MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajkjk | 2025-06-28 18:42:06+00:00
I am aware it's an infinite tape and finite state (maybe I misspoke somewhere), as well as the halting machines using finite tape (because of course they do).

But the overall 'complexity' (at a timestep, say) is going to be due to the states and the tape together. The BB(5) example that was analyzed, iirc, was a Collatz-like problem (Aaronson describes it here: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8088 ). My interpretation of this is that:

1. collatz-like functions have a lot of complexity just due to math alone 2. 5 states turned out to be enough to "reach" that one that 3. more states means you're going to reach more possible Collatz-like functions (they don't have to be Collatz-like; it's just easier to think about them like that) 4. eventually you reach ones that ZFC cannot show to halt, because there is effectively no way to prove it other than running them, and then you would have to solve the halting problem.

The part that was helpful for me to be less unsettle by BB(745) being independent of the ZFC was the notion that it eventually boils down to a halting problem, and asking ZFC to "solve" it... which is more agreeable than the idea that "ZFC cannot compute a function that seems to be solvable by brute force".
by acdha | 2025-06-28 18:42:35+00:00
> They knew the world community would give them some leeway after Oct 7th, so exploited it as far as possible to militarily achieve their geo-political goals.

That’s my read as well. I was strongly pro-Israel for decades and while I was never comfortable with the plight of Palestinians Hamas had a lot of the blame, too, but the last year really moved me over to thinking that the people who said most of the “accidents” over the years were intentional were correct. They can pull off these amazingly accurate strikes when they want to, it’s implausible that they suddenly have the precision of a drunken 18th century musketeer around aid workers and civilians. Their leadership clearly do not care and collective punishment is a war crime no matter who does it.
by chubot | 2025-06-28 18:42:46+00:00
It's incredibly simple, but it's also true

Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome - Charlie Munger

It's the same with politics and money.

We don't get the leaders we want, because it costs money to buy people's attention. We get the people who have some way to pay for attention

(in recent years, one of those ways is increasingly corruption - e.g. senator of NJ, mayor of NY, etc.)

An article today talks about Cuomo following the "local TV buys" playbook, which WAS a fairly reliable way to win elections:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...

That didn't work this time, but the mechanism is simple and clear
by tmountain | 2025-06-28 18:42:49+00:00
Almost any idea has long precedence, but the confluence of recent rulings, taken in its aggregate, provides a pretty well defined toolkit for a major departure from the normative state into the prerogative state. No amount of intellectual Zamboni reasoning can change the fact that it’s obvious to any rational observer that the U.S. is speed running an authoritarian takeover. Naturally some will support these changes and others will oppose them, but it’s as objectively verifiable as climate change; albeit, with the same chorus of denialism.
by siliconc0w | 2025-06-28 18:43:05+00:00
Because if you want to sell an AI product you now need to hire an army of lawyers to do the state-by-state compliance. This dramatically increases the costs and slows down critical innovation. Another common argument is that any regulation will allow China to 'win the AI race' but I don't entirely agree with that premise - it's not a 'race' and if China 'wins' it'll be because they largely use their debt to finance effective high ROI industrial policy rather than mega tax breaks.
by joules77 | 2025-06-28 18:43:19+00:00
They actually believe they are geniuses. More than the stories about their own greatness, is the level of Energy they have to run around telling the stories non stop come what may. And promoting people who do so. That's the biggest factor in what stories stay alive and what stories are forgotten. Someone has to constantly bang the drum. Frequency matters more than anything. Who beats the drum the most? People who have the most energy and no other work or capacity to do any other work.

Someone or group with matching energy has to then waste their lives running behind this over energetic army to neutralize the effect. Who is going to do that full time> No one sane.
by Scarblac | 2025-06-28 18:43:41+00:00
And also, if BB were computable, then it could be used to solve the halting problem: run the Turing machine of size n for BB(n) steps, and if it hasn't halted yet, it never will. So the BB function is clearly not computable.

But to me as a layman that seems true regardless of formal axioms chosen, but I guess I need to read that linked thesis.
by bberenberg | 2025-06-28 18:44:05+00:00
I think you can celebrate the ingenuity of a moment in a conflict without condoning the whole of it. Shooting down a plane with a helicopter is hard, this is the first time it happened as far as we know.

Also, when I was taught about the Vietnam War there was a huge amount of respect paid to the creativity of the North Korean forces in how they ran their military operations. Obviously a 1/n anecdote.
by basisword | 2025-06-28 18:44:08+00:00
Would any effect be limited once you achieve mastery (or close to it)? After 25 years playing my instrument when I play it my brain just switches off. No thinking at all. Doesn't matter whether I'm looking at sheet music playing something new, improvising, or playing something I know well. It's all easy. I imagine it's similar with a second language if you fully immerse yourself in it for a long time.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-06-28 18:45:57+00:00
I think real world ad blocking is one of the least imaginative scenarios of the future.

Where we're going, you'd kill for a world where you just had ads on billboards and screens that you only saw when you were looking at them.

Just imagine the real problems we're going to deal with in a few decades with next-gen always-on AR that doesn't require a bulky headset anymore.
by regularization | 2025-06-28 18:46:47+00:00
> I know Israel has attempted a 2 state solution 3 different times since 1947, unsuccessful because they were subsequently attacked. That's history.

I agree a two state solution has been derailed by attacks. Full implementation of the Oslo accords were derailed by the assassination of the Prime Minister of Israel. He was assassinated by a right wing Kahanist Jewish Israeli! And now the Israeli cabinet has Kahanist MPs. That's history.
by theahura | 2025-06-28 18:47:27+00:00
I think there's basically the benchmarks, and then "the benchmarks". The former is, like, actual stuff you can quantify and game. And the latter is the public response. The former is a leading indicator but it's not always accurate, and the latter is what actually matters. I knew Gemini 2.5 was better than Claude 3.7 based on the Reddit reaction lol
by Scarblac | 2025-06-28 18:47:36+00:00
There is a finite number of Turing machines of size 748. The number of them that eventually halt is thus also finite, and BB(748) is the highest number of steps in the finite list of how many steps each took to halt. It has to be a number.

We just can't prove which number it is, we don't know which of the machines halt.
by benreesman | 2025-06-28 18:48:05+00:00
I'm actually working on a project I'm quite serious about but jokingly refer to as "Ergonomic Rust", which would make all of it a weird expression in Rust.

It's a C++23 library suite and lint set that eliminates:

- UB in all but the most contrived cases (I think I can get it to zero with a modest clang patch set) - bounds errors (see below) - bans all naked pointers and most references of any kind (NVRO and elision are mandated since 17, and on modern hardware like `znver5` you're usually pessimizing with e.g. `const foo_t& foo`) - and has no `usafe` keyword to fall back on, that's enforced at the conceptual module level by having things declare they are unsafe in their entirety via `extern "C"`

This stuff is really unlocked by C++23:

``` template<typename T> concept SafeIndexable = requires(T& t, const T& ct, size_t idx) { { t.at(idx) } -> std::same_as<typename T::reference>; { ct.at(idx) } -> std::same_as<typename T::const_reference>; // Banned: t[idx] };

// Wrapper that forces .at() usage template<SafeIndexable Container> class Safe { Container c; public: // Forward everything except operator[] template<typename... Args> Safe(Args&&... args) : c(std::forward<Args>(args)...) {}

// Evil genius move: operator[] calls .at() auto operator[](size_t idx) -> decltype(auto) { return c.at(idx); // Throws on bounds violation! } auto operator[](size_t idx) const -> decltype(auto) { return c.at(idx); } // Forward other operations auto begin() { return c.begin(); } auto end() { return c.end(); } // ... etc

};

// Usage: Safe<std::vector<int>> vec{1, 2, 3}; vec[10]; // Throws std::out_of_range instead of UB! ```
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-06-28 18:48:31+00:00
I don't see this as very well conceived article, since the two concepts being discussed, manual memory management, and arena allocators are really orthogonal.

Arena allocators aren't going to save you from memory management bugs, and aren't intended to. They are just an efficient may to allocate and free a bunch of chunks of memory that have the same lifetime, for example due to belonging to the same data structure. The idea is that you just sequentially allocate from a large chunk of memory, then free up the entire large chunk in one go at the end of the collective lifetime of the allocated pieces.

The things that make memory management in C error-prone are that:

1) C doesn't have objects/destructors, so all freeing of memory is manual, thereby creating the possibility that you mess it up.

2) C's pointers don't have ownership semantics, and therefore also doesn't have niceties like shared ownership (cf C++'s shared vs unique pointers). All ownership tracking is manual, giving you another chance to mess up.

The only think that is going to save you from memory management errors in C is programmer discipline and attention to detail.
by mindcrime | 2025-06-28 18:48:32+00:00
Well, every subreddit is an RSS feed (ex: http://reddit.com/r/artificial/.rss) so if you have a favorite sub or two, you can follow those in an RSS reader.

Likewise, there is the HN RSS feed: http://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss

Also, all arXiv categories have RSS feeds associated with them: https://rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs

and you can also do individual subject classes within a topic:

https://rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.LG

But of course if you're asking about my favorite feeds, I guess I'd have to say "my own". :-)

http://philliprhodes.name/roller/blog/feed/entries/atom

https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/feed/entries/atom
by KaleBab | 2025-06-28 18:48:40+00:00
Congratulations on publishing your project!

Since you haven't written much in your post, I'm not entirely sure what your specific intentions are. Do you expect people to use your application, are you looking for feedback or tips?

I think my first tip is, if your intention is for it to be used by others, to ensure a little higher quality before publishing a project. If it's more of a learning project, that's fine, but then it would be nice to indicate as such! And perhaps ask for specific help.

I looked at the code a little bit, and I see some quirks and interesting things which makes me hesitant to use this application in production. I think a bit more polish is required before it's production ready. I'm not about to do a full code review, but here are some random pointers of things that I noticed.

* In the Readme it says the endpoints are POST and GET specifically. But are they? What happens when you GET enqueue or HEAD dequeue? * The queue methods update global variables, is this really the best design choice? Why not consider putting them as fields on the queue? If not, why are the queue's fields not simply global variables, too? * Go has an excellent `slog` package for structured JSON logging, and it would be quite idiomatic to use it * In some environments, such as Kubernetes, the implemented graceful shutdown procedure will terminate the app while the service might still be routing requests to it (as far as I know, it sends the SIGINT concurrently with asking the service to remove the pod from the service [simplified]) * Is "too many requests" the most appropriate status code when the enqueue method returns an error? * The server timeouts could be considered rather large when all it's doing is reading and writing a maximum of 128KiB payloads; preferably such options would be configurable in any case

Honestly all in all, it looks like a university student project. Specially due to the emphasis on spelling out computer science concepts and Go specifics in the Readme (e.g. "Nils every slice entry so Go’s tri‑colour GC can reclaim memory quickly; resets counters", "Mutex ensures linearizability (each op appears instantaneous). Because we hold the lock only long enough to modify the slice, throughput scales linearly until contention on enqueue/dequeue dominates"). Nothing wrong with that, but it would be good to mark it as such.

Also I can highly recommend the book 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them which will address some points I see in this code as well.

Anyway keep up the good work and happy coding!
by corimaith | 2025-06-28 18:49:06+00:00
While there is value in the experience of eating pastries and a cappuccino in a cobblestone square, that's also largely continuing the experience of what one's forebears were doing 100 years ago. It's a melancholic stagnancy. And for me, it's very important to situate my own context within the present, and then, towards the future. To be living in the present that exists now and what it offers in it's fullest extent.

That's why the experience of drinking coffee in a airport terminal and watching people from all across the world in many ways holds more value, because that's the experience that exists fully within the modern present day context. It didn't exist in the past, and won't in the future beyond "history".

Well, it's not Atlanta the author should be comparing against, it should be Doha Airport, or Tokyo as the flagbearers of modernity. And there are many experiences there that Europe can't hope to replicate. There is no contender to Akihabara, no place similar to the level urban integration as Roppongi Hills, no comparison to the sheer density and diversity of food and experiences one can find there.

The problem with America I feel funnily enough is the rejection of modernism (after the 2000s or so). Americans do venerate their history similar to Europeans, but their historical buildings are wooden colonial houses, a far cry from the monumental cities that the Europeans inherited. People in Asia and elsewhere don't do that, much of the old cities have been rebuilt from the ground up in glass, steel and concerete. Perhaps you might them soulless, but they're also far more covenient, far safer, far more comfortable, and that sets the foundation for new things to rise.

If America decided to follow that again and build real, modern cities again with efficient metros and integrated malls, when combined with their individualism and freedom, such a place could very well be one of the greatest places to live.
by diggan | 2025-06-28 18:49:26+00:00
> Can you elaborate on what makes this “software 3.0”?

Software 2.0: We need to parse a bunch of different job ads. We'll have a rule engine, decide based on keywords what to return, do some filtering, maybe even semantic similarity to descriptions we know match with a certain position, and so on

Software 3.0: We need to parse a bunch of different job ads. Create a system prompt that says "You are a job description parser. Based on the user message, return a JSON structure with title, description, salary-range, company, position, experience-level" and etc, pass it the JSON schema of the structure you want and you have a parser that is slow, sometimes incorrect but (most likely) covers much broader range than your Software 2.0 parser.

Of course, this is wildly simplified and doesn't include everything, but that's the difference Karpathy is trying to highlight. Instead of programming those rules for the parser ourselves, you "program" the LLM via prompts to do that thing.
by closetkantian | 2025-06-28 18:49:38+00:00
I'll tell you what's been working for me: an e-ink phone. It's a Bigme Hibreak Pro. The interface is a bit clunky but it gets the job done. Social media is just not fun on this phone. It's still very usable if I need it, however. I'm also knocking out books at a rate that I haven't in years.
by slt2021 | 2025-06-28 18:49:40+00:00
There is no latitude. They have only one requirement: growth growth growth.

If you hit the growth targets, they will pat you in the back and will demand Hyperscale growth growth growth and will throw money at you to supercharge it.

If you refuse to chase the growth, they will simply kick you off the company via Board or fund your competitor that will chase the growth at all means
by rramadass | 2025-06-28 18:49:54+00:00
It is understanding the non-trivial statistical properties (even at a simple conceptual level) that is of paramount importance. PRNG is one of the most difficult subjects in Numerical Computation and has nothing whatever to do with any language/package/library etc.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator

Even today, caution is sometimes required, as illustrated by the following warning in the International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science (2010).

The list of widely used generators that should be discarded is much longer [than the list of good generators]. Do not trust blindly the software vendors. Check the default RNG of your favorite software and be ready to replace it if needed. This last recommendation has been made over and over again over the past 40 years. Perhaps amazingly, it remains as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.
by sandworm101 | 2025-06-28 18:49:57+00:00
Because we do not saddle every individual soldier with responsibility for an entire war. That is the responsibility of politicians, and the people who elect them. Don't like the Vietnam war? Talk to all those people who voted in the leaders that perpetuated that war. Do it fast. They aren't getting any younger.

This soldier did not commit a war crime by shooting down an enemy plane. He was doing exactly what he was asked by his country to do.
by chisleu | 2025-06-28 18:50:55+00:00
The way I feel about this is. 1. It's going to pass 2. It's not going to get overturned by this Supreme Court 3. It's going to have the biggest impact on the world of any law.

Right now, The US and China are in an AI war. The US is doing everything it can to stop China from making progress on AI like it was a nuclear bomb. And it just might be that consequential in 10 years.

Where I am now is past the "3 sleepness nights" of 'Co-Intelligence' fame.

If you haven't seen a properly contexted (50k-100k tokens, depending on the size of the project(s)) LLM work in a code repo, then you have no idea why so many of us are terrified. LLMs are already taking jobs. My company laid off 7% of the workforce because of LLM's impact directly. I say that not because the CEO said it, but because I see it in my day to day. I'm a Principal Engineer and I just don't have need of Juniors anymore. They used to be super useful because they were teachable, and after some training you can offload more and more work to them and free up your time to work on harder problems.

With MCPs, LLMs aren't limited to the editor window anymore. My models update my JIRA tickets for me, rip content from the wiki into it's markdown memory bank which is kept in repo and accelerates everyone's work. It's connecting to databases to find out schemas and example column data. Shit, as I'm typing this it's currently deploying a new version of a container to ECR/ECS/Fargate with terraform for a little project I'm working on.

I believe we are in the very early days of this technology. I believe that over the next ten years, we are going to inundated with new potential for LLMs. It's impossible to foresee all the changes this is going to bring to society. The use cases are going to explode as each tiny new feature or new mode evolves.

My advice is to get off of the sidelines and level up your skills to include LLM integrations. Understand how they work, how to use them effectively, how to program system integrations for them... agents especially! Agents can be highly effective at many use cases. For instance, an Agent that watches a JIRA board for new tickets which contain prompts to be executed in certain repos, then executes the prompt and creates a PR for the changes. All in a context that is fully aware of your environment, deployment, CI/CD, secrets management, etc.

Anything will be possible sooner than we expect. It's going to impact the poorest people the most. A really cyberpunk reality could be upon us faster than we expect, including the starving masses stuggling to get enough to even survive.
by gen220 | 2025-06-28 18:51:06+00:00
You do have a personal knowledge management base, it’s all your friends and coworkers :)

I’ve heard this concept described as the “external brain”. If I don’t talk about something or write it down, it’s more likely than not getting flushed out of my brain. My friends or calendar app or sparingly few notes will be there to remind me if it’s actually important! I only write to make/check-in on longer term plans
by w10-1 | 2025-06-28 18:51:12+00:00
> I've not had the opportunity to do more than dabble with the best Gen-AI tools, but I'm fascinated as I listen to friends and colleagues share their experiences. I'm convinced that this is another fundamental change

So: impressions of impressions is the foundation for a declaration of fundamental change?

What exactly is this abstraction? why nature? why new?

RESULT: unfounded, ill-formed expression
by slavik81 | 2025-06-28 18:51:13+00:00
I used it because it was recommended by Stephan T. Lavavej, maintainer of Visual Studio's C++ Standard Library, in his "rand() Considered Harmful" talk, back when <random> was introduced. See 11m30s. https://youtu.be/LDPMpc-ENqY?t=10m50s
by toomuchtodo | 2025-06-28 18:51:56+00:00
Bluesky also:

Bluesky has launched RSS feeds

https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds - January 15, 2024

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 - January 2024

This is cool and fun because you can use Bluesky as RSS PubSub infra. You simply post as a user and clients can consume via RSS, you rely on Bluesky's PDS or host your own, etc.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-28 18:52:19+00:00
Great! You've convinced nobody of anything.

Businesses are powerful tools for the common good and the fact they produce returns for investors is absolutely critical to their continued existence and long-term viability.

But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners.

It cannot be "either/or" and it's not immoral to pursue profits.
by ANewFormation | 2025-06-28 18:52:32+00:00
For things like this I don't think you can view it as a destination, but rather a journey.

Your mind, body, and any skill will deteriorate over time if not regularly trained, so it must become a part of your life.

And because of this, the answer is easy - do what is permanently and realistically sustainable for yourself. It doesn't matter what's best when you're only going to really keep with things that are personally satisfying for yourself.