MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andersmurphy | 2025-07-19 16:50:15+00:00
It's false comparison compilers are deterministic. The only probabilistic behavior I've seen has been for performance (query planning/branch prediction).

I mean you're not wrong the serious people drop into assembly when they need too. Even if you work in a context where you can't or don't drop down into assembly being able to make your own compilers is incredibly useful.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-07-19 16:50:16+00:00
As search gives the answer rather than the path to it, the job of finding things out properly and writing it down for others is lost. If we let that be lost, then we will all be lost.

If we cannot find a way to redirect income from AI back to the creators of the information they rehash (such as good and honest journalism), a critical load-bearing pillar of democratic society will collapse.

The news industry has been in grave danger for years, and we've seen the consequences it brings (distrust, division, misinformation, foreign manipulation). AI may drive the last stake in its back.

It's not about some jobs being replaced; that is not even remotely the issue. The path we are on currently is a dark one, and dismissing it as "just some jobs being lost" is a naive dismissal of the danger we're in.
by Archit3ch | 2025-07-19 16:50:16+00:00
Metal support is most welcome (and rare in similar projects)!

Typically, you are not doing a matrix multiplication for the sake of it, but as part of a broader algorithm (e.g. a simulation). Without fusing those other operations into the MatMul kernel, you are leaving performance on the table. How will the Burn devs address this?
by aristofun | 2025-07-19 16:50:40+00:00
You don’t need to retain it. It’s an artificial problem.

What is important will retain automatically by your subconscious.

And there is not much unique net new information in nonfiction books to begin with.

90% of it is a garbage made up with sole goal of getting into your pocket.

9% is rephrasing and redigesting same thousand year old ideas.

And 1% is small and memorable enough by itself.
by bit1993 | 2025-07-19 16:50:48+00:00
Its because hackers are fed up of being conned by corporations that steal our code, ideas, data. They start out "open" only to rug pull. "Pissing in the pool of opensource".

As hackers we have more responsibility than the general public because we understand the tech and its side effects, we are the first line of defense so it is important to speak out not only to be on the right side of history but also to protect society.
by mauvehaus | 2025-07-19 16:51:00+00:00
What are you doing that you're changing brake pads every couple months?

For non-cyclists: brake pads have a minimum thickness, and usually a wear line molded in (less common on disc brakes). If you've got enough pad material and it isn't glazed or contaminated, it isn't time to change them yet. They can last years. I've got maybe 6,000 miles on the pads on my road bike, and they're fine.

The only normal case for needing to change pads every couple months that I've run across is people riding lift-service downhill. In which case, buy a set of digital calipers and check your rotors regularly, because they have a minimum thickness too.

For reference: I am a bike mechanic, though not a paid one at the moment.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-07-19 16:52:38+00:00
Are you sure that's not just a VNC-based demo of the desktop version of Collabora Office?

I wouldn't be too surprised if their web version was like that (given how long ago the first version came out), except Nextcloud uses a Collabora-based system for its online editing, and I doubt they'd go with something like that.

There are online ODT editors (e.g. https://webodf.org/demo/ci/wodotexteditor-0.5.9/localeditor....), so even if Collabora's is bad, it wouldn't be too hard to make a better one.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-07-19 16:52:40+00:00
> Wow, the bullshit some people are high on.

From the article, which was easy to google:

> The EPA currently has more than 16,000 employees, adding more than 6,000 during Joe Biden’s administration as the agency sought to rebuild.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/11/environm...
by abenga | 2025-07-19 16:52:49+00:00
We care. If I get a video recommendation on YouTube and it is AI-created, I blacklist the channel. I will never listen to AI music. Even articles, the only way I will keep reading someone's writing is if I never find out they don't use it. I consume media and art to commune with my fellow man, not to look at pretty bitmaps and read just strings of prose.
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-07-19 16:52:50+00:00
You're probably right - I didn't figure that out (I vaguely recall some dh_thing commands but I've fortunately reclaimed most neurons involved with it).

It also turns out that the only thing we did want to do was copy files onto the filesystem - early on we had some more complex bits like pre and post install scripts, and they got us into a horrible mess via not being written sufficiently defensively and apt giving you basically no safety rail and being very unhelpful at getting you out of a bad situation. After that we banned anything that wasn't just "put files on system".
by ModernMech | 2025-07-19 16:52:55+00:00
You prompt. You go live your life. You come back to ten thousand lines of code. You spend 5 minutes reading. One sentence of feedback. Another ten thousand lines appear while you're making lunch.

Yeah, it strikes me the author writes prose the same way they're generating code. 20k lines? That's enough code for a whole compiler or an operating system kernel. I'd love to see what those 20k lines actually do -- notably, in these articles about AI, people tend to not link the actual code when they easily could, which is curious. I mean, my macro expander can also write 20k lines of code while I eat lunch, but no one is pretending it's sentient and about to replace devs.
by bwfan123 | 2025-07-19 16:53:17+00:00
Based on the past history with frontier-math & AIME 2025 [1],[2] I would not trust announcements which cant be independently verified. I am excited to try it out though.

Also, the performance of LLMs on imo 2025 was not even bronze [3].

Finally, this article shows that LLMs were just mostly bluffing [4] on usamo 2025.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1i53ih7/fro...

[2] https://x.com/DimitrisPapail/status/1888325914603516214

[3] https://matharena.ai/imo/

[4] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21934
by DiscourseFan | 2025-07-19 16:54:40+00:00
No I mean that people who are healthy in general are less likely (or completely unlikely) to “get cancer” in the first place because cancer is something that has more to do with an immune system failure, which happens due to unhealthy lifestyles or genetic problems in general which are unavoidable. Cancer only affects people who generally already have other problems (old, sick, unhealthy lifestyles etc.) and young people because they are growing very quickly.

Thus, in young people cancer presents rapidly as they develop, these screenings are expensive and unnecessary. For old/sick/unhealthy people, or people who are predisposed to certain cancers, they will probably get something else anyway, so its an expensive workup to help treat a disease that won’t actually benefit much in the long term.

I’m not against treating cancer, however let’s recognize that cancer treatment is already an expensive and resource/labor intensive process. And 10yr survival rates are not great for most cancers, we’re only slowing the burn, not stopping it. Sometimes you get lucky and die of something else before the cancer can come back, but nobody is ever “cured,” they are all just delaying the inevitable. Which, as we have seen, can sometimes be worth it (who wouldn’t want another 10 years with a loved one?), but that doesn’t mean our goal should be to find a way to “cure” cancer, it should be to find a way to better manage it, and these screenings don’t seem like they really are, or at least the use-cases for them are minimal.
by tavavex | 2025-07-19 16:54:47+00:00
I'm not some crypto evangelist, but as far as I know, crypto at its foundation is a lot less "watertight" in terms of ascertaining who is who. Your government could pass laws to pressure your local money-to-crypto exchange service into complying with whatever regulation is needed. But they can't force the entire network of crpyto transactions to have real names tied to accounts, demand reasons for payment, discriminate based on what's being paid for, etc. So, circumventing payment processors' "grassroots" self-moderation requires finding a way to bypass basically the entire payment pipeline. Circumventing a hypothetical highly-regulated crypto environment just requires finding a way to sneak your money into the system. And there will probably be foreign or grey market services that don't care about what your specific country thinks.
by olddustytrail | 2025-07-19 16:54:52+00:00
> mathematicians by calculators

Calculators didn't replace mathematicians, they replaced Computers (as an occupation). To the point that most people don't even know it used to be a job for people.

I say calculators but there is a blurry line between early electronic computers and calculators. Portable electronic calculators also replaced the slide rule, around the late 1970s, which had been the instrument of choice for engineers for around 350 years!
by lossolo | 2025-07-19 16:55:30+00:00
> it’s also more efficient [than o1 or o3] with its thinking.

"So under his saturate response, he never loses. For her to win, must make him unable at some even -> would need Q_{even-1}>even, i.e. some a_j> sqrt2. but we just showed always a_j<=c< sqrt2. So she can never cause his loss. So against this fixed response of his, she never wins (outcomes: may be infinite or she may lose by sum if she picks badly; but no win). So she does NOT have winning strategy at λ=c. So at equality, neither player has winning strategy."[1]

Why use lot word when few word do trick?

1. https://github.com/aw31/openai-imo-2025-proofs/blob/main/pro...
by mike-cardwell | 2025-07-19 16:55:44+00:00
They really haven't done number 1. A bug report was submitted, and then it has stalled for 15 months.

As of this point in time, nobody has explained to me why it would be a bad idea to add a "Do not rely on for privacy. More info" message next to the feature in Evolution Mail.

That is 100% true. Users of Evolution Mail should not rely on that feature for privacy. Because Evolution Mail has chosen to add known flawed software to their application.

And despite lacking the will or ability to fix that software, they are unwilling to take a different path to patch over the problem until it is fixed in the library, by sanitising the html and stripping problematic tags/attributes.

These are all their choices. And all of their choices lead to end users being exposed to a privacy risk, and unaware of it.
by prinny_ | 2025-07-19 16:56:08+00:00
A lot of people join this profession because they like building stuff. They enjoy thinking about a problem and coming up with a solution and then implementing and testing it. Prompting is not the same thing and it doesn't scratch the same itch and at the end of the day it's important to enjoy your job, not only be efficient at it.

I have heard the take that "writing code is not what makes you an engineer, solving problems and providing value is what makes you an engineer" and while that's cool and all and super important for advancing in your career and delivering results, I very much also like writing code. So there's that.
by sparkie | 2025-07-19 16:56:27+00:00
They're the same in theory. The factor is the amount the original length is multiplied by (in place of *2 or *1.5 constants), and obviously x/√x = √x.

length * (1 + 1/√(length)) = length + length/√(length) = length + √(length)

Addition is cheaper than the multiplication, and since we're approximating the sqrt we probably want to avoid calculating its reciprocal and multiplying. Our actual implementation is an approximation of 1+1/√(length)

Maybe I could've worded it a bit better.

More detail is in the RAOTS paper. It organizes the data blocks into so called logical "superblocks" (which have no material representation). Each superblock is ~n data blocks each of length n. In practice it's not exactly this because when we have an odd number of bits, say 5, we have to split it either 2:3 or 3:2 (for the log2 of num_blocks:block_size). The paper choses the former (same as above), but we could potentially also do it the other way where you have more blocks of smaller average size, but it would be a bit more awkward to index into the data blocks themselves since you'd have have to test for odd/even - which we don't do above because of the /2 integer division, and it would make the index block larger which we'd want to avoid because we have to reallocate it.

So in the approach taken, avg_block_size > √(length) and num_blocks < √(length), but avg_block_size * num_blocks == length still holds, and avg_block_size ≈ √(length) ≈ num_blocks.

If we're reallocating rather than using an index block, replace `num_blocks` with number of times we have to call the allocator.
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-19 16:57:08+00:00
It's not the same claim.

Muratori's statement (that he debunks in his talk): OO was created for teams.

Graham's statement: OO is useful for teams.

Those are distinct concepts, there's lots of evidence of statements like Graham's out there, and you've helpfully provided one. What igouy is asking for is evidence of the former claim.
by majormajor | 2025-07-19 16:57:41+00:00
The market for utility software like this predates the internet, we used to pass them around on floppies. It was never subject to particularly high QA or scrutiny. It just has to be "adequate."

But it's never displaced the market for highly-produced, highly-planned, "central" software pieces that the utilities glue together and help you work with, etc.

The growth of that software-as-big-business has only enlarged the need for utilities, really, to integrate everything, but it's a tough space to work in - "it's hard to compete with free." One classic move is selling support, etc.

Might be tough to do non-LLM-driven software development there - the selling support for your LLM-created-products model is still viable, but if there's an increase in velocity in useful utility creation or maintenance, possibly the dev headcount needs are lower.

But does anyone know how to use LLMs to make those giant ones yet? Or to make those central core underlying libraries you mention? Doesn't seem like it. Time will tell if there's a meaningful path that is truly different from "an even higher level programming language." Even on the edges - "we outgrew the library and we have to fork it because of [features/perf/bugs]" is a pretty common pattern when working on those larger projects already, and the more specific the exact changes you need are, the less the LLM might be able to do it for you (e.g. the "it kept assuming this function existed because it exists in a lot of similar things" problem).

What I hope is that we can find good ways to leverage these for quality control and testing and validation. (Though this is the opposite of the sort of greenfield dev demos that get the most press right now.)

Testing/validation is hard and expensive enough that basically nobody does a thorough job of it right now, especially in the consumer space. It would be wonderful if we could find ways to release higher quality software without teams of thousands doing manual validation.
by saghm | 2025-07-19 16:57:54+00:00
> Calvin himself ran a dystopian theocratic state\hellhole in Geneva yet hardly anyone references that when talking about conservativism in Switzerland.

I'm not familiar with Swiss politics, but if there's a significant Christian element to it, it seems like it would be pretty reasonable to wonder about whether the historical basis for this is related to Calvinism. If it's not significantly Christian, then it's not surprising it doesn't get mentioned.

> There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Third "Great Awakenings" had a much bigger impact than a handful of Puritans inhabiting New England in the 1600s.

Sure, but those those were backlashes themselves to the backlash to the secularism that you mentioned happened beforehand. I'm not saying that there weren't Puritan-like influences elsewhere, or that there were no other developments in between the Puritans and modern Christian conservatism in the US, but there's a clear historical tradition of Christian conservatism in US politics, so I don't know why you don't think it's unreasonable to recognize how that has influenced what we see today.

To explain at a higher level where I'm coming from: I don't see historical analysis as making claims about the state we're in today as being a deterministic outcome based on the events that happen in the past because that's not any more possible than predicting exactly what will happen in the future based on the knowledge we have today. The most we can do to explain why things are the way they are now is to look at what things in the past have influenced where we are today.
by teo_zero | 2025-07-19 16:58:03+00:00
What I don't like is that some functions take as arguments a mix of StringBuffer's and regular C strings. This is confusing. For example why this:

void StringBuffer_replace(StringBuffer *buf, const char *original, const char *update, size_t from);

instead of this:

void StringBuffer_replace(StringBuffer *buf, const StringBuffer *original, const StringBuffer *update, size_t from);
by alkonaut | 2025-07-19 16:58:11+00:00
How did they fail to make this an option in the first place?

To be very clear, I don’t even want to translate videos in languages that YouTube know I don’t understand. Much less in videos languages I do understand.

Also I don’t think it’s a good idea to use AI in any part of this chain unless there is user driven corrections. Seems like even big TikTok/Instagram accounts use some auto subtitling machinery and it’s invariably wrong. Why even bother? Or why not just manually subtitle if it’s a 10 second English video and the text is in English? Why use automation at all for that?
by nerevarthelame | 2025-07-19 16:58:15+00:00
I'm worried that an increasing number of people are relying on LLMs for things as fundamental to daily life as expressing themselves verbally or critical thinking.

Perhaps LLMs can move someone's results from the 25th percentile to the 50th for a single task. (Although there's probably a much more nuanced discussion to be had about that: people with poor writing skills can still have unique, valuable, and interesting perspectives that get destroyed in the median-ization of current LLM output.) But after a couple years of using LLMs regularly, I fear that whatever actual talent they have will atrophy below their starting point.
by wasmperson | 2025-07-19 16:58:24+00:00
Yup, dpkg-deb is all you need, but I could never find it looking through online documentation. The thing that finally helped me figure out how to make .deb files was an internet outage, believe it or not. While bored I started looking at packaging-related documentation in my computer's locally-installed manual pages, and landed on these two, which explain the basics in simple terms:

https://manpage.me/index.cgi?apropos=0&q=dpkg-deb&sektion=0&...

https://manpage.me/index.cgi?apropos=0&q=deb-control&sektion...
by mrkramer | 2025-07-19 16:58:40+00:00
Satoshi wanted to bypass banks and make P2P direct payments with no trusted party besides Bitcoin protocol hence >no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party

And crypto community speculated that Satoshi or team behind Bitcoin worked at the internet gambling industry and what use to happen is that angry customers would chargeback the money they lost at the internet casino and cause numerous problems for "merchants" or in this case internet entrepreneurs.
by 1718627440 | 2025-07-19 16:58:48+00:00
I thought we are arguing about regulating oil not to not use oil at all.

> How would you have won the world wars without oil?

You don't need to win world wars to have technological advancement, in fact my country didn't. I think the problem with this discussion, is that we all disagree what to regulate, that's how we ended up with the current situation after all.

I interpreted it to mean that we wouldn't use plastic for everything. I think we would be fine having glass bottles and paper, carton, wood for grocery wrapping. It wouldn't be so individual per company, but this not important for the economy and consumers, and also would result in a more competitive market.

I also interpreted it to mean that we wouldn't have so much cars and don't use planes beside really important stuff (i.e. international politics). The cities simply expand to the travel speed of the primary means of transportation. We would simply have more walkable cities and would use more trains. Amazon probably wouldn't be possible and we would have more local producers. In fact this is what we currently aim for and it is hard, because transition means that we have larger cities then we can support with the primary means of transportation.

As for your example inventions: we did have computers in the 40s and the need for networking would arise. Space travel is in danger, but you can use oil for space travel without using it for everyday consumer products. As I already wrote, we would have more atomic energy, not sure if that would be good though.
by zdragnar | 2025-07-19 16:59:06+00:00
Having watched a few of Cirque du Soleil's shows, I can confirm that A is much more impressive and exciting than C.

Sure, there's risk, but seeing how effortless they make it look is amazing. The skill to do it fearlessly is far more impressive than the fact that something bad didn't happen. Audience members expect that it won't happen. There's a visceral reaction, of course, but that's it.
by bluecalm | 2025-07-19 16:59:20+00:00
Imo competitive math (or programming) is about knowing some tricks and then trying to find a combination of them that works for a given task. The number of tricks and depth required is much less than in go or chess.

I don't think it's very creative endeavor in comparison to chess/go. The searching required is less as well. There is a challenge processing natural language and producing solutions in it though.

Creativity required is not even a small fraction of what is required for scientific breakthroughs. After all no task that you can solve in 30 minutes or so can possibly require that much creativity - just knowledge and a fast mind - things computers are amazing at.

I am AI enthusiast. I just think a lot of things that were done so far are more impressive than being good at competitive math. It's a nice result blown out of proportion by OpenAI employees.
by crmd | 2025-07-19 16:59:31+00:00
In a healthy marketplace, customers stop using merchants that abuse customers, until they change their practices or go out of business and are replaced by more customer-responsive competitors.

Here in the US, however, 5 hotel brands have been allowed to control over 70% of hotel rooms nationwide. This means a dispute with even one will cause big problems for business travelers.

Same thing with Ticketmaster/Live Nation, Google, Amazon, etc.

This extreme consolidation of market power seems to me like a degenerate form of capitalism that breaks my libertarian idealism.