MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nilirl | 2025-06-19 15:06:39+00:00
Yes, I see your analogy between fallible humans and fallible AI.

It's not the non-determinism that was bothering me, it was the decision making capability. I didn't understand what kinds of decisions I can rely on an LLM to make.

For example, with the resume screening application from the post, where would I draw the line between the agent and the human?

- If I gave the AI agent access to HR data and employee communications, would it be able decide when to create a job description?

- And design the job description itself?

- And email an opening round of questions for the candidate to get a better sense of the candidates who apply?

Do I treat an AI agent just like I would a human new to the job? Keep working on it until I can trust it to make domain-specific decisions?
by mrweasel | 2025-06-19 15:06:59+00:00
What I would add is "sane defaults", as in unless you pick something different, you get a good enough load balancer/network/persistent storage/whatever.

I'd agree that YAML isn't a good choice, but neither is HCL. Ever tried reading Terraform, yeah, that's bad too. Inherently we need a better way to configure Kubernetes clusters and changing out the language only does so much.

IPv6, YES, absolutely. Everything Docker, container and Kubernetes should have been IPv6 only internal from the start. Want IPv4? That should be handle by a special case ingress controller.
by everdrive | 2025-06-19 15:07:07+00:00
One thing I'm interested are the EFF demo sites which try to identify if you're "uniquely fingerprint-able." What I've seen a lot in the discourse is people attempting to increase the privacy of their browser (via add-ons, configurations, etc) only to see their browser become _more_ unique. They then conclude that you cannot get away from fingerprinting.

I think there are a few potential problems with this approach.

- A lot of browser-based mitigations (such as Firefox's "resist fingerprinting" settings) send dummy data to websites. So yes, you may have a unique fingerprint according to the EFF site. But, when you visit it later, you could in principle have a different unique fingerprint. I haven't seen much discourse which discusses whether this is a viable point of not. Yes, my Linux Firefox with a bunch of weird settings clearly stands out. But maybe I have a different fingerprint across visits?

- Additionally, this strategy seems to say "don't be unique, blend in with the crowd. Look like Windows 10 and Chrome." I think there must be some validity to this. But clearly, advertiser fingerprinting is _most_ interested in the vast middle of the bell curve, ie that huge mass of users with Windows 10-11 & Chrome & Edge. If looking just like everyone else were somehow an effective mitigation, then the advertisers' tracking technology would not actually be effective for the vast majority of cases; the ones they care about the most.

- I also wonder what the difference is between what security researches at EFF and other places can do in principle vs. what various websites are actually doing in practice. It's important to remember that advertising is now like a warrant; if an advertiser thinks you're a different person and serves you the wrong ad, no one will ever notice or care. They have no way to verify it, and whatever error exists won't ever show up in their promotional materials. Even if the fingerprinting technology is quite strong, I sincerely doubt the statistics we hear from advertisers (ie, "we can identify 90% of users") can be very accurate.

I don't mean to suggest that my points are strictly correct -- however I also don't think the usual discourse around the realities of advertising and tracking really gets to the bottom of things in a very accurate or useful way.
by dkarl | 2025-06-19 15:07:19+00:00
It's a conflict as old as time. What do you do when an argument leads to an unexpected conclusion? I think there are two good responses: "There's something going on here, so let's dig into it," or, "There's something going on here, but I'm not going to make time to dig into it." Both equally valid.

In real life, the conversation too often ends up being, "This has to be wrong, and you're an obnoxious nerd for bothering me with it," versus, "You don't understand my argument, so I am smarter, and my conclusions are brilliantly subversive."
by mananaysiempre | 2025-06-19 15:07:27+00:00
> Cyrillic has letters for both sh and ch.

(With the one for sh, ш, having been borrowed from the Hebrew for sh/s/th, ש.)

And yet there have been some ligatures converted into letters following sound changes, as in ЪІ > Ы for [ɨ] (in Russian and Belarusian) or ІО > Ю for [ʉ] (in Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian).
by tayo42 | 2025-06-19 15:07:33+00:00
> where k8s is basically the only etcd customer left.

Is that true. No one is really using it?

I think one thing k8s would need is some obvious answer for stateful systems(at scale, not mysql at a startup). I think there are some ways to do it? Where I work there is basically everything on k8s, then all the databases on their own crazy special systems to support they insist its impossible and costs to much. I work in the worst of all worlds now supporting this.

re: comments about k8s should just schedule pods. mesos with aurora or marathon was basically that. If people wanted that those would have done better. The biggest users of mesos switched to k8s
by impossiblefork | 2025-06-19 15:09:28+00:00
I actually think the people developing AI might well not get rich off it.

Instead, unless there's a single winner, we will probably see the knowledge on how to train big LLMs and make them perform well diffuse throughout a large pool of AI researchers, with the hardware to train models reasonably close to the SotA becoming more quite accessible.

I think the people who will benefit will be the owners of ordinary but hard-to-dislodge software firms, maybe those that have a hardware component. Maybe firms like Apple, maybe car manufacturers. Pure software firms might end up having AI assisted programmers as competitors instead, pushing margins down.

This is of course pretty speculative, and it's not reality yet, since firms like Cursor etc. have high valuations, but I think this is what you'd get from the probably pressure if it keeps getting better.
by komali2 | 2025-06-19 15:09:52+00:00
What's incredible to me is the political blindness. Surely at this point, "liberal zionists" would at least see the writing on the wall? Apply some Bayesian statistical analysis to popular reactions to unprompted military strikes against Iran or something, they should realize at this point that in 25 years the zeitgeist will have completely turned against this chapter in Israel's history, and properly label the genocide for what it is.

I thought these people were the ones that were all about most effective applications of altruism? Or is that a different crowd?
by the_af | 2025-06-19 15:10:47+00:00
> The moment you think something like "I am more correct than this other person because I am a rationalist" is the moment you fail as a rationalist.

It's very telling that some of them went full "false modesty" by naming sites like "LessWrong", when you just know they actually mean "MoreRight".

And in reality, it's just a bunch of "grown teenagers" posting their pet theories online and thinking themselves "big thinkers".
by caudena | 2025-06-19 15:11:08+00:00
We never targeted weakly-ordered architectures like ARM, only x86. We never used a wide variety of different processors. We are not developing the Linux kernel and are not into control dependencies, just relying on the fences and the memory model. There may be some CPU-dependent performance differences, like discrepancy because of NUMA or false sharing being noticeable on one processor, but not on another. RCU and hazard pointers are nothing new. For the disjoint sets we don't need them. For the forest patches and the tries we do. We are using TBB and OpenMP whenever possible and trying to keep things simple.
by sneak | 2025-06-19 15:11:15+00:00
You seem to think that paperwork with a country’s name on it can tell you whether or not inviting that person to your land jeopardizes the safety or well being of your neighbors.

You are mistaken.

This idea that you are somehow safer next to citizens of your own country and less safe next to citizens of a different country is simply incorrect is citizenship is the discriminator you are using.

Based on your comments in this thread, you seem to have a conclusion to which you are attached, and then work backwards from there. This comment of yours really lays that bare in its ridiculousness.
by Out_of_Characte | 2025-06-19 15:11:17+00:00
>They need something that can land on Mars and return with a crew >A three stage rocket is something you’d use for one-way missions with smaller payloads

The only succesfull human spacecraft that landed on another body and taken off again used a three stage rocket to deliver a three stage lander,

The Command and Service Module(CSM) which brought the two stages into low lunar orbit The Lunar Lander (LM) contained a descent stage and an ascent stage, the descent stage was used as a platform for the ascent stage.

To say that three stage rockets are just for one way missions is silly, especially considering that more stages enable larger payloads. We've yet to see whether SpaceX's two stage solution will actually be any good. I also do not expect a single stage to the surface of the moon and back to Low Lunar Orbit to be very usefull. Any mars mission will likely follow the exact apollo staging plan.
by solaire_oa | 2025-06-19 15:11:24+00:00
Top-tier professional programmer quality is exceedingly, impractically optimistic, for a few reasons.

1. There's a low probability of that in the first place.

2. You need to be a top-tier professional programmer to recognize that type of quality (i.e. a junior engineer could select one of the 3 shit PRs)

3. When it doesn't produce TTPPQ, you wasted tons of time prompting and reviewing shit code and still need to deliver, net negative.

I'm not doubting the utility of LLMs but the scattershot approach just feels like gambling to me.
by mortenjorck | 2025-06-19 15:11:41+00:00
There is a pendant light in my entryway that came outfitted with LED filament bulbs when I bought my home. They flicker noticeably, and I would have replaced them all if it were in my living room.

One of the bulbs recently burned out, and I picked up a replacement at Menards. Even though it was just a basic Sylvania, the new one clearly has a rectifier circuit as it does not exhibit any flickering that I can detect.

So anecdotally at least, the cheap bulbs without rectifiers seem to be going away from the big box stores (although I’m sure you can still get them with unpronounceable all-caps names from Amazon).
by bawana | 2025-06-19 15:11:52+00:00
Thank you for the hint. I guess I need a claude API token. From the images it seems he is opening it from his default directory. I sees the 'base env' so it is unclear if any other packages were installed beyond the default linux. I see he simply typed 'boot llmunix' so he must have symlinked 'boot' to his PATH.
by yaxu | 2025-06-19 15:11:57+00:00
Speaking as a member of the Strudel project in the OP, it went really well, everything migrated across (issues, PRs etc) pretty much seamlessly. We have to self-host the ci actions, but as a bonus now they run much faster.

It really is a no-brainer for any free/open source project to be hosted on a free/open source platform. It's pretty nuts that so many stay on Microsoft github who are busy IP-stripping everything via AI, even without considering all the other terrible stuff MS get up to that it's best not to support or be associated with.

Quite a few live coding platforms are making the move to codeberg too. It's a bit trickier for desktop apps like supercollider who depend on cross-platform ci builds though.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-19 15:12:02+00:00
> There are places where non straight orientation is punishable by law or extrajudicially

I didn’t mean to suggest the comparison was exhaustive. Just that both those groups, if they had control of a state, would do exactly this. (And when they have had such control, they have. See American evangelical effects on liberty in their African missions.)
by parpfish | 2025-06-19 15:12:14+00:00
One of my many peeves has been the way that people misuse the term “slippery slope” as evidence for their stance.

“If X, then surely Y will follow! It’s a slippery slope! We can’t allow X!”

They call out the name of the fallacy they are committing BY NAME and think that it somehow supports their conclusion?
by cogman10 | 2025-06-19 15:12:35+00:00
> clever enough to always be right

Oh, see here's the secret. Lots of people THINK they are always right. Nobody is.

The problem is you can read a lot of books, study a lot of philosophy, practice a lot of debate. None of that will cause you to be right when you are wrong. It will, however, make it easier for you to sell your wrong position to others. It also makes it easier for you to fool yourself and others into believing you're uniquely clever.
by crazygringo | 2025-06-19 15:12:55+00:00
Couldn't the power management simply throttle the CPU to never go above supplied power in a battery-free mode? Don't they already implement a power threshold for degraded batteries? It seems like that would just be part of the feature I'm asking for, and easy to implement.

It really seems like, if it weren't for the battery part, these phones could run for decades... but right now you have to replace the battery every couple years because it swells when constantly kept at 100% which it is not designed for.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-06-19 15:13:11+00:00
Phonemic / morphological spelling is a thing (or rather a range of things). E.g. Belarusian is spelled phonetically, but Russian spelling is closer to phonemic—while the Belarusian standard could be used to spell the Moscow variety of Russian pretty painlessly, for those of Vologda or Ryazan it would be a downgrade. (This does not stop standardized textbooks or tests from only touching on spelling mistakes that are natural in Moscow, but that’s another story.)
by benreesman | 2025-06-19 15:13:27+00:00
Any time people engage in some elaborate exercise and it arrives at: "me and people like me should be powerful and not pay taxes and stuff" the reason for making the argument is not a noble one, the argument probably has a bunch of tricks and falsehoods in it, and there's never really any way to extract anything useful, greed and grandiosity are both fundamentally contaminative processes.

These folks have a bunch of money because we allowed them to privatize the commons of 20th century R&D mostly funded by the DoD and done at places like Bell Labs, Thiel and others saw that their interests had become aligned with more traditional arch-Randian goons, and they've captured the levers of power damn near up to the presidency.

This has quite predictably led to a real mess that's getting worse by the day, the economic outlook is bleak, wars are breaking out or intensifying left right and center, and all of this traces a very clear lineage back to allowing a small group of people privatize a bunch of public good.

It was a disaster when it happened in Russia in the 90s and its a disaster now.
by diggan | 2025-06-19 15:14:06+00:00
> would it be able decide when to create a job description?

If you can encode how you/your company does that decision as a human with text, I don't see why not. But personally there is a lot of subjectivity (for better or worse) in hiring processes, I'm not sure I'd want a probabilistic rules engine to make those sort of calls.

My current system prompt for coding with LLMs basically look like I've written down what my own personal rules for programming is. And anytime I got some results I didn't like, I wrote down why I didn't like it, and codified it in my reusable system prompt, then it doesn't make those (imo) mistakes anymore.

I don't think I could realistically get an LLM to do something I don't understand the process of myself, and once you grok the process, you can understand if using an LLM here makes sense or not.

> Do I treat an AI agent just like I would a human new to the job?

No, you treat it as something much dumber. You can generally rely on some sort of "common sense" in a human that they built up during their time on this planet. But you cannot do that with LLMs, as while they're super-human in some ways, are still way "dumber" in other ways.

For example, a human new to a job would pick up things autonomously, while an LLM does not. You need to pay attention to what you need to "teach" the LLM by changing what Karpathy calls the "programming" of the LLM, which would be the prompts. Anything you miss to tell it, the LLM will do whatever with, and it only follows exactly what you say. A human you can usually tell "don't do that in the future" and they'll avoid that in the right context. A LLM you can scream at for 10 hours how they're doing something wrong, but unless you update the programming, they'll continue to make that mistake forever, and if you correct it but reuse it in other contexts, the LLM won't suddenly understand that it doesn't make sense in the context.

Just an example, I wanted to have some quick and dirty throw away code for generating a graph, and in my prompt I mixed X and Y axis, and of course got a function that didn't work as expected. If this was a human doing it, it would have been quite obvious I didn't want time on the Y axis and value on the X axis, because the graph wouldn't make any sense, but the LLM happily complied.
by wavemode | 2025-06-19 15:14:06+00:00
> Of course anyone's allowed to license their project any way they see fit, but they'll have to call it something other than open source and accept the limited distribution and userbase they'll see as a result.

This doesn't require abandoning open source. The GPL and AGPL serve precisely the purpose of preventing open-source software from being exploited for closed-source purposes.

Obviously hindsight is 20/20, so this doesn't help maintainers who have already chosen a permissive license and don't want to rugpull their users. But to say solving this problem requires adopting a non-open-source license is not correct.

Another option is dual-licensing - GPL/AGPL for all, or a permissive license that can be purchased for a fee.
by bhouston | 2025-06-19 15:14:19+00:00
This is a really weird response on your part.

You are misleadingly reframing the drug use part: it was THC gummies bought legally in NYC, and they had no evidence of drug use prior to searching his phone, a search which was motivated by their disapproval of his political views.

Then you talk about irrelevant topics for two paragraphs.

I need to move on.
by BobbyJo | 2025-06-19 15:14:25+00:00
The versioning makes sense to me. Software has a cycle where a new tool is created to solve a problem, and the problem winds up being meaty enough, and the tool effective enough, that the exploration of the problem space the tool unlocks is essentially a new category/skill/whatever.

computers -> assembly -> HLL -> web -> cloud -> AI

Nothing on that list has disappeared, but the work has changed enough to warrant a few major versions imo.
by tuveson | 2025-06-19 15:15:00+00:00
My feeling has been that it’s a lot of people that work on B2B SaaS that are sad they hadn’t gotten the chance to work on the Manhattan Project. Be around the smartest people in your field. Contribute something significant (but dangerous! And we need to talk about it!) to humanity. But yeah computer science in the 21st century has not turned out to be as interesting as that. Maybe just as important! But Jeff Bezos important, not Richard Feynman important.
by npalli | 2025-06-19 15:15:21+00:00
Rust is the future of systems programming and will always be for the foreseeable future. The memory issue will mostly be addressed as needed, see from John Carmack yesterday[1], the C++ ecosystem advantage (a broad sense of how problems whether DS, Storage, OS, Networking, etc. have been solved) will be very hard to overcome for newer programming languages. I think it is ironic how modern C++ folks just keep chugging along releasing products while Rust folks are generally haranguing everyone about "memory safety" and generally leaving half finished projects (turns out writing Rust code is more fun than reading someone else, who would have guessed).

[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1935353905149341968
by immibis | 2025-06-19 15:15:22+00:00
IPv6 reinvented hardly anything. It's pretty much IPv4, with longer addresses, and a handful of trivial things people wished were in IPv4 by consensus (e.g. fragmentation only at end hosts; less redundant checksums).

The main disagreements have been above what to do with the new addresses e.g. some platforms insist on SLAAC. (Which is good because it forces your ISP to give you a /64).

Devices operating at the IP layer aren't allowed to care about extension headers other than hop-by-hop, which must be the first header for this reason. Breaking your stupid middlebox is considered a good thing because these middleboxes are constantly breaking everyone's connections.

Your sockaddr complaints WOULD apply at double address length on platforms other than your favorite one. The IETF shouldn't be in charge of making BSD's API slightly more convenient at the expense of literally everything else. And with addresses twice as long, they wouldn't be as effectively infinite. You'd still need to be assigned one from your ISP. They'd still probably only give you one, or worse, charge you based on your number of devices. You'd still probably have NAT.
by pyman | 2025-06-19 15:15:23+00:00
It just makes you wonder why Apple is so behind with its apps. I remember when Android was the one struggling to catch up, but now the tables have turned. A friend of mine was able to remove people from a photo ages ago, something that only recently came to iOS. Apple spent so much time and money on those 3D avatars, but honestly, who's using them? I mean, 8-year-olds don't even have iPhones, right?

Apple could take inspiration from this little app and build something brilliant using AI and machine learning.

- An app that animates your photos and lets you record a message on top

- Or a feature in iOS that converts any audio into text and lets you summarise 2 or 5 minute voice messages into a paragraph. I don't have time to listen to long audios. And please, don't just add it to Messages, add it to iOS.

- Or an app that turns your voice messages into a video with subtitles for people who can't hear, with animations, background moving, colours, and all the AI jazz.

- Or even better, an app that creates images based on what you're saying in the audio.

I don't know, there are so many cool ideas floating around.

Apple really needs to start showcasing its AI capabilities. Even the camera software feels behind. I keep upgrading the hardware & software and barely see any difference.

Tim, if you are reading this: Stay hungry, stay foolish!
by achierius | 2025-06-19 15:15:46+00:00
Concretely we know that there exist irreducible structures, at least in mathematics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simpl...

The largest of the finite simple groups (themselves objects of study as a means of classifying other, finite but non-simple groups, which can always be broken down into simple groups) is the Monster Group -- it has order 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000, and cannot be reduced to simpler "factors". It has a whole bunch of very interesting properties which thus can only be understood by analyzing the whole object in itself.

Now whether this applies to biology, I doubt, but it's good to know that limits do exist, even if we don't know exactly where they'll show up in practice.