MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gumboshoes | 2025-06-04 16:53:32+00:00
Recalls a recent employment experience where the engineering team would say "it's too hard," to which the only sane response is, "but you're not saying you can't do it." At the end of so many "no" statements phrased however, unfortunately, is an unspoken "I don't want to do that particular work," not even talking above priorities, but personal interest in the task and having to work at that level of intensity to solve those particular problems. But, frankly, what are we here for (at this company) but to work? The difficulty of a task shouldn't come into it if it's the only way. You work at it until it's done. All this is assuming goals are aligned and all agree the task is important. But to have a DOA project just because it's hard? No.
by patrickscoleman | 2025-06-04 16:53:57+00:00
It feels like some of the comments are responding to the title, not the contents of the article.

Maybe a more descriptive but longer title would be: AGI will work with multimodal inputs and outputs embedded in a physical environment rather than a frankenstein combination of single-modal models (what today is called multimodal) and throwing more computational resources at the problem (scale maximalism) will be improved with thoughtful theoretical approaches to data and training.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-06-04 16:54:29+00:00
Sure. But which half? If half is legitimate, and half is fraudulent, who do you expect to still be in the game after you cut half, the legitimate researchers or the fraudsters?

Talking about rebuilding after just shifts this problem instead of solving it. When you start to spin things back up, who's at the front of the line looking for new grant money?
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-04 16:54:32+00:00
What if the AI can do things others find hard to do?

And my point with AI isn't that it can do things that are easy or hard, it's that it can do things I don't know how to do, yet. I can spend time to learn them but the AI knows them already and at that point it's better than me.

Hard and easy are subjective. When yo don't know how to do something it's hard, when you know how to do it it's easy.

You might know IAM but most people don't so it's not meant to replace you, it's to replace them.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-06-04 16:54:56+00:00
My anecdote is that I was diagnosed with stage 3 kidney disease, likely as a result of years of very high blood pressure. Four years later, using medication to get the blood pressure down to near-normal, and following a high-fat/keto diet, my kidneys were operating perfectly in the normal range. (I didn't tell my doctor about my diet, because I needed him to prescribe the BP meds and didn't want him nagging me about diet. One mention of "healthy grains" was enough.)

The "your kidneys will fall out" nonsense has been circulating since I first started hanging out on alt.support.diet.low-carb in the mid-90s. Probably since Atkins first published his book. It's superstition.
by dconden | 2025-06-04 16:55:14+00:00
Agreed. Pricing is insane and availability generally sucks.

If anyone is curious about these neo-clouds, a YC startup called Shadeform has their availability and pricing in a live database here: https://www.shadeform.ai/instances

They have a platform where you can deploy VMs and bare metal from 20 or so popular ones like Lambda, Nebius, Scaleway, etc.
by latexr | 2025-06-04 16:55:21+00:00
All of your answers were already addressed in my previous comment:

> [You are] completely ignoring how many people are proudly and ignorantly using them wrong.

The point is precisely that too many people are never going to verify outputs and will even resist any kind of human review to their LLM-generated code. This is not theoretical, we know this is happening. Which would be fine in a “you do you” manner if what those people did only affected them, but it affects everyone else too. Because we don’t write every software we use, and some day soon we’ll be bitten by one of these idiots who introduced a major security flaw in some system we’re forced to use (e.g. government website).

In other words, what I’m objecting to is precisely the narrow view of this article in unambiguously propping up the good parts and being blind to the bad parts, even criticising those who have a concern for the bad.
by john01dav | 2025-06-04 16:55:35+00:00
Is this a violation of the computer fraud and abuse act? It seems to me like it might be because they're literally breaking out of a sandbox and viewing data from other apps. Other cases of that (like breaking out of VMs on a cloud provider) are clear violations. Sometimes people see violations of the law by a big corporation against people as less bad than when a single person does the same thing, but that's unreasonable -- if anything the former is more harmful due to potential for scale.
by tristor | 2025-06-04 16:55:38+00:00
Honestly I wouldn't change much. I think I'd have kept some relationships going that I let fizzle away. I would have done more academically earlier in my life. But otherwise, I think I've made good decisions, served my family and community, and done work that I'm proud of that I feel is morally and ethically defensible. Had I done things differently, I would hope I could have done more to give back than I have done in this current life, but at the end of the day I'm pretty happy with where I'm at.
by colechristensen | 2025-06-04 16:56:02+00:00
Agreed. This is a situation where you need a dedicated security team to classify and mitigate this kind of attack while making sure the mitigations don't add too much friction to your real customers. It's not easy. It's also not really on your payment processor to be the first line of defense for this kind of fraud.

You'll need to find some way to fingerprint to classify users into risk buckets and then treat them differently based on the bucket: blackhole, high friction verification, and likely safe are three reasonable buckets.

Cloudflare has tools that can help identify bots, much of this can be offloaded onto them.
by Anthony-G | 2025-06-04 16:56:19+00:00
tiniuclx answered this very eloquently in a separate comment¹ so I’ll quote them in full:

> The point about being disconnected with tactile sensation is very poignant. I've experimented with crafts before, but my go-to hobby has always been music - stringed instruments like the guitar. There's something very rewarding about the instant feedback you get when you fret down a string, and how much nuance you can get out of the smallest movements of your hands.

Currently, I’m trying to learn how to improve my dynamic range: being able to play softer and louder and/or accent a particular beat while keep a steady rhythm. I found it hard not to strike the strings more quickly to make them sound louder and I still find it challenging to play evenly with consistent loudness and tone.

I’ve found the more I play, the more attuned I become to the subtleties of the sound being produced, e.g., I’ve learned that pressing down on a string too much results in the pitch being sharper than what it should be. I’ve been experimenting with different thicknesses of plectrums and if not using a plectrum, noticing how the tone is different depending on whether the string is struck with the nail or the fleshy part of the finger. That’s all on an acoustic guitar; so far, I’ve purposely avoided the rabbit-hole of how electric guitar tone can be modified by amplifier and effects.

Programming – for me – doesn’t really have the same nuances and challenges. Even though I don’t produce anything tangible, I guess the main benefit for me is that learning and playing the guitar exercises completely different parts of my brain than those I use as a system administrator or programmer. I’m completely focussed on what I’m doing when I’m learning and practising and there’s a real buzz from nailing something that I first thought was impossible.

As a side-effect, it has also improved my appreciation for different styles of music and my understanding of how music is made (e.g., I can tell the difference between music in 4:4 and 6:8 time signatures) and what other instruments are doing in a piece of music, e.g., drummers often play the snare on beats 2 and 4 in many genres of popular music.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44178391
by netsharc | 2025-06-04 16:56:26+00:00
> In a .js file, each character is UTF-16 (2 bytes).

What? I'd like to challenge this. The in-memory representation of a character may be UTF-16, but the file on disk can be UTF-8. Also UTF-16 doesn't mean "2 bytes per character": https://stackoverflow.com/a/27794229

The file https://github.com/AZHenley/coord2state/blob/main/dist/coord... doesn't use anything other than the 1-byte ASCII characters.
by wat10000 | 2025-06-04 16:56:38+00:00
I've written assembly in a production environment. I love it and wish I could do more.

But the context where I'm doing it is very different from the context where you had to write a division routine from scratch! We never use assembly where a higher-level language would be good enough. It's only used for things that can't be written in C at all, either because it needs an instruction that the C compiler won't emit, or it involves some special calling convention that C can't express.

However, I read assembly in production all the time. Literally every day on the job. It's absolutely essential for crashes that won't reproduce locally, issues caused by compiler bugs, or extremely sensitive performance work. Now, lots of programmers very rarely have to deal with those sorts of things, but when it comes up, they'll be asking for help from the ones who know this stuff.
by ednite | 2025-06-04 16:56:53+00:00
Great example, and to be honest, I’m guilty of the same. I used ChatGPT to come up with a logo for one of my projects, and it only took about five minutes. The kicker? The designer I would’ve usually handed it to actually approved it and liked it.

It kind of stings, though. That used to be someone’s craft, their livelihood. But like you said, the key now is finding ways to adapt, maybe by leaning more into the human side of the work: real collaboration, client interaction, deeper research.

Still, not everyone can or wants to adapt. What happens to the quiet designer who just wants to spend the day in their bubble, listening to music and creating? Not chasing clients, not pivoting constantly, just doing what they love. That’s the part that saddens me at times when I see AI in action. Thanks for sharing.
by qgin | 2025-06-04 16:57:01+00:00
When it's been studied so far, AI alone does better than AI + human doctor

>Surprisingly, in many cases, A.I. systems working independently performed better than when combined with physician input. This pattern emerged consistently across different medical tasks, from chest X-ray and mammography interpretation to clinical decision-making.

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/when-doctors-with-ai-are-ou...
by GMoromisato | 2025-06-04 16:57:15+00:00
Another argument is that death is a continuum. You can die after 80 years or after 120 or after 1,200 or after 1.2 million.

Sure, maybe if we lived 1 million years there would be problems. But it's a strawman to say that living for 1 million years is bad, so we should kill people at 100.

Honestly, (in my uninformed opinion) of all the potentially disruptive technologies, life extension is the least problematic. Disruption is worst when it happens quickly (witness AI). But life extension is not likely to happen quickly exactly because it is a complex problem with myriad causes.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-04 16:57:21+00:00
It might not matter with so many companies eschewing Apple’s design UI concepts for their own (to maintain similarity cross platform or just for branding reasons) but making a UI design change requires developers to be onboard (to a degree). The problem is Apple doesn’t really have the ability to force through a change like that with their current dev relations (which are at an all time low).

It will be interesting to see how developers (especially indies) respond to this change (all the work being dumped on their plate).
by K0balt | 2025-06-04 16:57:33+00:00
This exactly. If you are doing embedded programming, direct register access and manipulation is often a far, far superior option, and you don’t have to be some kind of “assembly sensei” to do it if you just have a very basic idea of how things work. It doesn’t mean you write programs in assembly… it means when you are needing to do something that the hardware is going to do for you anyway, you know how to ask for it directly without having to load a 2Kloc library. This is especially true when using python or JS bytecode on the MCU. Actually, using python with assembly is really the best of both worlds in many cases.
by hwillis | 2025-06-04 16:57:51+00:00
For the majority treatment is pretty minor, which is reflected in all-cause mortality. Pill-based chemo is much more common now and patients do not need to relocate and isolate as much. Cancer is still terrifying, and in almost all other types of cancer people vastly underestimate the life impact of "survival". Young people with localized Hodgkin lymphoma have a ~90% chance that they will never have a recurrence, but the chemo (which is extremely well tolerated!) can still regularly be life-altering.

That said prostate cancer is most of the time not a big deal. Getting prostate cancer will still probably the most dangerous thing that ever happens to you (how many single events have a 5%+ mortality rate? besides birth) and should be treated incredibly seriously, but the odds are still good you'll be fine.
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-04 16:57:58+00:00
>Also, why rewrite perl code in python? Those two languages have basically the same set of problems, assuming the perl code is doing banking stuff and not orchestrating GPUs.

Because at some point it's no longer worthwhile to continue hacking up stuff build with the assumptions and best practices of 20yr ago and just want to write a new one that's built with today's assumptions and best practices and will be easier/cheaper for everyone who has to interact with for the next 20yr.
by globie | 2025-06-04 16:58:03+00:00
I assume autoexec is referring to the plethora of WebRTC vulnerabilities which have affected browsers, messengers, and any other software which implements WebRTC for client use. Its full implementation is seemingly difficult to get right.

Of course, you're right that this implementation is very small. It's very different than a typical client implementation, I don't share the same concerns. It's also only the WHIP portion of WebRTC, and anyone processing user input through ffmpeg is hopefully compiling a version enabling only the features they use, or at least "--disable-muxer=whip" and others at configure time. Or, you know, you could specify everything explicitly at runtime so ffmpeg won't load features based on variable user input.
by Aloisius | 2025-06-04 16:58:15+00:00
Getting parts at cost?

So I could find some manufacturer using a part I want and order it at their cost rather than having to go to a retailer?

Is there anything that allows a manufacturer to require you send in the broken part after or any limit to how many times something can be "repaired"? Because I'd like to purchase a very large number of NVIDIA GPUs at cost.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-06-04 16:58:22+00:00
The Renaissance was a messy pivot, where peoples' relationship with the future changed.

They started looking backward in order to move forward. Before that, the dominant logic was rooted in the authority of tradition. Basically, "This is how it's always been done, so this is how we'll keep doing it." The idea was that the past had already figured things out. But people's relationship with the past shifted. People began entertaining the idea that, actually, maybe we could do better - that new ideas might solve problems the old ones couldn't.

For example, Petrarch didn't just have a nostalgic relationship with Cicero's works. He thought the ancients had something we'd lost, and by digging it back up, we could think more clearly. But it wasn't in deference or tradition, it was through a the lens which new consequences became possible. You see the same thing with Brunelleschi, who looked at Roman ruins and said, "Cool, now let's use this to invent perspective and change how we visualize space forever." Even Machiavelli, when interacting with the works of Livy and Tacitus, wasn't trying to restore a Roman republic, he was trying to figure out how power really works in the modern state.

The Renaissance was looking backward on the surface, but what made it revolutionary was how it looked back. It didn’t simply copy like the ancients had done since forever, it reinterpreted. That reinterpretation cracked open the door to modernity and the idea that the future didn't have to be like that past, but rather that it's a set of contingencies and possibilities.
by barrkel | 2025-06-04 16:58:23+00:00
Do bagpipes explain the mystery of sand performing calculations and taking actions? Do they give you an intuition for connecting how CPUs and memory accesses and cache hierarchies work with high level code, in such a way that you can start to understand why one version of code might be faster or slower than another?

If you can't see through field accesses and function calls to memory indirections, anything you might read about how TLBs and caches and branch prediction work doesn't connect to much.
by sgammon | 2025-06-04 16:58:53+00:00
> The underlying Elide tool looks amazing

Thank you!

> Does the Kotlin compiler support plugins, e.g. serialization?

We don't support Kotlin Serialization yet, but KotlinX is fully embedded and ready. You can reach for things like KotlinX Coroutines without installing a single JAR.

Bring-and-use-your-own-plugins might be challenging, yeah, but we plan to at least build in the KotlinX plugins you would want by default (serialization included). So thank you for this note, it's helpful and I'll add a notch next to that feature :)
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-04 16:59:02+00:00
"Over the weekend I went digging for evidence that AI can, will, or has replaced a large percentage of jobs."

Perhaps the author is curious whether "AI" will replace "SEO jobs", or "web marketing" jobs

If "AI"-generated answers are replacing www search, and even visits to other websites, then perhaps to some extent "AI" will reduce the number of "SEO" or "web marketing" jobs

https://searchengineland.com/seo-opportunity-shrinking-rand-...

The author is a "web marketer" accusing "Tech Execs" of doing web marketing

Marketers trying to discredit other marketers
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-04 16:59:02+00:00
On 8-bit home computer CPUs like the 6502 or Z80, high level programming languages like C simply were not an option, you left too much performance on the table (not to mention BASIC which was easily 100x slower than handwritten assembly).

Forth was quite acceptable performance wise, but that's barely above a good macro assembler.

And after the 8-bitters, assembly coding on the Amiga was pure pleasure - also for large programs, since apart from the great 68k ISA the entire Amiga hardware and operating system was written to make assembly coding convenient (and even though C was much better on the 68k, most serious programs used a mix of C and assembly).

(also, while writing assembly code today isn't all that important, reading assembly code definitely is when looking at compiler output and trying to figure out why and how the compiler butchered my high level code).
by ferguess_k | 2025-06-04 16:59:17+00:00
Most of us do not have the chance to use it in production. I think that's where the fancy came from.

We are also getting burned out by the modern Agile web/data/whatever development scene and would like to drill really deep into one specific area without stakeholders breathing down our necks every few hours, which assembly programming conveniently provides.

I also consider the grit (forced or voluntary) to be a bath of fire which significantly improved two important things - the programmer's understanding of the system, and the programmer's capability to run low level code in his brain. Is it suffering? Definitely, but this is a suffering that bring technical prowess.

Most of us do not have the privilege to suffer properly. Do you prefer to suffer from incomplete documentation, very low level code and banging your head on a wall for tough technical problems, or do you prefer to suffer from incomplete documentation, layers and layers of abstraction, stakeholders changing requirements every day and actually know very little about technical stuffs? I think it is an easy choice, at least for me. If there is an assembly language / C job that is willing to take me in, I'll do it in half of the salary I'm earning.
by Lammy | 2025-06-04 16:59:20+00:00
> Without a universal standard

The universal standard is Dublin Core (IETF RFC 2413 / ISO 15836) `dc:subject` “Unordered array of Text” stored in an XMP (ISO 16684) sidecar file:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core#Dublin_Core_Metada...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform

I like to put the DC stuff directly in my filesystem xattrs, but using a sidecar file will get you compatibility with any old filesystem and with any tooling that might destroy or disregard an xattr.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-06-04 16:59:32+00:00
> My worst case total risk exposure is approximately the same as the cost of 3 months of payment processing

Okay, yes: what you're describing is the actual utility of these things.

I think you underestimate how many people dealing in them are using them much less intelligently than you are.

They are being marketed in an extremely dishonest way, as a safe long term store of value. I regularly overhear normal people at my local bars talking about how they're "investing big in stablecoins" and it terrifies me.
by culi | 2025-06-04 16:59:35+00:00
What sets PP apart from companies making similar machines is their commitment to open source hardware. They make some machines themselves and sell them but their main focus has always been the open source blueprints that (in theory) any one can use to make these machines at home

Lots of cross over with Open Source Ecology's Global Village Construction kit[0] where they attempted to create open source versions of 50 technologies they considered critical for civilization. They made a brick press and a tractor but I think progress slowed after that

[0] https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
by Someone | 2025-06-04 16:59:41+00:00
> The x86-64 ISA promises execution of instructions in the specified order

It doesn’t, and out-of-order CPUs don’t do that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution: “In this paradigm, a processor executes instructions in an order governed by the availability of input data and execution units, rather than by their original order in a program.”
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-04 16:59:54+00:00
I think a big part of intelligence is being able to correlate things. Well, the more modes, the more ability to correlate.

For example, smell is a component of ER triage. Some different problems smell differently.

And if I had a robot chef, but the chef couldn't actually taste... yeah, not sure I trust it very far as a chef.
by jimt1234 | 2025-06-04 17:00:15+00:00
My mother is in the early stages of Alzheimer's. It's terrible. I wouldn't recommend my experience on anyone. That might sound selfish, but it's just so painful to watch her deteriorate, knowing there's nothing that can be done. I watched her take a cognitive test recently - draw a clock, put the hands at 10 after 5. She worked on it for a minute or two, struggled, got it all wrong, then forgot what she was doing. It was one of the most painful things I've ever witnessed.

Sorry for the non-constructive comment. I guess the only constructive-ish thing is to recommend that if you've got elderly loved ones exhibiting short-term memory issues, get them tested ASAP. Then, get the "legal stuff" started right away (powers of attorney).