MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-06 22:32:51+00:00
The limitations and gotchas of Docker containers are now well-known.

- Doesn't have the same resource isolation guarantees of quality type 1 hypervisors.

- Makes installation of cross-cutting concerns (monitoring and security agents) more difficult.

- Hand-waves away system administration.

- Challenges in assuring proper supply chain integrity.

But what it does is make infrastructure more accessible, repeatable, and standardized more simply than what came before, for better or worse. That's a giant dev UX win.

Them's called tradeoffs and choosing the right tool(s) in the toolbox for the particular purpose. Many of the concerns above can be mitigated with extra attention to detail.
by chrsw | 2025-07-06 22:33:40+00:00
We don't need AGI, whatever that is.

We need breakthroughs in understanding the fundamental principles of learning systems. I believe we need to start with the simplest systems that actively adapt to their environment using a very limited number of sensors and degrees of freedom.

Then scale up from there in sophistication, integration and hierarchy.

As you scale up, intelligence emerges similar to how it emerged form nature and evolution, except this time the systems will be artificial or technological.
by Cieric | 2025-07-06 22:33:51+00:00
Oh nice. I don't actually know how to play solitaire, but I know Microsoft used the method of randomly generating them, solving them and then saving solvable seeds. (I believe they had 2 that weren't solvable somehow though so maybe it was a human solving them and it was a typo or mistake)

Also, I was just checking around to see if there were any good methods for telling if a puzzle is solvable without solving it. Seems geeks for geeks have some code for it.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/dsa/check-instance-15-puzzle-s... The only other solution I can think of is detecting both configurations (blank in bottom right or top left) and displaying something when either is reached.
by tmseidman | 2025-07-06 22:33:56+00:00
I always feel like these "We do this new horrible thing that's taking over" articles are always blown out of proportion- sure, _some_ people talk that way, maybe it's even trending to talk that way for a significant group of people, but it's not true of everyone, all the time. To me, this trend seems largely confined to youth culture and social media.

I also found it ironic that part of the OP's argument was that nobody has personality anymore, they just have problems to solve, and this article seemed to be doing the same thing, but for culture at large; reducing it to a problem to be solved.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-07-06 22:34:20+00:00
Lawyers have law school after a degree, a bar exam, legal liability for malpractice, and ongoing licensing requirements.

Medicine has medical school after a degree, a 5+ year residency under close supervision with significant failure rates, legal liability for malpractice, and ongoing licensing requirements.

So explain to us what it is that you "know this for a fact" regarding how they have it easier. Most of the people reading this, myself included, would never have been allowed into this industry, let alone been allowed to stay in it, if the bar were as high as law or medicine.
by brookst | 2025-07-06 22:34:37+00:00
Slippery slope arguments are by definition wrong. You have to say that the proposition itself is just fine (thereby ceding the argument) but that it should be treated as unacceptable because of a hypothetical future where something qualitatively different “could” happen.

If there’s not a real argument based on the actual specifics, better to just allow folks to carry on.
by internet2000 | 2025-07-06 22:35:01+00:00
Anything that gets posted to HN when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that gets posted to HN between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything posted to HN after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
by gnramires | 2025-07-06 22:36:59+00:00
I don't know, I can't really justify spending say 8 hours sitting -- and much less more time. We need to go for a walk, drink water, stop staring at a screen to stay reasonably healthy. Maybe there could be an hour bank or something and you can do a 8 hour stint once in a while if you really wanted. When you're young that doesn't feel so painful, but as you get older you start noticing the health implications of this kind of habit, it's very destructive. For example it can affect your spine, insulin resistance (cause pre-diabetes/diabetes), and more. At least if I were designing an MMO, my conscience would demand I think seriously about this.

But really this (although I think it can be helpful and important) does not get to the heart of the matter which is good, non-dark-pattern-filled game design. Again I don't think this is just a matter or regulation, but requires both a game dev and gamer culture that favors the healthier and more full of wonder, communication and learning (opposed to just gambling addiction) kind of games.
by robterrell | 2025-07-06 22:37:00+00:00
You've always had this ability, but with more convoluted syntax:

osascript -e "tell application \"System Events\" to keystroke \"whatever\""

Specify the application too with multiple -e parameters. This will copy whatever is selected in Safari:

osascript -e "tell application \"Safari\" to activate" -e "tell application \"System Events\" to keystroke \"c\" using {command down}"
by dakiol | 2025-07-06 22:37:55+00:00
Here’s an idea for fair interviews:

Interviewer and candidate meet at time X for 1h session of “live coding”. A saas throws at them both one problem at random. Let the game begin. The company can decide if they want interviewer and candidate to collaborate together to solve the problem (the saas is the judge) or perhaps they both need to play against each other and see who gets the optimal solution.

You can add a twist (faangs most likely): if the candidate submits a “better” answer than the interviewer’s , candidate takes over their job.

An LLM could be very well behind the saas.

Oh boy, I wouldn’t feel that nervous anymore in any interview. Fairness is the trick. One feels so underpowered when you know that the interviewer knows every detail about the proposed problem. But when both have no idea about the problem? That’s levelling the field!
by Balgair | 2025-07-06 22:38:39+00:00
-- A human brain is theoretically reproducible outside standard biological mechanisms, if you have a good enough nanolathe.

Sort of. The main issue is the energy requirements. We could theoretically reproduce a human brain in SW today, it's just that it would be a really big energy hog and run very slowly and probably become insane quickly like any person trapped in a sensory deprived tank.

The real key development for AI and AGI is down at the metal level of computers- the memristor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

The synapse in a brain is essentially a memristive element, and it's a very taxing one on the neuron. The equations is (change in charge)/(change in flux). Yes, a flux capacitor, sorta. It's the missing piece in fundamental electronics.

Making simple 2 element memristors is somewhat possible these days, though I've not really been in the space recently. Please, if anyone knows where to buy them, a real one not a claimed to be one, let me know. I'm willing to pay good money.

In Terms of AI, a memristor would require a total redesign of how we architect computers ( goodbye busses and physically separate memory, for one). But, you'd get a huge energy and time savings benefit. As in, you can run an LLM on a watch battery or small solar cell and let the environment train them to a degree.

Hopefully AI will accelerate their discovery and facilitate their introduction into cheap processing and construction of chips.
by v5v3 | 2025-07-06 22:38:42+00:00
A therapist isn't 'there for you'.

He or she has a daily list if clients, ten mins before they will brush up on someone they doesn't remember since last week. And it's isn't in their financial interest to fix you.

And human intelligence and life experience isn't distributed equally, many therapists have passed the training but are not very good.

Same way lots of Devs with a degree aren't very good.

Llms are not there yet but if keep developing could become excellent, and will be consistent. Lots already talk to ChatGPT orally.

The big if, is whether the patient is willing to accept a non human.
by kaashif | 2025-07-06 22:39:38+00:00
Okay, well, if you read my comment saying that sometimes meeting with people outside the team is useful, then you start writing about how I'm wasting the time of people _inside_ my team, then I must have miscommunicated something.

You're reading things into what I'm saying that aren't there.

My job is to defend my direct reports from having their time wasted and clear blockers for them. Sometimes, yeah, this means meeting with people to ferret them out.

I'm not weaponizing anyone's presence at a meeting except mine.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-07-06 22:40:03+00:00
What results have they delivered?

I recall the recent DeepMind material science paper debacle. "Throw everything against the wall and hope something sticks (and that nobody bothers to check the rest)" is not a great strategy.

I also think that Dwarkesh was referring to LLMs specifically. Much of what DeepMind is doing is somewhat different.
by root_axis | 2025-07-06 22:40:06+00:00
At the very least, it needs to be able to collate training data, design, code, train, fine tune and "RLHF" a foundational model from scratch, on its own, and have it show improvements over the current SOTA models before we can even begin to have the conversation about whether we're approaching what could be AGI at some point in the future.
by cb321 | 2025-07-06 22:40:11+00:00
Do you have any URIs or back up links? Encouragement to actively break compatibility sounds like "inciting murder" vs. a more tame "don't expend effort (go to medical school)" to save folks.

{ Oh, and before anyone jumps on me, this is only an analogy as it relates to freshman moral philosophy courses, not an attempt by me to over-dramatize - that is more the fault of said courses trying to engage 18 year olds. :-) I'm mostly interested in the active-passive details of the pledge campaign. }
by pclmulqdq | 2025-07-06 22:41:10+00:00
TIL Cambridge University is a degree mill.

https://www.cambridgestudents.cam.ac.uk/exams/students/postg...

Like I said above, this is not usually offered unless you are clearly doing work of sufficient quality. 3 ArXiV preprints can get you a PhD just fine, but it won't cut it if you wrote them when nobody is watching.
by esrauch | 2025-07-06 22:41:20+00:00
Even if all wire format encoding is utf8, you wouldn't be able to decode these new high codepoints into systems that are semantically utf16. Which is Java and JS at least, hardly "obsolete" targets to worry about.

And even Swift is designed so the strings can be utf8 or utf16 for cheap objc interop reasons.

Discarding compatibility with 2 of the top ~5 most widely used languages kind of reflects how disconnected the author of this is from the technical realities if any fixed utf8 was feasible outside of the most toy use cases.
by HenryBemis | 2025-07-06 22:41:32+00:00
Yes!

I was "stuck" (someone dropped me off and someone else was supposed to pick me up, but they were late so..) on a highway/motorway in <country> (edit: I wrote it and then deleted it for privacy) some weeks back. The weather was great! Sun was shining, a cool 24 degrees, I was wearing my hoodie, it was windy. I got bored on waiting by the highway/motorway.

No village/coffee place anywhere near, so I decided to take a vertical small road and walk by a green field. And it was windy. And I could see the bushes and leaves from the trees swinging back and forth. And it was windy and very calming (to my soul) so I stood there gazing at the wonderful nature. And I was thinking, why the fuck do we live in cement boxes in cities? I could buy "a few sqm, build something with glass/brick/steel, no deep foundations, and smaller 25sqm "hut" as my office right next to the "house" and live next to a field and have a great life...

Anyway, my friend arrived, picked me up and we continued driving.

I was thinking that the cost of remote land/house/'office' would be 50% on the cost of a 100sqm flat in (most), with the pro of the calmness and the con of being alone in the middle of nowhere.

But there is always the option...
by gxs | 2025-07-06 22:42:04+00:00
I don’t know why you felt compelled to reply with a “duh are you stupid” type of response, but if that’s just your style I guess that’s fine

I was literally expressing curiosity and wondering what the frequency relative to past topics and trends is and totally open to it being actually saturated

I didn’t define or explain what saturated is, I said it’d be good to see those stats - you don’t know the answer as you’re obviously conjecturing about fracking popularity quantified on HN but don’t actually know anything regarding those numbers (you might now after you go look them up to reply to this, nj)

And fwiw hn includes a lot of article types but it’s obviously already slanted towards tech so if you don’t see how much closer ai is related to tech and why it’d be more popular than fracking then I don’t know what to tell you

If anything, I should have noticed that they are talking about show HN because that does change things but I’d still be curious to see stats

Like it’s not that serious I don’t know why you got so offended

Either way, not interesting in engaging with some hn smart ass atm so have a good day and feel free to have the last word

Last thing I’ll say is HN is so fickle, have no clue why I’m getting downvoted

Sometimes I feel like it would be great if it were required to enter a reason
by LightHugger | 2025-07-06 22:42:30+00:00
It's worth keeping in mind that the "market" for a particular player can actually be incredibly small depending on their interests. In the most extreme example, a player might be a fan specifically of a single IP or series of games. Call of duty is one good example because there really are a lot of people who are like this. Video game IPs are a government granted monopoly on a small scale, and the word monopoly is not there for no reason, there is only one place to get CoD if you are a fan of CoD. Predictably, these companies follow the OA's suggested strategy very closely!
by shippage | 2025-07-06 22:42:38+00:00
That's also a concern. Many day-to-day tasks for employees are repetitive to the point even a less-than-AGI system could potentially disrupt those jobs (and there are people actively working right now to make this happen).

The best case scenario would be the employees taking advantage of their increased productivity to make themselves more valuable to their employer (and if they are lucky, gain increased compensation).

However, it's also possible employers decide they don't need many of their lower level workforce anymore because the remaining ones are more productive. It wouldn't take much of this to drive unemployment levels way up. Perhaps not to the level of the Great Depression, at least not for a while, but it is certainly a potential outcome of the ongoing, long-term process in our economic system of increasingly automating repetitive, low skill tasks.

IOW, it doesn't take AGI to throw a lot of people out of work. It's happened many times with other technologies in the past, and when it happens, things can get pretty bad for a large number of people even if the majority are still doing okay (or even great, for those at the top).
Ask HN: Is There a LeetCode for AI or Machine Learning?
by NewUser76312 | 2025-07-06 22:43:15+00:00
Leetcode gets a bit of mixed feelings on tech forums, but the qualities I care about are: standardized questions to test knowledge, quick feedback, and the ability to practice and learn concepts without being part of an educational institution or creating your own custom project. So I'm more interested in those aspects, rather than as an interview tool.

Does such a thing exist for AI or Machine Learning? Maybe interactive problem sets that focus on making and running models in PyTorch. Or execute specific code yourself (with a given random seed) and put in the final result of training a model after N epochs. I'm not really sure how this is best done, just brainstorming a bit here.

Thanks for any suggestions.
by jjmarr | 2025-07-06 22:44:08+00:00
Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). I only had a 90% in HS and didn't get into good CS/ECE programs (thanks grade inflation, my marks went up in uni). If you're not in Waterloo/UBC/UofT the quality drops drastically.

We don't even have an automatic grading system for code. You have to go in-person to a lab and demonstrate your code "working" while the TA asks questions.

It's actually a requirement that you put all of your code into a PDF and submit it. I have LaTeX macros that do it for me but most people literally attach 50 screenshots.

I don't see this getting better. CompArch is a required course (COE608) but the assignments are too hard so the school just gives out prewritten code to everyone. The hardest part is copying and pasting from the PDF and removing the smart quotes.

Also, the provided code is wrong. I found this out because I wrote everything from scratch and had to explain to the TA why my implementation of a shift instruction didn't match the correct one.

I think everyone involved views software as a cash grab.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-06 22:44:39+00:00
When the choice is between 1. "avoid tarnishing my own brand" and 2. "doing what the user requested," corporations will always choose option 1. Who is this software supposed to be serving, anyway?

I'm surprised MS Office still allows me to type "Microsoft can go suck a dick" into a document and Apple's Pages app still allows me to type "Apple are hypocritical jerks." I wonder how long until that won't be the case...
by kragen | 2025-07-06 22:46:15+00:00
Yeah, the distutils clusterfuck is another excellent reason someone might "insist on not using the standard packaging solution for the language": it's specifically and only the packages that did use the standard packaging solution for the language, distutils, that got broken when distutils was removed from the standard library.

I mean, I understand the desire to remove distutils. It sucked. It was the least Pythonic package in the whole Python standard library. But removing it was even worse, because it means you can't use old versions of most Python libraries with recent versions of Python.
by cmenge | 2025-07-06 22:46:19+00:00
Seems like they just threw this at gpt with no system prompt at all? I mean, gpt-4o really isn't a strong model these days, but certainly the answer will not be very useful without a good prompt that hopefully an app designed around actual therapy would come with...

With a good system prompt, a modern LLM tends to be much, much better than that.
by HenryBemis | 2025-07-06 22:47:20+00:00
Sidenote: when I look for a solution to a problem I don't care whether ones uses AI, or a hammer, or a screwdriver. I just want the bloody job done.

(Additionally) Depending where you are in the world, and where your customer is, AI can simply make things worse (GDPR: profiling, decision making, 'explainability, etc)
by apical_dendrite | 2025-07-06 22:47:29+00:00
What does "better" mean to you though?

Is it - "I was upset about something and I had a conversation with the LLM (or human therapist) and now I feel less distressed." Or is it "I learned some skills so that I don't end up in these situations in the first place, or they don't upset me as much."?

Because if it's the first, then that might be beneficial but it might also be a crutch. You have something that will always help you feel better so you don't actually have to deal with the root issue.

That can certainly happen with human therapists, but I worry that the people-pleasing nature of LLMs, the lack of introspection, and the limited context window make it much more likely that they are giving you what you want in the moment, but not what you actually need.
by exiguus | 2025-07-06 22:47:58+00:00
I thought about it and realized that i have a lot of friends and colleagues who speak more than 3 languages. Many even speak 5 or more.

One reason is that many have two mother tongues, e.g. Russian and Ukrainian or Russian and Lithuania, or Spanish and Catalan or swiss German and Italian.

Another reason is that they have emigrated to a country where they had to learn the language.

Also, in most European, it's normal to learn two or three languages in secondary school, beside your native language, and at least one other. Combinations like English, Latin, and Spanish; English and French; or English, Spanish and German are common as secondary languages. By learning two or three languages in school, and already speaking one or two native languages, you know between two to five languages by the time you finish school.

Basically, you learn English at school everywhere. often even before that, because tv and other media are not translated into the local language. That's for example common in the Nederlands or Scandinavian Countries.

Now, if you like languages and have already learned a Romance language at a young age, for example, it is much easier to learn other Romance languages later. This means that if you already speak Spanish or Portuguese, it is easier to learn Italian.
by protocolture | 2025-07-06 22:48:34+00:00
>High trust society.

I usually see this as an anti immigration dogwhistle.

I live in an actual hellhole by these standards.

For 40 years, every refugee or immigrant population was forced to live in my region. Every time the government wanted to do A/B testing on welfare, my region.

When I first wanted to move here I considered that I would need amazing security and reviewed crime stats. OH NO, its a CRIME HOTSPOT. How could I subject myself to that, I would have to live in fear.

Then I turned off "Drug Crimes" in the police statistics, and that completely normalised the results against much richer, whiter suburbs.

If anything we have a greater density of churches, because everyone wants to hear the bible read in their tongue. Theres an islander community just over the main drag from me where twice a year I see like 200 big islander kids dressed in choir costumes being loaded into busses for a big church thing.

My wife literally takes my toddler out for walks unassisted in the middle of the night.

I have no issues talking to people, or being approached by people.
by uselesswords | 2025-07-06 22:49:07+00:00
Sure context and audience matters, but even outside of that the article is rather poorly written. This part in particular should really emphasize that she disproved the conjecture, as it stands it almost sounds like she proved it:

> Cairo solved the so-called Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a problem first proposed in the 1980s that had kept the harmonic analysis community had been working on for decades. The conjecture was widely believed to be true — if so, it would have automatically validated several other important results in the field — but the community greeted the new development with both enthusiasm and surprise: the author was a 17-year-old who hadn’t yet finished high school.