so much of the Kubernetes API is a thin wrapper around etcd APIs like watch that are quite essential to writing controllers and don't map cleanly to most other databases, certainly not sqlite or frictionless hosted databases like DynamoDB.

What actually makes Kubernetes hard to set up by yourself are a) CNIs, in particular if you both intend to avoid cloud-provider specific CNIs, support all networking (and security!) features, and still have high performance; b) all the cluster PKI with all the certificates for all the different components, which Kubernetes made an absolute requirement because, well, prpduction-grade security.

So if you think you're going to make an "easier" Kubernetes, I mean, you're avoiding all the lessons learned and why we got here in the first place. CNI is hardly the naive approach to the problem.

Complaining about YAML and Helm are dumb. Kubernetes doesn't force you to use either. The API server anyway expects JSON at the end. Use whatever you like.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-06-19 20:32:25+00:00
The AI as it is currently, will not come up with that new app idea or that clever innovative way of implementing an application. It will endlessly rehash the training data it has ingested. Sure, you can tell an AI to spit out a CRUD, and maybe it will even eventually work in some sane way, but that's not innovative and not necessarily a good software. It is blindly copying existing approaches to implement something. That something is then maybe even working, but lacks any special sauce to make it special.

Example: I am currently building a web app. My goal is to keep it entirely static, traditional template rendering, just using the web as a GUI framework. If I had just told the AI to build this, it would have thrown tons of JS at the problem, because that is what the mainstream does these days, and what it mostly saw as training data. Then my back button would most likely no longer work, I would not be able to use bookmarks properly, it would not automatically have an API as powerful as the web UI, usable from any script, and the whole thing would have gone to shit.

If the AI tools were as good as I am at what I am doing, and I relied upon that, then I would not have spent time trying to think of the principles of my app, as I did when coming up with it myself. As it is now, the AI would not even have managed to prevent duplicate results from showing up in the UI, because I had a GPT4 session about how to prevent that, and none of the suggested AI answers worked and in the end I did what I thought I might have to do when I first discovered the issue.
by yujzgzc | 2025-06-19 20:33:23+00:00
Another, related benefit of LLMs in this situation is that we can observe their hallucinations and use them for design. I've come up with a couple situations where I saw Copilot hallucinate a method, and I agreed that that method should've been there. It helps confirm whether the naming of things makes sense too.

What's ironic about this is that the very things that TFA points out are needed for success (test coverage, debuggability, a way to run locally etc) are exactly the things that typical LLMs themselves lack.
by antonymoose | 2025-06-19 20:33:38+00:00
It’s not just an argument of name, it’s an argument of when. Go down to Charleston, SC where the local black population celebrates Emancipation Day on January 1st and has for a long, long time.

Juneteenth is in that context as artificial a holiday as Kwanza. I would imagine most other southern states have similar breaks with the Juneteenth holiday, in that it doesn’t represent the historical reality of their community.
by mountainriver | 2025-06-19 20:34:03+00:00
>> * Globally distributed >Non-requirement?

It is a requirement because you can't find GPUs in a single region reliably and Kubernetes doesn't run on multiple regions.

>> * Tailnet as the default network stack

> That would probably be the first thing I look to rip out if I ever was to use that.

This is fair, we find it very useful because it easily scales cross clouds and even bridges them locally. It was the simplest solution we could implement to get those properties, but in no way would we need to be married to it.

>> * Multi-tenant from the ground up

> How would this be any different from kubernetes?

Kuberentes is deeply not multi-tenant, anyone who has tried to make a multi-tenant solution over kube has dealt with this. I've done it at multiple companies now, its a mess.

>> * Bittorrent as the default storage stack

> Might be interesting, unless you also mean seeding public container images. Egress traffic is crazy expensive.

Yeah egress cost is a concern here, but its lazy so you don't pay for it unless you need it. This seemed like the lightest solution to sync data when you do live migrations cross cloud. For instance, I need to move my dataset and ML model to another cloud, or just replicate it there.
by gjm11 | 2025-06-19 20:34:45+00:00
Pretty much every movement does this sort of thing.

Religions: "Catholic" actually means "universal" (implication: all the real Christians are among our number). "Orthodox" means "teaching the right things" (implication: anyone who isn't one of us is wrong). "Sunni" means "following the correct tradition" (implication: anyone who isn't one of us is wrong").

Political parties: "Democratic Party" (anyone who doesn't belong doesn't like democracy). "Republican Party" (anyone who doesn't belong wants kings back). "Liberal Party" (anyone else is against freedom).

In the world of software, there's "Agile" (everyone else is sluggish and clumsy). "Free software" (as with the liberals: everything else is opposed to freedom). People who like static typing systems tend to call them "strong" (everyone else is weak). People who like the other sort tend to call them "dynamic" (everyone else is rigid and inflexible).

I hate it too, but it's so very very common that I really hope it isn't right to say that everyone who does it is empty-headed or empty-hearted.

The charitable way to look at it: often these movements-and-names come about when some group of people picks a thing they particularly care about, tries extra-hard to do that thing, and uses the thing's name as a label. The "Rationalists" are called that because the particular thing they chose to focus on was rationality; maybe they do it well, maybe not, but it's not so much "no one else is rational" as "we are trying really hard to be as rational as we can".

(Not always. The term "Catholic" really was a power-grab: "we are the universal church, those other guys are schismatic heretics". In a different direction: the other philosophical group called "Rationalists" weren't saying "we think rationality is really important", they were saying "knowledge comes from first-principles reasoning" as opposed to the "Empiricists" who said "knowledge comes from sense experience". Today's "Rationalists" are actually more Empiricist than Rationalist in that sense, as it happens.)
by maxcomperatore | 2025-06-19 20:35:10+00:00
for me it's less about dopamine crash and more about clashing headspaces. coding is pure flow, all in. ai pulls you out to play editor, and that shift kills momentum. here's what i've tried:

* batch ai work: toss it small stuff like snippets or lookups while i stay deep in my zone.

* hard limits: ai handles grunt work, not the big logic. if i'm fixing its bugs faster than writing it, i skip it.

* async vibes: treat ai like a junior coder. send a prompt, do something else, check later. no staring at the spinner.
Ask HN: What are the most popular uses of LLMs (other than code/image gen)?
by mi3law | 2025-06-19 20:35:12+00:00
It's not immediately obvious which 3rd party apps powered by LLMs-- the most frequent blatant usage I can see is captured by the dominant LLM platforms (chat.openai.com, Gemini, etc).

Of course AI powered coding tools are an exception but what other apps use LLMs or reasoning/CoT LLMs extensively?

I assume a ton of apps make API calls to LLMs in the background, to get or process information, though this is not always clear in the frontend/UX. I'm curious what are known uses.

I know some flashcard-like apps and other educational features use LLMs extensively, some customer service applications-- what else?
by aurumque | 2025-06-19 20:35:19+00:00
Access modifiers don't give you unlimited protection, they help you reason about the code and how it is used. If I change a public method and break something downstream, that's on me and my team. If I change a private method and break someone else's code which was bypassing using reflection or other mechanisms, that's on them.

Languages like Python don't have keywords but enforce using conventions like underscore and 'dunder', the latter of which is actually enforced using obfuscation. It is extremely helpful to signal to users that they should not be using certain methods or fields. When there are no access modifiers available, we still see teams writing methods like "xyx_UNSAFE" or "abc_DO_NOT_USE". It's ridiculous to me to encode this kind of information like this instead of having first class support in the language.

Access modifiers also tell the compiler or JIT what is safe or unsafe to manipulate. It has implications beyond users, and can be a determining factor when inlining or making other optimizations.

This article is so opinionated (edgy?) that it ends with "Inheritance was a hack in the first place." I think, like all things, we need to consider the broader landscape for object oriented programming instead of just saying these things are irrelevant and absurd and useless.
by lowbloodsugar | 2025-06-19 20:36:01+00:00
“I don’t like how they said it” and “I don’t like how this made me feel” is the aspect of the human brain that has given us Trump. As long as the idea that “how you feel about it” is a basis for any decision making, the world will continue to be fucked. The authors audience largely understand that “this made me feel” is an indication that introspection is required, and not an indication that the author should be ignored.
by kemotep | 2025-06-19 20:36:03+00:00
Well I would hardly say that protections against being obliterated in a global ransomware attack that comes out after the ransomware attack occurs helps the victims that much but yes it is possible if there is another massive cyber attack Microsoft could release a fix for 10 years after support has ended.

It is definitely possible to heavily lockdown a Windows computer to prevent 99% of attacks and if you don’t need WAN access especially that becomes significantly easier.

It is far more likely browsers will drop support for 10 in a few years and that will be what stops the average user from being able to continue to use their Windows 10 computer.
by astrange | 2025-06-19 20:36:27+00:00
Very rational of you, but that's the problem with the whole system.

If you want to avoid thinking you're right all the time, it doesn't help to be clever and say the logical opposite. "Rationally" it should work, but it's bad because you're still thinking about it! It's like the thinking of a pink elephant thing.

Other approaches I recommend:

* try and fail to invest in stocks

* read Meaningness's https://metarationality.com

* print out this meme and put it on your wall https://imgflip.com/i/82h43h
by bytepoet | 2025-06-19 20:36:31+00:00
This is very cool. I enjoyed going through the writeup and GitHub README.

I was wondering if these same optimizations can be brought to bear on training as well, rather than only inference. I guess the challenge here is fusing backward computations with gradient communication.

I also saw that this currently does not handle dynamic workloads such as MoE. I recently came across this paper that does exactly this:

FlashDMoE: Fast Distributed MoE in a Single Kernel - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04667
by Arrowmaster | 2025-06-19 20:36:49+00:00
You say supposed to. That's great when building your own software stack in house but how much software is available that can run on kubenetes but was created before it existed. But somebody figured out it could run in docker and then later someone realized it's not that hard to make it run in kubenetes because it already runs in docker.

You can make an opinionated platform that does things how you think is the best way to do them, and people will do it how they want anyway with bad results. Or you can add the features to make it work multiple ways and let people choose how to use it.
by gooseus | 2025-06-19 20:37:03+00:00
I heard of the play originally from Chapter 10 of On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder:

https://archive.org/details/on-tyranny-twenty-lessons-from-t...

Which I did post top-level here on November 7th - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42071791

Unfortunately it didn't a lot of traction and dang told me that there wasn't a way to re-up or "second chance" the post due to the HN policy on posts "correlated with political conflict".
by n2d4 | 2025-06-19 20:37:16+00:00
Python absolutely does have private members. If a member starts with two underscores, its class name (and an underscore) is prefixed to the member name, essentially resulting in the same behavior as a private modifier. (Although there are ways to circumvent this in Python, there are also ways to access private fields in most other languages.)

But even if that were true, that wouldn't mean that accessibility modifiers are unnecessary in other languages. Python is a certain language with certain idioms, and other languages are more or less OOP and hence some constructs that might not make sense in Python definitely make sense elsewhere.
by maxcomperatore | 2025-06-19 20:37:29+00:00
langgraph’s killer for llm-savvy teams needing complex, stateful workflows, think multi-agent systems or cyclic graphs. it’s faster than custom pipelines, with langsmith debugging and one-click scaling. but it’s steep to learn, and debugging multi-agent setups can suck if state’s messy. langchain’s better for simple, linear tasks; langgraph’s for intricate control. autogen’s easier but less precise; crewai’s rigid. langgraph’s your pick for dynamic, production-ready projects.
by karmakaze | 2025-06-19 20:37:33+00:00
If I were getting a PC laptop today, I'd get one with an AMD APU which has great performance/battery. Whether you want a discrete GPU or use the integrated graphics is up to you. The integrated graphics is also pretty good. I'd opt for a system using the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 'Strix Halo' APU with integrated 9060S GPU and up to 128GB of quad-channel LPDDR5x memory (soldered so decide once).
by delusional | 2025-06-19 20:37:51+00:00
> One of the primary idioms in Kubernetes is looping

Indeed, working with kubernetes I would argue that the primary architectural feature of kubernetes is the "reconciliation loop". Observe the current state, diff a desired state, apply the diff. Over and over again. There is no "fail" or "success" state, only what we can observe and what we wish to observe. Any difference between the two is iterated away.

I think it's interesting that the dominant "good enough technology" of mechanical control, the PID feedback loop, is quite analogous to this core component of kubernetes.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-06-19 20:38:03+00:00
I would have preferred something like this to the current UEFI environment and shell, a FLOSS 64-bit DOS-like. A cool retro boot manager and diagnostic env perhaps.

Could this run from an efi system partition? Seems to support fat12, what about gpt?

Does it poke video hardware like DOS, or have a terminal like output?