MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-07-01 01:53:51+00:00
Seeing comments here saying “this problem is already solved”, “he is just bad at this” etc. feels bad. He has given a long time to this problem by now. He is trying to solve this to advance the field. And needless to say, he is a legend in computer engineering or w/e you call it.

It should be required to point to the “solution” and maybe how it works to say “he just sucks” or “this was solved before”.

IMO the problem with current models is that they don’t learn categorically like: lions are animals, animals are alive. goats are animals, goats are alive too. So if lions have some property like breathing and goats also have it, it is likely that other similar things have the same property.

Or when playing a game, a human can come up with a strategy like: I’ll level this ability and lean on it for starting, then I’ll level this other ability that takes more time to ramp up while using the first one, then change to this play style after I have the new ability ready. This might be formulated completely based on theoretical ideas about the game, and modified as the player gets more experience.

With current AI models as far as I can understand, it will see the whole game as an optimization problem and try to find something at random that makes it win more. This is not as scalable as combining theory and experience in the way that humans do. For example a human is innately capable of understanding there is a concept of early game, and the gains made in early game can compound and generate a large lead. This is pattern matching as well but it is on a higher level .

Theory makes learning more scalable compared to just trying everything and seeing what works
by munificent | 2025-07-01 01:54:14+00:00
All of these blog posts to me read like nerds speedrunning "how to be a tech lead for a non-disastrous internship".

Yes, if you have an over-eager but inexperienced entity that wants nothing more to please you by writing as much code as possible, as the entity's lead, you have to architect a good space where they have all the information they need but can't get easily distracted by nonessential stuff.
by refulgentis | 2025-07-01 01:55:15+00:00
I've read these ideas a 1000 times, I thought it was the most beautiful core of the "Sparks of AGI" paper. (6.2)

We should be able to name the source of this sheepishness and have fun with that we are all things at once: you can be a viral hit 2002 super PhD with expertise in all areas involved in this topic that has brought pop attention onto something important, and yet, the hip topic you feel centered on can also make people's eyes roll temporarily. You're doing God's work. The AI = F(C) thing is really important. Its just, in the short term, it will feel like a buzzword.

This is much more about me playing with, what we can reduce to, the "get off my lawn!" take. I felt it interesting to voice because it is a consistent undercurrent in the discussion and also leads to observable absurdities when trying to describe it. It is not questioning you, your ideas, or work. It has just come about at a time when things become hyperreal hyperquickly and I am feeling old.
by inspectorwadget | 2025-07-01 01:55:28+00:00
For the record, I did not downvote anyone.

>[Inspecting assembly and caring about its output]

I agree that it does not make sense for everyone to inspect generated assembly code, but for some jobs, like compiler developers, it is normal to do so, and for some other jobs it can make sense to do so occassionally. But, inspecting assembly was not my main point. My main point was that a lot of people, probably many more than those that inspect assembly code, care about the generated code. If a C compiler does not conform to the C ISO specification, a C programmer that does not inspect assembly can still decide to file a bug report, due to caring about conformance of the compiler.

The scenario you describe, as I understand it at least, of codebases where they are so complex and quality requirements are so low that inspecting code (not assembly, but the output from LLMs) is unnecessary, or mitigation strategies are sufficient, is not consistent with a lot of existing codebases, or parts of codebases. And even for very large and messy codebases, there are still often abstractions and layers. Yes, there can be abstraction leakage in systems, and fault tolerance against not just software bugs but unchecked code, can be a valuable approach. But I am not certain it would make sense to have even most code be unchecked (in the sense of having been reviewed by a programmer).

I also doubt a natural language would replace a programming language, at least if verification or AGI is not included. English and Mandarin are ambiguous. C and assembly code is (meant to be) unambiguous, and it is generally considered a significant error if a programming language is ambiguous. Without verification of some kind, or an expert (human or AGI), how could one in general cases use that code safely and usefully? There could be cases where one could do other kinds of mitigation, but there are at least a large proportion of cases where I am skeptical that sole mitigation strategies would be sufficient.
by godelski | 2025-07-01 01:55:43+00:00
> The customer has to opt-in to WiFi motion sensing to have the data tracked. - Is this true if Law Enforcement gets a subpoena? - Is this true if Law Enforcement asks "nicely"? - Can Xfinity activate it without the user knowing? - Does it explicitly notify the user when the setting has been changed? (e.g. done by LE, hacker, or an abusive partner) - Is this a promise and a promise that by default it will stay off? - Is the code to perform this feature pre-installed and able to be trivially (or even non-trivially) activated by hackers?

Idk, there's a lot of questionable things here and Xfinity doesn't have the best track record that gives me a lot of confidence that we should trust them. This seems like an easily abused system that can do a lot of harm while provides very little utility to the vast majority of people.
by chuckadams | 2025-07-01 01:55:51+00:00
Redux is a simple and elegant idea from functional programming, but rather than build up more expressive composable abstractions, most things just ended up larding it up with more and more boilerplate. As for React, virtually every one of the footguns people complain about with regard to hooks was solved in Vue's reactivity system. I'm not so partisan as to suggest Vue is superior for all purposes, but there are just so many developers who seem willfully unaware that there is anything else out there other than React.
by charcircuit | 2025-07-01 01:56:01+00:00
>held accountable for predatory behavior?

Apple is held accountable by people choosing not to use their device. If iPhone is too expensive for the value it provides people won't use them.

>The thing with this 30% tax the private company Apple imposes on a majority of US adults is reasonable?

By this logic grocery stores have been applying a 30+% tax to all of America since the country was founded.

>but not allowing other stores OR allowing external payment methods to be advertised is definitely predatory behavior

Again comparing to a grocery store I think it is fair for them to prohibit unauthorized sellers to sell within their premises. This is a standard because it can undermine the business model of the business.

>But Apple makes a profit of iPhones, they make a profit on iCloud, they make profit on App Store... They make a profit everywhere.

And that's why Apple is worth 3 trillion and Sony isn't. Apple has created a successful business with large profit margins that people are willing to pay. It's not predatory if people are willing to pay for it.
by simonw | 2025-07-01 01:56:18+00:00
Quite a few times, I've been able to give it enough context to write me an entire working piece of software in a single shot. I use that for plugins pretty often, eg this:

llm -m openai/o3 \ -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/llm-hacker-news/refs/heads/main/llm_hacker_news.py \ -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/tools/refs/heads/main/github-issue-to-markdown.html \ -s 'Write a new fragments plugin in Python that registers issue:org/repo/123 which fetches that issue number from the specified github repo and uses the same markdown logic as the HTML page to turn that into a fragment'

Which produced this: https://gist.github.com/simonw/249e16edffe6350f7265012bee9e3...
by xqb64 | 2025-07-01 01:57:45+00:00
I'm working on a git(1) implementation written in Python. I'm following along the amazing James Coglan's book. Currently 23 chapters in, about to finish off the Part II of the book. Can't wait for the final, third part.

I love books like this one. Some other examples are "Crafting interpreters", "Writing a C compiler", "Building a debugger", and a couple other lower quality ones. The potential in this space for aspiring technical writers is enormous. Let me know if you know some other books that guide you through implementing complex systems software from scratch.
by btilly | 2025-07-01 01:57:45+00:00
The lack of clarity is often the point. They try to get you to accept that God is the uncreated cause, then slip into talking about the God of Abraham. For them this is a natural substitution, because in their belief system the two are one and the same.

But no careful thinker should accept that those two set of ideas are a priori the same thing. It is absolutely true that, if you accept the Bible, then the God of the Bible is the only possible candidate for the uncreated cause. But there are many possible belief systems with an uncreated cause, where the Jews are not the chosen people of that uncreated cause.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-01 01:58:39+00:00
> any script kid has enough info to try to build an array of SDRs to do the same thing

It doesn't particularly matter what hobbyists get up to. It matters what's available at scale on the mass market, what's widely deployed, what data is legally permissible to collect on a large scale, and what data is legal to sell.

Law enforcement can't subpoena that which does not exist. The best defense to these sorts of things is often to place legal limits on collection, retention, and sale.

Your take is both alarmist and defeatist.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-07-01 01:59:16+00:00
> To emulate DL workloads without actual GPUs, we replace GPU- related steps (steps #3–5, and Step 2 if GPU-based) with simple sleep(T) calls, where T represents the projected time for each step.

This is a model (of GPU arch/system/runtime/etc) being used to feed downstream analysis. Pretty silly because if you're going to model these things (which are extremely difficult to model!) you should at least have real GPUs around to calibrate/recalibrate the model.
Show HN: Database of foods likely to trigger IBS
by qwesr123 | 2025-07-01 01:59:18+00:00
Hi HN! My family has a history of IBS. For those not aware, a diet low in a class of carbs called FODMAPs is among the most effective treatments for IBS. Following a low-FODMAP diet can be really difficult.

I made a database that estimates detailed FODMAP content for ~3M mass-produced foods. It infers product ingredient composition based on FDA/USDA data and assigns FODMAP content.

Let me know if you have any feedbacks or questions. Hopefully it is useful!
by gyomu | 2025-07-01 02:00:50+00:00
People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time.

In the single player realm, there are games like Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, etc.

Point is, the landscape of what "narrative" means in video games today is broad and deep. If none of those are even remotely like what Crawford thinks is "right" - and he's not able to design a game that meets his standards himself - I'd argue his definition of "right" might just not be workable in the first place.

There's a kind of people who want video games to have all of the possibility, depth, and meaning of real life. A game where you could do anything, be anyone, but still have consequences matter and be far reaching (like "Roy: A Life Well Lived" in Rick & Morty). Well, that exists, it's called real life, but you're not going to recreate it on a computer screen.
by simonw | 2025-07-01 02:01:12+00:00
> The difference is that humans can actively seek to acquire the necessary context by themselves

These days, so can LLM systems. The tool calling pattern got really good in the last six months, and one of the most common uses of that is to let LLMs search for information they need to add to their context.

o3 and o4-mini and Claude 4 all do this with web search in their user-facing apps and it's extremely effective.

The same patterns is increasingly showing up in coding agents, giving them the ability to search for relevant files or even pull in official document documentation for libraries.
by mdaniel | 2025-07-01 02:01:39+00:00
My hypothesis of the mismatch is centered around "read" - I think that when you wrote it, and when others similarly think about that scenario, the surprise is because our version of "read" is the implied "read and internalized" or at bare minimum "read for comprehension" but as very best I can tell the LLM's version is "encoded tokens into vector space" and not "encoded into semantic graph"

I welcome the hair-splittery that is sure to follow about what it means to "understand" anything
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-01 02:02:35+00:00
> This is magical thinking, because it’s using the legal system to solve a technical and social problem.

Is that not literally the entire purpose of the legal system?

> will likely not do anything that isn’t implemented by standards bodies, such as WiFi standards

I imagine beamforming techniques are only going to become more commonplace over time.

> Once Comcast has the data, it is available to law enforcement via the Third Party Doctrine

Unless they were legally obligated to purge it from their servers after a few weeks. Or if they employed E2EE so as not to have access to the data in the first place.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-01 02:02:41+00:00
Tracks with me, I don't like using Python for real programming. Try explaining any of your "Python sucks" catechisms to a second-year statistics student though. If you'd rather teach them C++, be my guest. If you want to make them indebted to proprietary infra like Mojo or CUDA, knock yourself out.

I'm still teaching them Python.
by class3shock | 2025-07-01 02:03:18+00:00
Next step it will just be a feature they offer and whether you know of it, use it, or want it, it'll always be on in the background due to you signing a terms of service that lets them. And then it'll not just be in a xfinity router but your tv, phone, etc. Just makes me want to live in a cabin in the woods.
by rcanfield86 | 2025-07-01 02:04:11+00:00
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by hall0ween | 2025-07-01 02:04:17+00:00
In my opinion, Nature is part of the problem in academic research. In the US, taxpayers must pay to access the information that they paid to fund! And then the researchers (other taxpayers) have to pay to publish and pay to access the content.

This manner of doing business is frustrating to me. Personally, Springer executive board, I hope this hits your bottom line.
by TipOfTheSpoonAI | 2025-07-01 02:06:26+00:00
FAISS index probing: Scan for high-confidence embedding matches using a custom n-gram corpus

Entropy scan: Identify rare, proprietary terms that overlap with model memory

Fingerprinting: Visualize embedding distribution via PCA/UMAP for anomaly or vendor comparison

Leak reporting: Generate detailed, markdown-style compliance and risk reports

Operational. Free. Enjoy.
by godelski | 2025-07-01 02:07:23+00:00
I agree, but the reason I'm less convinced this is in that gray zone is because, frankly, break-ins are relatively rare. In general, crime is highly localized. So while I'm sure it is useful to some people, I'm quite suspicious that it is not helpful for most people. Maybe gives them peace of mind, but that peace of mind can increase paranoia. We'll just have to see the rates of false positives to false negatives...

But I do see this as an extremely useful tool for autocrats, hackers, and abusive relationships. I'm willing to bet that this is used by these malicious actors far more than your average user gets a true positive detection. And we really should be clear, the danger is far more than autocrats.
by apothegm | 2025-07-01 02:08:14+00:00
Massage. Anything else where literal human touch is part of the value.

Plumbing.

Embalming and funeral direction.

Childrearing, especially of toddlers. Therapy for complex psychological conditions/ones with complications. Anything else that requires strong emotional and interpersonal judgement and the ability to think outside the box.

Politics/charisma. Influencers. Cult leaders. Anything else involving a cult of personality.

Stand up comics/improv artists. Nobody’s going to pay to sit in a room with other people and listen to a computer tell jokes.

World class athletes.

Top tier salespeople.

TV news and game show etc hosts.

Also note that a bunch of these (and other jobs) may vanish if the vast majority of the population is unemployed and only a few handfuls of billionaires can afford to pay anyone for services.

I’d also note that a lot of jobs will stay safe for much longer than we fear if AI continues to be unable to actually reason and can only handle patterns / extrapolations of patterns it’s already seen.
by mdaniel | 2025-07-01 02:08:47+00:00
I used keybase for the longest time (one can still see the proofs on my various profiles) but eventually the app would hang so much I convinced my network to move to Signal. I still don't know why Zoom didn't cut the technology loose since they seemed to just have acquihired keybase and didn't try to fold it into Zoom or do anything except let it bitrot
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-01 02:09:38+00:00
2022 Renault Megane e-Tech.

Had the required range (>400km listed), physical controls for important functions, snappy infotainment center with CarPlay and Android Auto, and it was small enough for our garage.

Has quite tight turning radius which is great in the city, and was a fair bit cheaper than the Kia Niro EV.

Quite pleased with it so far overall.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-01 02:10:02+00:00
> Your take is both alarmist and defeatist.

Legal limits on national security agencies are not enforceable due to Five Eyes etc. Allied foreign spies do what American spies don’t. I’m just admitting the political reality of the situation. What you do with that information may be limited, but it’s not a failing on my part that this is the status quo.
by intermerda | 2025-07-01 02:10:10+00:00
Did you get a chance to read the two paragraphs leading to what you quoted?

> This time the seismic event is President Trump’s efforts to remake the world order with an aggressive tariff push and a more isolationist foreign policy.

> The combination of Mr. Trump’s trade proposals, inflation worries and rising government debt has weighed on the dollar, which has also been buffeted by slowly sliding confidence in the role of the United States at the center of the global financial system.

> That means it is more expensive for Americans to travel abroad and less attractive for foreigners to invest in the United States[...]
by gwern | 2025-07-01 02:11:05+00:00
The exposure therapy part was definitely the most interesting part for me: licking dumpsters, hugging crazy homeless people (who then run away shrieking at invisible people), (very slightly) vandalizing cars, running a gauntlet of people holding knives... Not sure how much I got out of the previous sections, but the part starting here was fun:

> Onstage facing them stood Grayson, the mastermind of the night. This Grayson was a heady cocktail of signifiers garnished by an Indiana Jones–type hat he’d worn, I gathered, to all twenty-one Road to Recovery Tours to date.
by sethammons | 2025-07-01 02:11:20+00:00
I was engineer 12 at SendGrid and left after IPO and subsequent acquisition by Twilio. Being infrastructure and the backing many email marketing companies, we did really well. Kind of like selling shovels in the gold rush. We struggled more on the product front breaking into the much larger marketing space. Learned a lot there leading and scaling teams and scaling the email infrastructure to support over 8 billion daily sends.
by pruufsocial | 2025-07-01 02:11:26+00:00
https://sewerreport.com I am a dev/sewer inspector, done over 20k inspections for real estate alone. I built the ultimate, AI report generator based on my voice to text notes. Reports, email notifications, stripe integration. Payments and invoices. Unlock reports when paid. Square appointments integrations. Pulls all appointments and fills outs new report fields for me. No copy pasting anything ever again. Very niche but saves me 3 hours a day. Next js, it’s really been life changing for me.
by lillecarl | 2025-07-01 02:11:39+00:00
It might not seem predatory to the end user, but to all developers who want to access these people it's another thing. They can't deliver a mobile app to 60% of Americans without going through Apples little LARP government where they set the tax to 30% and arbitrary rules they see fit to increase their profits.

And in the end that affects the end users because more things become useless adfilled crap because it's more profitable, and everything is more expensive.

I don't even get how you're comparing grocery stores (which do NOT have a 30% profit, maybe 4-6) to Apple passively making 30% off anyone who wants access to "modern day people". Grocery stores don't scale like virtual markets, when you buy something you cost the store money, when i buy whatever through App Store it costs Apple virtually nothing and they make 30% because they like it.

Obviously regulators seem to agree with me and at the end of the day they make the rules, and I agree with the regulators in this case and I don't think many people think what Apple is doing is good and appreciate it. People are forced into the iOS ecosystem because that's what everyone uses in some profitable parts of the world too.
by dnautics | 2025-07-01 02:14:12+00:00
yeah I don't think the GPA is really a great strategy for detecting UAF, but it was a good try. It basically creates a new virtual page for each allocation, so the kernel gets involved and ?I think? there is more indirection for any given pointer access. So you can imagine why it wasn't great.

Anyways, I am optimistic that UAF can be prevented by static analysis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY_Z-aGbYm8

Note since this sort of technique interfaces with the compiler, unless the dependency is in a .so file, it will detect UAF in dependencies too, whether or not the dependency chooses to run the static analysis as part of their software quality control.