MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigyabai | 2025-06-20 02:21:51+00:00
I'll steelman against you. Books are inherently neutral in nature, and can be used to spread corrupt or indignant ideas in the same way movies or music can be propagandized. The key operand is the individual, who exercises their personal judgement as a composite of their personal experiences and their interpretations of fiction and history.

Say we had two heirs to a monarchy: one who never read a book in his life, and the other who was exclusively allowed to interpret Mein Kampf and The Fountainhead to formulate their political ideologies. Would the reader really be the more intelligent, grounded leader? Would their surrogate, vicarious experiences in literature give them an advantage over someone who synthesizes their judgement from nothing but personal experience?
by brainless | 2025-06-20 02:23:19+00:00
Yes the prompts are clear enough but it depends on the capacity of the people involved. People have to internalize the math (or any other) concepts from language into some rules, syntax, etc.

This is what an agent can do with an LLM. LLMs can help take English and generate some sort of an algorithm. The agent stores algorithm not the prompt. I do not know what current commercially available agents do but this was always clear to me.
by rafram | 2025-06-20 02:24:16+00:00
> arguably continuing since System 7

A downward trend since 1991?

It’s fair to say that design has moved on in the last 34 years. Totally subjective whether you think it’s all been for the better. But macOS is self-evidently more usable now than it was then; a lot more people are using it. I imagine fairly few of them would be happy if Apple decided to abandon this Liquid Glass idea and return to System 7 design instead.
by taeric | 2025-06-20 02:24:20+00:00
I'm not entirely clear why/how this is an open source issue?

My assertion: Inertia of user base is by far the largest predictor of what will stick in a market. If you can create a critical mass of users, then you will get a more uniform set of solutions.

For fun, look into bicycles and how standardized (or, increasingly not) they are. Is there a solid technical reason for multiple ways to make shoes that connect to pedals? Why are there several ways to shift from your handlebars? With the popularity of disk brakes, why don't we have a standard size for pads?

I think there are a lot of things that we tell ourselves won from some sort of technical reasoning. The more you learn of things, the less this seems true, though.

Not, btw, that there aren't some things that die due to technical progress.
by AIPedant | 2025-06-20 02:24:53+00:00
And it has a maybe 3-5% accuracy rate on actually being “unreasonably” effective! There are a lot of surprising things about transformer LLMs but they were literally designed to translate human languages, so being effective at translating programming languages seems natural.

At least the “X Considered Harmful” clones describe something which is plausibly harmful.
by cyberax | 2025-06-20 02:25:12+00:00
> Counterpoint: no it isn't, which is why virtually nobody uses it. Even the attack this thread centers on --- BGP hijacking of targeted DNSSEC servers to spoof CA signatures

Wait, wait, wait. How can you hijack a DNSSEC server? Its keys are enrolled in the TLD, and you can't spoof the TLD server, because its keys in turn are enrolled in the root zone. And the root zone trust anchor is statically configured on all machines.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-20 02:29:22+00:00
> I think that SlimeMoldTimeMold's rise and fall was actually a pretty big point in favor of the "rationalist community".

That feels like revisionist history to me. It rose to fame in LessWrong and SlateStarCodex, was promoted by Yudkowski, and proliferated for about a year and half before the takedowns finally got traction.

While it was the topic du jour in the rationalist spaces it was very difficult to argue against. I vividly remember how hard it was to convince anyone that SMTM wasn't a good source at the time, because so many people saw Yudkowski endorse it, saw Scott Alexander give it a shout out, and so on.

Now Yudkowski has gone back and edited his old endorsement, it has disappeared from the discourse, and many want to pretend the whole episode never happened.

> (I don't remember any detailed takedowns of SlimeMoldTimeMold coming before that article, but maybe there are).

Exactly my point. It was criticized widely outside of the rationalist community, but the takedowns were all dismissed because they weren't properly rationalist-coded. It finally took someone writing it up in the form of rationalist rhetoric and seeding it into LessWrong to break the spell.

This is the trend with rationalist-centric contrarianism: You have to code your articles with the correct prose, structure, and signs to get uptake in the rationalist community. Once you see it, it's hard to miss.
by umeshunni | 2025-06-20 02:30:28+00:00
I think paper itself expresses that

Page 9: There is no deterministic path from model memorization to outputs of infringing works. While we’ve used probabilistic extraction as proof of memorization, to actually extract a given piece of 50 tokens of copied text often takes hundreds or thousands of prompts. Using the adversarial extraction method of Hayes et al. [54], we’ve proven that it can be done, and therefore that there is memorization in the model [16, 27]. But this is where, even though extraction is evidence of memorization, it may become important that they are not identical processes (Section 2). Memorization is a property of the model itself; extraction comes into play when someone uses the model [27]. This paper makes claims about the former, not the latter. Nevertheless, it’s worth mentioning that it’s unlikely anyone in the real world would actually use the model in practice with this extraction method to deliberately produce infringing outputs, because doing so would require huge numbers of generations to get non-trivial amounts of text in practice
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-06-20 02:30:58+00:00
Indeed, "good" doesn't matter if the OS is a pain to use.

The Driver support issues are essentially a theological war between FOSS ideals, and mystery OEM binaries.

Most of the linux kernel code is still the driver modules, and board support packages.

The desktop options have always been a mess of forks and bodged applets to make it useful.

Ubuntu balances the purity of Debian with practical user experience (we could all write a book about UEFI shenanigans.) RedHat focuses more on hardened server use-cases.

Is it worse than Win11 ? depends what you are doing, and what people consider is the low bar for messing with users. =3
by blahlabs | 2025-06-20 02:32:28+00:00
Fedora media writer is fantastic. You're right, it can either automatically download a fedora iso, or you can just feed it any image. Its so simple and handy for me, to the point a recent foray back to Debian was cut short because there was no included equivalent and the alternatives were just a hassle.

Although, the `cat liveimage.iso > /dev/sdX` tip mentioned in this thread is very handy and is probably enough for me. Anything I can do without a distro specific tool is a win.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-20 02:33:14+00:00
> the salient bit is that penal slavery was ended in 1941-1942 by Roosevelt,

No, convict leasing, one of several manifestations of penal slavery, was (formally) ended by Roosevelt then. Penal slavery continues in the US today, although some states have abolished it recently (though there is litigation in some of those states over it being continued in practice despite the recent formal abolition.)
by Terr_ | 2025-06-20 02:33:42+00:00
> no special responsibility to the people around you

Musing on the different failure-directions: Pretty much any terrible present thing against people can be rationalized by arguing that one gadzillion distant/future people are more important. That includes religious versions, where the stakes of the holy war may presented as all of future humanity being doomed to infinite torment. There are even some cults that pitch it retroactively: Offer to the priesthood to save all your ancestors who are in hell because of original sin.

The opposite would be to prioritize the near and immediate, culminating in a despotic god-king. This is somewhat more-familiar, we may have more cultural experience and moral tools for detection and prevention.

A check on either process would be that the denigrated real/nearby humans revolt. :p
by Tokumei-no-hito | 2025-06-20 02:35:52+00:00
nothing prevents you from using a proxy server if you want it all from one entry point. idk of any clients hitting hundreds of MCPs anyways, that's a straw man.

unlike web dev where you client cab just write more components / API callers, AI has context limits. if you try to plug (i get it, exaggerated) 500 MCP servers each with 2-10 tools you will waste a ton of context in your sys prompt. you can use a tool proxy (one tool which routes to others) but that will add latency from the processing.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-20 02:36:21+00:00
Thanks for sharing. You summed it up well: The community feels like a hidden gem when you first discover it. It feels like there's an energy of intelligence buzzing about interesting topics and sharing new findings.

Then you start encountering the weirder parts. For me, it was the group think and hero worship. I just wanted to read interesting takes on new topics, but if you deviated from the popular narrative associated with the heroes (Scott Alexander, Yudkowski, Cowen, Aaronson, etc.) it felt like the community's immune system identified you as an intruder and started attacking.

I think a lot of people get drawn into the idea of it being a community where they finally belong. Especially on Twitter (where the latest iteration is "TPOT") it's extraordinarily clique-ish and defensive. It feels like high school level social dynamics at play, except the players are equipped with deep reserves of rhetoric and seemingly endless free time to dunk on people and send their followers after people who disagree. It's a very weird contrast to the ideals claimed by the community.
by crmd | 2025-06-20 02:36:50+00:00
Authors are getting busted[1] on a regular basis publishing LLM-generated or augmented novels that plausibly compete commercially with human-written books. If the LLM was trained on any books in the same genre, it seems like a clear violation.

1. For example earlier this month: https://www.reddit.com/r/fantasyromance/comments/1ktrwxj/fan...
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-20 02:37:49+00:00
> it overlooks the fact that what triumphs in the long run is simply reproductive fitness.

Why can't that observation be taken into account? Isn't the entire point of the approach accounting for all inputs to the extent possible?

I think you are making invalid assumptions about the motivations or goals or internal state or etc of the actors which you are then conflating with the approach itself. That there are certain conditions under which the approach is not an optimal strategy does not imply that it is never competitive under any.

The observation is then that rationalism requires certain prerequisites before it can reliably out compete other approaches. That seems reasonable enough when you consider that a fruit fly is unlikely to be able to successfully employ higher level reasoning as a survival strategy.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-20 02:38:23+00:00
> Black AF takes place in California and the main character had a huge celebration with his entire extended family before it was even a federal holiday.

Did you just use the fact that Black characters in fictional media set in California celebrated the holiday to contradict an argument that actual Black people in coastal California do not?

I mean, the claim was factually wrong, but that's the worst counterargument imaginable.
by zhihaojia | 2025-06-20 02:38:42+00:00
Thanks for the great feedback! Stanford's MegaKernel project tackles a similar challenge but focuses on manual CUDA implementation. While MPK takes a compiler-driven approach—users express their LLMs at the PyTorch level, and MPK automatically compiles them into optimized megakernels. Our goal is to make programming megakernels much more accessible.

I completely agree that CUDA can be a limiting factor, especially for latency-sensitive workloads. As GPUs are becoming larger and faster, it's increasingly difficult to write standalone kernels that fully utilize hardware resources—particularly when optimizing for low latency with small batch sizes.

> What are the chances we see your work land in PyTorch as an experimental backend?

We're definitely excited about that direction. We believe MPK can help PyTorch support megakernel generation, and we’re actively exploring how to make that happen. Stay tuned!

> P.S. minor typo, your first two paragraphs under part 1 are nearly identical.

Thanks for pointing it out--I meant to remove the duplicate paragraph when finalizing the post.
by const_cast | 2025-06-20 02:39:09+00:00
The elephant in the room here is why is the Supreme Court even concerned with how prescription drugs are used? I'm sure are justices are very smart - but they're not doctors. And they're certainly not my doctor or your doctor or every single child's doctor.

It should be up to a doctor to decide if a prescription makes sense for a particular patients symptoms and diagnosis. The Supreme Court should not concern itself otherwise.

At least with Roe v Wade there's an argument to be made about it involving a second hypothetical person. But this? This is strictly between patients, their medical care, and their parents.
by a_shovel | 2025-06-20 02:40:13+00:00
This is something I've been thinking too (though it seems clear to me it's only one factor out of many). I've heard at least two anecdotes from trans women I follow on social media that led me to this theory. One was prescribed estrogen doses too infrequently, and the other had lost access to medication, and they both started feeling like total crap when they went off estrogen, without any associated perceptible changes to their bodies.
by jacknews | 2025-06-20 02:40:18+00:00
lol, that looks exactly what it is, stuffed into a doll and wrapped in 'pink' marketing and DEI.

I don't think it will work at all.

It might well sell.

Fathers (cue the space references, I guess) and perhaps mothers, might think it's a great idea.

But it won't do what it says; encourage girls to code.

I think one important way to do that is to make coding itself less solitary, and this doesn't seem to do that particularly, despite the pictures of girls playing together.

Another is to make coding more powerful. Eg, Scratch is great for both boys and girls, being able to put simple stories, animations and games together with fairly little and simple code. But it quickly gets to the point where it's just too much detailed coding to make even fairly simple things happen, let alone complex projects where you're also fighting Scratch's limitations (no functions, seriously?). As one of my code-club students explained, "I understand how to do it, I just don't have the patience to"

Given the founder's background, I'm surprised they are not using an LLM, 'vibe coding' etc, as the basis for this. That might also justify the $200 price tag.

Girls, in fact most kids, don't necessarily want to code (that more often comes from the parents). A small slither get hooked on coding itself. But most just want to make things to share with their friends.
by cyberax | 2025-06-20 02:40:22+00:00
The eventual plan is to limit certs to 48 hours (AFAIR), right now they're already allowing 6-day certs: https://letsencrypt.org/2025/02/20/first-short-lived-cert-is... In this scenario, if Let's Encrypt goes down for just a couple of days, a lot of certs will expire.

There are also operational risks, as Let's Encrypt has to have their secret key material in close proximity to web-facing services. Of course, they use HSMs, but it might not be enough of a barrier for nation-state level attackers.

The offline signing feature of DNSSEC allows the root zone and, possibly, the TLDs to be signed fully offline.

That's why in my ideal world I want to keep DNSSEC as-is for the root zone and the TLD delegation records, but use something like DoH/DoT for the second-level domains. The privacy impact of TLD resolution is pretty much none, and everything else can be protected fully.
by zhihaojia | 2025-06-20 02:41:16+00:00
Ooops, missed one sentence in my previous response. Stanford's MegaKernel project tackles a similar challenge but focuses on manual CUDA implementation. While MPK takes a compiler-driven approach—users express their LLMs at the PyTorch level, and MPK automatically compiles them into optimized megakernels. Our goal is to make programming megakernels much more accessible.
by jhanschoo | 2025-06-20 02:42:19+00:00
I'm just going to defend Aristotle a bit. His incomplete logic and metaphysics nevertheless provided a powerful foundation to inquire into many aspects of the world that his predecessors did not do, nor do systematically. His community did not shy away from empirical research in biology. They all came to wrong conclusions in some things, but we should rather fault their successors for not challenging them.
by alsetmusic | 2025-06-20 02:44:25+00:00
> So this is the architecture, except there’s one more thing. The one more thing is, we have been secretly for the last 18 months designing a completely new user interface. And that new user interface builds on Apple’s legacy and carries it into the next century. And we call that new user interface Aqua, because it’s liquid. One of the design goals was when you saw it, you wanted to lick it.

Steve Jobs
by moondev | 2025-06-20 02:44:38+00:00
I was all ready to complain about HCL because of the horrible ergonomics of multiline strings, which would be a deal breaker as a default config format. I just looked though and it seems they now support it in a much cleaner fashion.

https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/expressio...

This actually makes me want to give HCL another chance
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-20 02:45:01+00:00
Realistically specializing on the data flow is all you can do. Assuming a modern CPU contains on the order of 10 billion transistors that only amounts to 1.2 GiB storage before you account for any actual logic (ie 1 bit per transistor). DRAM hardware is quite different from that of processing elements and it takes quite a lot of DRAM chips to hold the weights of a single model.
by duskwuff | 2025-06-20 02:45:03+00:00
The System 7.0 UI appearance - before Platinum - was a mess. It was little more than a partially colorized version of the monochrome System 6 user interface; in fact, it mostly fell back to the System 6 appearance on machines with monochrome displays, like the (brand-new in 1991!) PowerBook series.

In a certain sense, Platinum was an attempt to reinterpret what Mac OS could have looked like if it had always been designed for a color display. It didn't just add color, like System 7.0 had; it added depth and texture to the interface which wasn't practical to display before. It also added a ton of new controls to the toolkit which previously didn't have standardized implementations or appearances. (For instance, System 7.0 didn't have a standard progress bar control - every application which used one had to provide their own implementation.)
by ghushn3 | 2025-06-20 02:46:03+00:00
I'm non-binary. Some days the body dysphoria hits hard. Some days it's not a big deal at all. I am mostly unhappy I can't just float between them day by day. The body dysphoria I feel is mostly a dissatisfaction with how permanent bodies are. (There's a reason so many trans folks are also transhumanists. Gimme that cyber body please.)
by DowsingSpoon | 2025-06-20 02:46:19+00:00
It might be the parts that lead a person to commit large scale fraud with the idea that the good they can do with the stolen money outweighs all the negatives. Or, at least, that’s the popular idea of what happened to Sam Bankman-Fried. I have no idea what was actually going through that man’s mind.

In any case, EA smells strongly of “the ends justify the means” which most popular moral philosophies reject with strong arguments. One which resonates with me is that there are no “ends.” The path itself is the goal.
by echelon | 2025-06-20 02:46:54+00:00
The law should allow for training, but not reproduction. That would be compatible with the world that seems to be emerging.

You can train on Disney, but you can't produce Disney outputs.

Likewise, if you create some new IP using AI, the US will confer copyright so long as there was sufficient user input (eg. inpainting, editing, turning it into a long-form movie, etc.) Those new, sufficiently novel works should also be copyrightable.

Copyright should compel people to make good stuff and reward them when they do so. But it shouldn't hinder technological progress. There's a balance that can be struck.
by jeswin | 2025-06-20 02:47:02+00:00
If you're using k8s as a service where you've outsourced all of the cluster maintenance (from any of the cloud vendors), which part due you see as super complex? The configuration and specs are vast, but you might only need to know a very small subset of it to put services into production.

You can deploy to k8s with configuration that's just a little more complex than docker-compose. Having said that, perhaps for a majority of apps even that "a little more" is unnecessary - and docker-compose was what the long tail actually wanted. That docker-compose didn't get sustained traction is unfortunate.
by kalleboo | 2025-06-20 02:47:21+00:00
The classic Mac OS (Toolbox) menu routine took over exclusive use of the machine when it was tracking the mouse in the menu - all multitasking stopped running.

So an extension could draw whatever fancy effect it wanted when the menu was down without worrying about a background application drawing over it (drawing over the transparency) as long you made sure to restore what was beneath when the menu was let go.
by twoodfin | 2025-06-20 02:48:21+00:00
IANABCE but…

It’d be really great to be able to price predictions for various RWA at a fine grain: “Will IBM be >$240 next Friday at market close?” “Will George Alleline default on his mortgage for 46 Smiley Court?”

But manually creating and marketing these nanosecurities has too much overhead. Traditionally you’d bundle up a bunch of small stuff into a derivative, but that creates a complex instrument that’s hard to price—and then you get a Global Financial Crisis.

Block chains offer the potential to make these kinds of nano trades self-executing at scale.
by VivaTechnics | 2025-06-20 02:48:51+00:00
I’ve thought about it more seriously. There are two kinds of professionals:

- Technicals – coders, scientists, engineers, artists, builders, etc. - Non-technicals – business people, marketers, writers, policy folks, ops, etc.

There are also two broad skillsets:

- Technical skills – like coding, design, architecture, engineering. - Non-technical skills – and the core of all of these is communication.

The foundation of communication is language. Reading or listening to books, and building core knowledge are how people become strong communicators.

Many of the most successful tech professionals are not just highly skilled technically — they’re also at least above average in communication.

Those who lack communication skills tend to fail — especially in non-technical roles, but sometimes even in technical ones.

That’s why reading and listening to books isn’t optional — it’s essential. Whether you’re in marketing, product, or engineering, communication is a core part of the job.
by capyba | 2025-06-20 02:51:40+00:00
Can’t a good privacy browser randomize some of the ‘nonessential’ elements it sends, thereby creating a new fingerprint for each website? Or change them all to the same one so everyone using that browser has an even more similar fingerprint?

Its always struck me as odd that your browser just volunteers so much information every time you go to a site. Then again, my knowledge of how the web works is limited to HTML+CSS from the 00’s…