MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dandanua | 2025-07-19 20:00:03+00:00
You don't need specialized tooling like Lean if you have enough training data with statements written in the natural language, I suppose. But the use of AlphaProof/AlphaGeometry type of learning is almost certain. And I'm sure they have spent a lot of compute to produce solutions, $10k is not a problem for them.

The bigger question is - why should everyone be excited by this? If they don't plan to share anything related to this AI model back to humanity.
by saghm | 2025-07-19 20:00:38+00:00
It's super easy to demonstrate your point with the first example the article gives as well; instead of separate methods, nothing prevents defining a method `fn x_y_mut(&mut self) -> (&mut f64, &mut 64)` to return both and use that in place of separate methods, and everything works! This obviously doesn't scale super well, but it's also not all that common to need to structure this way in the first place.
by 9dev | 2025-07-19 20:01:24+00:00
Germany, Spain, and Italy were no western democracies in any sense of the word before the rise of fascism, Japan, Brazil, and Chile are no western democracies per definition.

I’m talking about the post-WW2 order, which has been remarkably solid. Until Trump showed up, that is. But even the USA are still a working democracy, despite all the fear of an authoritarian regime. So I would at least argue for a bit of calm and reason before proclaiming the end of freedom due to discontinued 500€ notes.
by wavemode | 2025-07-19 20:01:55+00:00
There's just one feature Zig lacks, which would have allowed for full automation of interface definitions. In Zig you can programmatically construct data types with compile-time programming, but such types aren't allowed to have methods: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/6709

This is an intentional limitation, because the language creator worries the feature would be abused.
by majormajor | 2025-07-19 20:02:41+00:00
This seems to be a golden rule of many languages? `return 3` in a function with a signature that says it's going to return a string is going to fail in a lot of places, especially once you exclude bolted-on-after-the-fact type hinting like what Python has.

It's easier to "abuse" in some languages with casts, and of course borrow checking is not common, but it also seems like just "typed function signatures 101".

Are there common exceptions to this out there, where you can call something that says it takes or returns one type but get back or send something entirely different?
by eigenspace | 2025-07-19 20:02:46+00:00
I don't use Rust much, but I agree with the thrust of the article. However, I do think that the borrowchecker is the only reason Rust actually caught on. In my opinion, it's really hard for a new language to succeed unless you can point to something and say "You literally can't do this in your language"

Without something like that, I think it just would have been impossible for Rust to gain enough momentum, and also attract the sort of people that made its culture what it is.

Otherwise, IMO Rust would have ended up just like D, a language that few people have ever used, but most people who have heard of it will say "apparently it's a better safer C++, but I'm not going to switch because I can technically do all that stuff in C++"
by fragmede | 2025-07-19 20:02:54+00:00
When you're high, where you are depends on the drug. They don't all cause the same incapacitating euphoria that fentanyl zombies experience. Alcoholics famously have a problem with driving while intoxicated, which is to say there's a state between sober and being blacked out. Some alcoholics just like a pleasant buzz and don't get to a point of euphoria and nothing else. Of course, cocaine addicts hash together elaborate business schemes while high to (to your point of stimulants being a gogogo drug), but then they're not in blissed out euphoria either, but actively thinking and planning and doing.
by Spivak | 2025-07-19 20:02:55+00:00
> In that sense, Rust enables escapism: When writing Rust, you get to solve lots of 'problems' - not real problems, mind you, but fun problems.

This is a real problem across the entire industry, and Rust is a particularly egregious example because you get to justify playing with the fun stimulating puzzle machine because safety—you don't want unsafe code, do you? Meanwhile there's very little consideration to whether the level of rigidity is justified in the problem domain. And Rust isn't alone here, devs snort lines of TypeScript rather than do real work for weeks on end.
by dpkirchner | 2025-07-19 20:03:42+00:00
It looks like a large majority of Republicans do support gun control: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/center-for-gun-violence-solutio... and a large proportion support abortion being legal in at least most cases (albeit not a majority): https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opini...

I wish pollsters would ask the right question: "would you support the government fining you or jailing you (or a family member) if you seek an abortion." I bet the numbers would swing way towards legality. But what're ya gonna do.
by sailingparrot | 2025-07-19 20:04:08+00:00
> and not so much that fact that they used precise numbers in the their internal monologue as opposed to verbal buckets like "pretty likely", "very unlikely"

I am obviously only talking from my personal anecdotal experience, but having been on a bunch of coffee chat in the last few months with people in the AI safety field in SF, and a lot of them being Lesswrong-ers, I experienced a lot of those discussions with random % being thrown in succession to estimate the final probability of some event, and even though I have worked in ML for 10+ years (so I would guess more constantly aware of what a bayesian probability is than the average person), I do find myself often swayed by whatever numbers comes out at the end and having to consciously take a step back and pull myself from instinctively trusting this random number more than I should. I would not need to pull myself back, I think, if we were using words instead of precise numbers.

It could be just a personal mental weakness with numbers with me that is not general, but looking at my interlocutors emotional reactions to their own numerical predictions I do feel quite strongly that this is a general human trait.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-19 20:04:40+00:00
The rural focus seems weird, a mis-direction. Sure yes, they'll feel a lot of damage from this, stations will close, but there's so many people everywhere going to be impacted by this.

What feels most notable to me is that there has been so much media consolidation already. David (son of Larry) Ellison's Skydance buying CBS removes on more not hard right/hard plutocrat aligned media empire. The ongoing Warner Brothers / Discovery mega-conglomrate (also encompassing HBO, DC, Turner) being run by plutocrat friendly David Zaslav. Rumbles of Bezos trying to buy Conde Master. LA Times, WaPo, NYT all having very plutocrat friendly operators now.

Having the government paying kind of regular boring human people to go make programs and radio is a threat to the consolidated media, a threat to the large sweeping faction of very rich people who've been gobbling up the press.

I care for sure about rural people & their access to media, their local stations. Local stations are amazing, local journalism is especially amazing & ghastly absent, super hard to fund today. The government de-participating in enriching democracy by supporting independent media, that's the incredibly woe begotten (for all) sadness I feel about this news.
by kelnos | 2025-07-19 20:04:44+00:00
For a dealership I feel like there's less risk; they can do a quick background/credit check on you before accepting the personal check, and it's probably easier for them to track down someone who gives them a bad check. They also have better ability to absorb the loss, in the worst case. I'm sure they've modeled everything and have decided that taking personal checks is worth it financially to them.

(I remember reading long ago that if if a potential customer has to leave the dealership to go secure the proper form of payment, a significant percent just don't come back at all. They want to keep you there until you buy something, fairly standard sales tactic.)

But for a regular person just trying to sell their own car directly to someone else, they're absolutely going to want a cashier's check or cash. (Even the cashier's check can be risky; I doubt your average person is an expert in detecting a fraudulent one.)
by kjellsbells | 2025-07-19 20:04:47+00:00
Unlikely to be better in supportability terms, since we are talking about a 30 year old OS on 30 year old hardware that wasnt the primary development target.

However, in terms of build quality, I would take the old HP 9000s over NeXT cube any day. Those old HPs were engineering workstations built by an HP that at the time still cared about engineering.

Jobs and the NeXT crew built beautiful things, but at that time they didnt have the decades of experience that HP did. (I'd say the same about old RS/6000s by the way.)

A trivial example is how when you open up the back, engineering workstations did not slice up your hands on stamped metal frames and risers. Whereas PCs of the time generally did. (Compaq was a notable exception, but you paid a price premium for it.)
by perching_aix | 2025-07-19 20:04:54+00:00
I've posted a reply to this in haste, but it was a bit more emotionally charged than ideal. This is a reworded version that I believe reflects my thoughts more accurately.

> The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.

That is a very far removed interpretation of what I wrote. As I'm sure you're aware, nuclear bombs operate on fission (or in rarer cases, fission and fusion). These are atomic-scale processes, but do not involve atomic-scale control (or in some cases, even control at all - natural fission sites exist). A more faithful example for what I said would be semiconductor manufacturing, where the state of the art is 40-atoms wide tracks of patterning resolution. The atomic pick-and-place I describe was demonstrated, but has no practical implementations that I'm aware of (would be way too slow). But even if we go back to fission, nuclear plants are providing stable, relatively clean baseline power at reasonable costs, and for better or for worse, the world didn't yet descend into WW3 either, and it's more than fair to speculate that this is due to the temporary checkmate nuclear bombs provide us. So as far as I'm concerned, no, I think we're pretty alright still.

> Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“.

But your position doesn't seem to care much for if this assumption is correct or not. Even if it's bang-on perfectly correct, you stated that this is eugenics period, therefore it's bad. Was that not what you meant to suggest then?

> They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason.

How would you know? What if I disagree that reason and purpose are ontologically real?

> Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral.

I disagree that human genetics would be a conscious process, and that it can thus care about things. I also disagree that it can know anything about morals - morals are a human concept, and they're not even universally shared across us. Very clearly just the two of us seem to hold ourselves to very different definitions of what's moral, for example.

> It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.

I don't suppose you're claiming that this treatment (or other genetic treatments) result(s) in the vast majority of the patients dying?
by fnordpiglet | 2025-07-19 20:05:32+00:00
Surely you jest. The cheating would be the same cheating as any other situation - someone inside the IMO skipping the questions and answers to people outside then that being used to compete. Fine - but why? If this were discovered then it would be disastrous for everyone involved, and for what? A noteworthy HN link? The downside would be international scandal and careers destroyed. The upside is imperceptible.

Finally, even if you aligned the model with the answers its weight shift of such an enormous model would be inconsequential. You would need to prime the context or boost the weights. All this seems like absurd lengths to go to to cheat on this one thing rather than focusing your energies on actually improving model performance. The payout for OpenAI isn’t a gold medal in the IMO it’s having a model that can get a gold medal at IMO then selling it. But it has to actually be capable of doing what’s on the tin otherwise their customers will easily and rapidly discover this.

Sorry, I like tin foil as much as anyone else, but this doesn’t seem credibly likely given the incentive structure.
by skydhash | 2025-07-19 20:05:43+00:00
Interfaces and tools are orthogonal. It's like a hammer. The head is what is used on the nail. While the handle is shaped to fit the human hand. We can modify one without modifying the other. Another good example is Magit (or Lazygit) and git. Magit is designed to be used interactively, while is more about the domain of version control.

Workflows are humans processes, what we do is naming them and identify their parameters. The actual tools to implement those workflows don't matters that much at a human scale other than cognitive load. So I don't care much about gcc various options. What I want is `make debug` or `make release` (or just `make`). And cognitive load is lowered because I only have these to remember and they are deterministic.

Agent is not a good bridge between humans and tools. Because they increase cognitive load, while all the interface have been about lowering it. There's no "make test" and have a nice output of all the lines that have been flagged (and have some integration like Vim's quickfix which can quickly bring you to each line). Instead it's typing a lot and praying that it actually do something good.
by yawboakye | 2025-07-19 20:05:53+00:00
eu resident here. i’ve observed with sadness what a scared and terrified lots the europeans have become. but at least their young people can do drugs, party 72 hours straight, and graffiti all walls in berlin so hey what’s not to like?

one day some historian will be able to pinpoint the exact point in time that europe chose to be anti-progress and fervent traditionalist hell-bent on protecting pizza recipes, ruins of ancient civilization, and a so-called single market. one day!
How will AI impact politics?
by mobileturdfctry | 2025-07-19 20:06:05+00:00
I'd be interested to hear any thoughts on this, but the thing that brought me here was that it seems even indirectly AI is poised to have a pretty enormous impact on politics.

Specifically I'm interested in this question from the perspective of what I observe in the responses I get when I'm not concise or leave crucial details out. This in and of itself seems to be a "training ground" for people to start to truly grasp just how expansive human knowledge has become. By formulating well thought out questions you will get better answers. People will be rewarded for thinking critically about the problems they're trying to get answers to. Not that this wasn't already the case, it's just that some people just don't try. With AI it seems to fill a gap that makes critical thinking accessible to pretty much everyone. Putting it plainly, AI will respond with an answer to the question you ask. Ask better questions get better answers. As people learn / continue to become better at critical thinking, I think a natural progression is that we'll all (relatively rapidly) become better at formulating our position on issues. The "spin" games that some disreputable media thrive in today, will naturally become harder and harder to sustain.

This in and of itself (to me) is reason to be very optimistic about the future of politics in the US and around the world.
by xg15 | 2025-07-19 20:06:20+00:00
That sounds entirely reasonable and also extremely exciting. I didn't know there is so much research on that topic going on. Thank you for explaining that.

> Always beware of anyone using evolutionary biology to make an argument about the development of species.

From what I understand so far, I can just say that I dislike arguments of the form "feature X provides evolutionary advantage Y to the species, and that explains why the species evolved it".

In fact, it doesn't explain anything: Being able to shoot laser beams out of ones eyes would provide a large evolutionary advantage, but I still don't expect any future children of mine to spontaneously develop that ability - because there is no feasible way how the body could change to realize that ability, how that change would be transmitted from the parents or how it would even develop in the first place.

I think it could still be a useful shorthand if you already know that an aspect of the body is influenced by evolution, to explain the "direction" this feature took.

But I think I see what you mean, there is a risk of getting caught up in "it could have happened like this" speculation that is not grounded in any reality anymore.
by mdaniel | 2025-07-19 20:06:22+00:00
Every time I try to get into Kustomize, I feel it just has a documentation problem. It's written in Ph.D.ese without suitable examples

But, if it helps, my mental model of Kustomize is "it's a sequence of JSON Patch [1] operations"[2] which makes it absolutely stellar for mutating someone else's helm chart[3] (or yaml) since you can target anything for updating to your needs

My secondary complaint is that even JetBrains don't have good support for it, which makes working with them extra hard mode

1: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6902.html

2: it's a very "functional programming language" mental model https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/references/kustomize/kust...

3: https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/references/kustomize/buil...
by seanhunter | 2025-07-19 20:06:52+00:00
No, the bets are definitely not still open. Hawking described a model of particle behaviour on the event horizon of a black hole. His model predicts radiation arising from the mechanism described in the model. That may not be what happens in reality because as you pointed out, the radiation is predicted to be extremely faint and so it has not yet been detected, and therefore it is currently not empirically verified.

You claim that your proposal predicts radiation from black holes (without explaining any mechanism other than it’s different from Hawking’s model). But here’s the thing: If it doesn’t happen the way Hawking’s model says, then it isn’t Hawking radiation. It could be that cluckindan radiation becomes a thing, but that’s not Hawking radiation.

You’re not getting terms wrong, you’re making empirically unjustifiable statements that do not connect with each other or intersect with the observations we have made of the universe in any meaningful way. That’s what I mean by “not even wrong”.
by craftkiller | 2025-07-19 20:07:07+00:00
Unless you're using a SED, your EFI system partition is unencrypted. It would be trivial to build a malicious copy of popular open source UEFI bootloaders (grub, refind, zfsbootmenu, etc), and a bootable USB stick that scans your EFI system partition, replacing your unencrypted bootloader with a malicious one. This attack could then be applied by relatively unskilled people in a couple minutes ("boot this flash drive, wait until the screen says "done", power it off"). I hope your laptop is never out of your possession for more than a couple of minutes! (For example, the TSA at the airport, geek squad or other repair centers, or classically an evil maid).
by aoki | 2025-07-19 20:07:24+00:00
The early 90s were the era of (1) Pentium (2) PCI (3) multiplatform Windows NT. Most vendors switched to desktop/deskside designs based on PC bus and PC components, it would be more cost competitive (volume economics) and could run NT/Alpha, NT/MIPS, NT/PowerPC if the market went that way.
by c1ccccc1 | 2025-07-19 20:08:00+00:00
Yes, there is: https://manifold.markets/

People's bets are publicly viewable. The website is very popular with these "rationality-ists" you refer to.

I wasn't in fact arguing that giving a prediction should make people more trustworthy, please explain how you got that from my comment? I said that the main benefit to making such predictions is as practice for the predictor themselves. If there's a benefit for readers, it is just that they could come along and say "eh, I think the chance is higher than that". Then they also get practice and can compare how they did when the outcome is known.
by johnklos | 2025-07-19 20:08:04+00:00
It makes sense, if one considers them the evolution of the Apple II and the IBM PC.

The IBM had the motherboard on the left, along with the expansion cards, and the drives and power supply on the right. The AT continued this.

Clones wanted mostly compatible cases, and motherboards wanted to be mostly compatible with IBM cases and clone cases.

Then we had Amigas like the Amiga 3000, which had a similar layout but a riser to take horizontal expansion cards.

While some more bespoke PCs had vertical risers, most PC cases in the early to mid '90s were large. It was the machines we paid a bit more for that made being smaller in to something a bit premium.

While taking apart my Amiga 3000 is a bit of work, the design is absolutely wonderful, and more than once I thought about the design of it compared with later machines like the Sun Ultra 5, the Motorola StarMax (PowerPC Mac clone) and others.
by asdff | 2025-07-19 20:08:27+00:00
Reviews are basically useless today. I'm sorry but it is true. Pick any hobby you deeply understand enough to not require handholding by a reviewer, and watch the reviews about that segment. It is a joke, pure PR. "This one is good but this one is pretty gooder" None of these sponsored reviewers want to bite the hand that feeds them and gives them free product to review for their channel. They never go very deep into anything. Classic Gell-Mann amnesia

Customer reviews are also useless. 10 people go 5/5 no comment. One guy goes 3/5 "good thing." ???? Another person didn't hold it right and rated it 1/5, another person got a defective product customer service would have replaced if they had reached out and rated it 1/5.

IMO the solution is doing actual due dilligence. What is the spec sheet? What is actually relevant to what I am doing? How was this thing made? What are the tradeoffs of using this technique in in this product vs other techniques? Where does this featureset stand against other offerings in this segment and pricepoint?

You can do all of this yourself from the primary materials, the product pages, etc. It also doesn't take longer than you'd spend agonizing over yet another half dozen 20 minute review videos. And you'd end up better informed than most content producers, most customer reviewers, even most redditors on the relevant subreddit.

You operate along these lines and all 5 friction points mentioned in the article become irrelevant. You don't give a shit about the brand, you care about the merits of the component. Prolific advertisement is no longer required as a signal for quality since you are actually evaluating the merits of the component directly and not using proxy signals. Return status also doesn't matter because you are evaluating the merits of the component directly. Ratings don't matter. Pricepoint also doesn't matter because you don't include price in your analysis save for comparing capabilities across a price point vs assuming costly product = better.

And of course maybe you are bad at estimating a components merit. Maybe you are suffering from Dunning Krueger effect. For most things in life this hardly also matters because the effective difference between a most optimal product and one that is merely good enough is basically zero especially when you lack the ability to determine the differences between perfect and good enough (probably means that precision is not required for you use case).