MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ramses0 | 2025-07-19 15:53:36+00:00
You've put into words what I've been internally struggling to voice. Information (on the web) is a gas, it expands once it escapes.

In limited, closed systems, it may not escape, but all it takes is one bad (or hacked) actor and the privacy of it is gone.

In a way, we used to be "protected" because it was "too big" to process, store, or access "everything".

Now, especially with an economic incentive to vacuum literally all digital information, and many works being "digital first" (even a word processor vs a typewriter, or a PDF that is sent to a printer instead of lithograph metal plates)... is this the information Armageddon?
by isaacremuant | 2025-07-19 15:53:45+00:00
Meh. Some over hype, some under hype. People like you whine and then don't want to listen to any technical concerns.

Some of us are implementing things in relation to AI so we know it's not about "increasing performance of models" but actual about the right solution for the right problem.

If you think Twitter has "educated takes" then maybe go there and stop being pretentious schmuck over here.

Talent drain, lol. I'd much rather have skeptics and good tips than usernames, follows and social media engagement.
by dathinab | 2025-07-19 15:54:34+00:00
> The business model is just screaming that GPL'd LibreOffice is toast.

or MS might find itself accidentally toasting themself

a lot of places (including very important MS Office customers) insist in a open document format for various reasons

if MS convinces people that LibreOffice and similar is toast because they can't afford keeping steep with the format in question because it's too expensive they also might end up convincing this customers that it's also too expensive to _them_, and try to find way to switch away from MS Office
by rpdillon | 2025-07-19 15:54:57+00:00
I think it's an open question whether we can reboot society without the use of fossil fuels. I'm personally of the opinion that we wouldn't be able to.

Simply taking away some giant precursor for the advancements we enjoy today and then assuming it all would have worked out somehow is a bit naive.

I would need to see a very detailed pipeline from growing wheat in an agrarian society to the development of a microprocessor without fossil fuels to understand the point you're making. The mining, the transport, the manufacture, the packaging, the incredible number of supply chains, and the ability to give people time to spend on jobs like that rather than trying to grow their own food are all major barriers I see to the scenario you're suggesting.

The whole other aspect of this discussion that I think is not being explored is that technology is fundamentally competitive, and so it's very difficult to control the rate at which technology advances because we do not have a global government (and if we did have a global government, we'd have even more problems than we do now). As a comment I read yesterday said, technology concentrates gains towards those who can deploy it. And so there's going to be competition to deploy new technologies. Country-level regulation that tries to prevent this locally is only going to lead to other countries gaining the lead.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-19 15:54:58+00:00
If Europe is serious about responsible AI, I think applying pressure to ASML might be their only real option.

True, but now they get to butt heads with the US, who call the tunes at ASML even though ASML is a European company.

We (the US) have given China every possible incentive to break that dependency short of dropping bombs on them, and it would be foolish to think the TSMC/ASML status quo will still hold in 5-10 years. Say what you will about China, they aren't a nation of morons. Now that it's clear what's at stake, I think they will respond rationally and effectively.
by harrison_clarke | 2025-07-19 15:55:03+00:00
i think it's kinda funny, because Unity is very clearly inspired by some of casey's work

the big one is immediate mode UIs, which casey popularized back in 2005. Unity's editor uses it to this day, and if you do editor scripting, you'll be using it. for in-game UI, they switched to a component-based one, which also somewhat aligns with casey's opinions. and they shipped DOTS, which aligns even more with what he's saying

i think his lack of shipping is mostly because he switched to teaching and has absolutely no pressure to ship, rather than his approach being bad
by spacemadness | 2025-07-19 15:55:13+00:00
Sure but it’s still a gold rush with a lot of exaggeration pushed by tech executives to acquire investors. There’s a lot of greed and fear to go around. I think LLMs are fascinating and cool myself having grown up with Eliza and crappy expert systems, but am more interested in deep learning outcomes like Alphafold than general purpose LLMs. You don’t hear enough about non-LLM AI because of all the money riding on LLM based tech. It’s hard not to see the bad behavior that has arisen due to all the money being thrown about. So that is to say it makes sense there is some skepticism as you can’t take what these companies say at face value. It’d be nice to have a toned down discussion about what LLMs can and can’t do but there is a lot of obfuscation and hype. Also there is the conversation about what they should or shouldn’t be doing which is completely fair to talk about.
by brudgers | 2025-07-19 15:55:30+00:00
Warning: Replacing the platform keys with your own can end up bricking hardware on some machines, including laptops, making it impossible to get into the firmware settings to rectify the situation. This is due to the fact that some device (e.g GPU) firmware (OpROMs), that get executed during boot, are signed using Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA certificate or vendor certificates. This is the case in many Lenovo Thinkpad X, P and T series laptops which uses the Lenovo CA certificate to sign UEFI applications and firmware.

“Just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that solution.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware...
by wrsh07 | 2025-07-19 15:55:49+00:00
With regard to AI & LLMs Twitter/x is actually the only place with all of the industry people discussing.

There are a bunch of great accounts to follow that are only really posting content to x.

Karpathy, nearcyan, kalomaze, all of the OpenAI researchers including the link this discussion is on, many anthropic researchers. It's such a meme that you see people discuss reading Twitter thread + paper because the thread gives useful additional context.

Hn still has great comment sections on maker style posts, on network stuff, but I no longer enjoy the discussions wrt AI here. It's too hyperbolic.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-19 15:56:04+00:00
Everest is such a well-known target, they have helpers and there’s a whole system, right? I vaguely think I’ve seen photos of a line at the top…

I think it is somewhat commercialized. Actually, I’m surprised the death rate is that high. I wonder if it is pulled up by people who aren’t really ready, because it is so popular. FWIW,

https://www.climbing-kilimanjaro.com/mount-kilimanjaro-death...

> Approximately 50,000 people ascend Mount Kilimanjaro every year. According to Kilimanjaro travel guides and recorded statistics, on average 3 to 10 people die each year. It is widely believed that the actual number could be two to three times higher, although these estimates are not substantiated by reliable data.
by nick__m | 2025-07-19 15:56:11+00:00
But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.

That's a thought terminating cliché for the ages ! The problem with eugenics is the noneconsensual, racist, ignorant ways and ideas of the early egenists. But the idea of editing out genetic mutation that purely detrimental (like the COMT-Val158Met polymorphism that make people prone to psychosis and schizophrenia, or one of the defective variants of the many genes that cause hereditary blindness or deafnessl would be a net positive for everyone. How can you argue otherwise?

They should not mess with genes where the sciences is not 100% settled but that still leaves a lot's of mutations known to be 100% deleterious. There are no benefits in having hereditary blindness, deafness or schizophrenia!
by scrubs | 2025-07-19 15:56:21+00:00
Well it's a bit of rant ... but I regret to say it's a rant I could see myself making.

I really identified with (paraphrasing) unless you work at the top %1 you will are in for a serious bout of confusion.

To give you an idea I once uttered this line after a meeting:

"This is the most disorienting place I've ever worked at. I feel like I was taken at gunpoint and made to act in the French absurdist play Waiting for Godot"
by aras_p | 2025-07-19 15:56:47+00:00
(author here) I think yes and no -- while it is true that the "MOP" quick test I tried does not allow to access/decompress individual EXR channels, it does allow to access "chunks" of the image. Unlike say EXR ZIP that splits up image into 16 scanline chunks where each is independent, this splits up into 16K pixel chunks where each is completely independent from each other. So you can access a chunk without decompressing the whole image.

That said, if someone were to investigate ideas like this furher, then yes, making "layers" within EXR be able to get decompressed independently would be a thing to look at. Making individual "channels" perhaps not so much; it is very likely that if someone needs say "indirect specular" layer, then they need all the channels inside of it (R, G, B).
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-19 15:57:58+00:00
You don't "upload" data to an LLM, but that's already been explained multiple times, and evidently it didn't soak in.

LLMs extract semantic information from their training data and store it at extremely low precision in latent space. To the extent original works can be recovered from them, those works were nothing intrinsically special to begin with. At best such works simply milk our existing culture by recapitulating ancient archetypes, a la Harry Potter or Star Wars.

If the copyright cartels choose to fight AI, the copyright cartels will and must lose. This isn't Napster Part 2: Electric Boogaloo. There is too much at stake this time.
by gundmc | 2025-07-19 15:58:18+00:00
You and the parent poster seem to be conflating the ideas of:

- Does not have the requisite skills and experiences to do X successfully

- Inherently does not have the capacity to do X

I think the former is a reasonable standard to apply in this context. I'd definitely say I would be bad if I tried to play the guitar, but I'm not inherently incapable of doing it. It's just not very useful to say "I could be good at it if I put 1000 hours of practice in."
by akubera | 2025-07-19 15:58:56+00:00
The PEP: https://peps.python.org/pep-0736/

The discussion: https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-736-keyword-argument-shorth...

The rejection: https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-736-shorthand-syntax-for-ke...

Grammar changes, in particular things used everywhere like function invocations, have to be worth paying the price for changing/adding new rules. The benefits of fewer characters and more explicit intention weren't enough to outweigh the costs.

There were other considerations: Do linters prefer one syntax to another? Does the name refer to the parameter or the argument in tooling? Should users feel pressure to name local variables the same as the function's parameters? What about more shorthand for common cases like func(x=self.x, y=self.y)?

I personally did not like the func(x=, y=) syntax. I think their example of Ruby's func(x:, y:) would actually make more sense, since it's syntax that would read less like "x equals nothing", and more "this is special syntax for passing arguments".
by rpdillon | 2025-07-19 15:59:04+00:00
I'd like for you to expand your point on understanding statistics better. I think I have a very good understanding of statistics, but I don't see how it relates to your point.

Your point is fundamentally philosophical, which is you can't use the past to predict the future. But that's actually a fairly reductive point in this context.

GP's point is that simply making an argument about why everything will fail is not sufficient to have it be true. So we need to see something significantly more compelling than a bunch of arguments about why it's going to be really bad to really believe it, since we always get arguments about why things are really, really bad.
by graycat | 2025-07-19 16:00:55+00:00
AGI???? Again, once again, over again, yet again, one more time:

(1) Given triangle ABC, by means of Euclidean construction find point D on line AB and point E on line BC so that the lengths |AD| = |DE| = |EC.

(2) Given triangle ABC, by means of Euclidean construction inscribe a square so that each corner of the square is on a side of the triangle.

Come ON AGI, let's have some RESULTS that human general intelligence can do -- gee, I solved (1) in the 10th grade.
by cynicalpeace | 2025-07-19 16:01:07+00:00
HN feels very low signal, since it's populated by people who barely interact with the real world

X is higher signal, but very group thinky. It's great if you want to know the trends, but gotta be careful not to jump off the cliff with the lemmings.

Highest signal is obviously non digital. Going to meetups, coffee/beers with friends, working with your hands, etc.
by varyous | 2025-07-19 16:01:08+00:00
The zig std library often builds vtables for structs in an effort to minimize runtime cost for the typical non-virtual cases. I feel it leads to creating a lot of boilerplate to effectively have virtual functions. Worse, you have to study the zig code in a case by case basis to determine how to even use this ad-hoc virtual function scheme. Surely zig can introduce virtual function support in a more ergonomic way than this, as it's so widely used in real life code and extensively in zig's own std library.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-07-19 16:01:13+00:00
I ll give you an even better idea for a youtube extension, if nobody makes it, i ll most certainly do. I need to pin a particular comment on a set of videos matching a criteria and change this pinned comment across all these videos every now and then, like for example when i put a new video out, i would like to link to this from the pinned comment of relevant videos. this is such a hassle doing manually in current times. i am amazed nobody has come up with a pinned comment manager for youtube yet
by krapp | 2025-07-19 16:01:40+00:00
> Obviously you could train someone to recite the The Raven from memory, but they can’t do it now.

That doesn't make them bad at reciting The Raven from memory. Being trained to recite The Raven from memory and still being unable to do so would be a proper application of the term. There is an obvious difference between the two states of being and conflating them is specious.

If you want to take seriously the premise that humans are bad at almost everything because most humans haven't been trained at doing almost everything humans can do, then you must apply the same rubric to LLMs, which are only capable of expressions within their specific dataset (and thus not the entire corpus of data on which they haven't been trained) and even then which tend to confabulate far more frequently than human beings at even simple tasks.

edit: never mind, I guess you aren't willing to take this conversation on good faith.
by dathinab | 2025-07-19 16:02:15+00:00
you can have both

having a lot of intend to keep it complicated and cause vendor locking and comply in bad faith

and this being very easy to archive just by not trying to improve on a status quo and creating a standard where you are the only one to decide what goes in where. Or other simple things like intentionally putting a senior engineer you know tends to painfully overweening things but keep it in a working state, etc. etc. Just by management decisions done in a higher level then the project you can pretty reliable mess up things in various ways as needed pretty reliable as long as you have enough people to choose from.
by mrandish | 2025-07-19 16:02:18+00:00
Sounds similar to the red light traffic camera revenue sharing scam. Free or discounted install and then revenue share. Both the supplier and location owner have every incentive to trigger false positives to make more money. In both cases this 'business model' is exploiting asymmetry in power dynamics.

Also, in both cases it's subverting and abusing a cost-effective technology which, if used appropriately, could be beneficial and all-around positive. If it was really about stopping illicit smoking in hotels, preventing annoying other guests with the smell and potential extra cleaning, the front desk would just call the room and say they got an alert on the smoke detector and will have to send someone up if it triggers again. If people are smoking/vaping, they'll very likely stop. Problem solved. Instead they silently stick a charge on the bill received at check out, proving what they really care about.

Because of this scummy money-grabbing misuse of the tech, it will get a terrible reputation and consumer push back like boycotts, lawsuits, regulation or banning will eventually lead to it being restricted even for appropriate, beneficial applications. The same thing happened with red light traffic cameras. My city banned them without ever adopting them because of the abusive scams happening in other cities. It's sad because when someone blows through a red light at high speed long after the light changed to red, it can kill people. Fortunately, that's quite rare but it does happen. Since the potentially life-saving use was too rare to be a big revenue opportunity, those cameras became all about catching someone trying to slide through a yellow light a quarter second after it turned to red, which happens more frequently (especially when the company shortened the yellow light time) but is also almost never a serious risk of injuring anyone since cross traffic is still stopped or not in the intersection yet. And now we lost the potentially life-saving beneficial application due to some assholes trying to scam people.
by Ar-Curunir | 2025-07-19 16:02:38+00:00
There is not one group of developers C folks won’t throw under the bus (eg by calling them sloppy) to defend C.

Like here you have one of the lead devs of the Linux kernel saying that Rust solves many problems that he has seen happen repeatedly in the kernel, and you’re saying “hm well they must just have been sloppy”.
by vidarh | 2025-07-19 16:03:14+00:00
I'm not making a leap there at all. Assuming we agree the brain is unlikely to exceed the Turing computable, I explained the stepwise reasoning justifying it: Given Turing equivalence, and given that for each given UTM, there is a bigger UTM that can express programs in the simpler one in less space, and given that the brain is an existence-proof that a sufficiently compact UTM is possible, it is preposterous to think it would be impossible to construct an LLM architecture that allows expressing the same compactly enough. I suspect you assume a very specific architecture for an LLM, rather than consider that LLMs can be implemented in the form of any UTM.

Current architectures may very well not be sufficient, but that is an entirely different issue.
by db48x | 2025-07-19 16:03:19+00:00
You’ll get better results if you just search for “OOP large teams” rather than the specific phrase used in the video. You’ll get results like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming#Po... that point to specific references such as https://www.paulgraham.com/noop.html which says:

Object-oriented programming is popular in big companies, because it suits the way they write software. At big companies, software tends to be written by large (and frequently changing) teams of mediocre programmers. Object-oriented programming imposes a discipline on these programmers that prevents any one of them from doing too much damage.
by nicomt | 2025-07-19 16:03:32+00:00
Yeah, that is how I use it. You can technically host any TCP including end to end encrypted data through CloudFlare tunnels but you need the cloudflared app installed on the client side to access it (SSO still works even for this case). I find having to manage certificates and installing cloudflared everywhere is too much of a hassle. I understand that proxing through CloudFlare gives them a lot of visibility and control, but I find that risk acceptable given my application.
by martin-t | 2025-07-19 16:03:34+00:00
It definitely should not be determined by corporations because they not elected and almost untouchable by the individuals affected.

The state is a less bad alternative but bad (unintentionally harmful) and malicious (intentionally harmful) decisions are generally not punished either.

When people set rules which affect others, they should also be held accountable.

And in general, rules limiting a person's behavior should only exist when that behavior can be _proven_ to be harmful.

They should be determined by individuals capable of critical and logical thinking and without anything personal to gain from the rules.

They should not be determined by individuals who have antisocial traits or who are indoctrinated into various belief systems which are founded on preferential treatment (such as religion).
by Der_Einzige | 2025-07-19 16:03:51+00:00
This BTW is 100% the reason why americans still perform circumcison and still radically cling to it.

Men must have their sexuality attacked and stymed from the very beginning of birth, or else they will waste their brain power on promiscuity. That's the only thinking anyway that explains why over half this country still circumcises.

Kant and I think Newton were famously virgins and a whole lot of moral crusaders in this world get extremely angry at the idea that people in this world have enjoyable sexual relations. A lot of people want a lot more sexual frustration to exist in this world, as it's good for capitalist exploitation.
by scellus | 2025-07-19 16:04:03+00:00
It may be a talent drain too, but at least it's a selection bias. People just get enough and go away, or don't comment. At the extreme, that leads to a downward spiral in the epistemology of the site. Look at how AI fares in Bluesky.

As a partially separate issue, there are people trying to punish comments quoting AI by downvotes. You don't need to have a non-informative reply, just sourcing it to AI is enough. A random internet dude telling the same thing with less justification or detail is fine to them.
by craftkiller | 2025-07-19 16:04:05+00:00
That's a good analogy to point out the weakness behind relying on encryption without secure boot but without going into the mechanism behind "making sure the lock can’t be replaced" people might incorrectly think "they're both about setting up locks and therefore they are linked" whereas "making sure the lock can’t be replaced" involves securing the environment that the lock is placed in, like "Make sure your hinges are not exposed so the door cannot be taken off its hinges from the outside and replaced with a seemingly identical door."
by wcunning | 2025-07-19 16:05:01+00:00
There was a big thing about this a few years ago -- companies didn't want class actions (too expensive in lawyers, primarily), so they forced binding arbitration agreements into their EULA. Then a big law firm filed thousands of binding arbitrations on behalf of what was basically the class. The company had to pay $1000's/arbitration in fees to the arbitration company, which also didn't have an incentive to reduce the number of arbitrations when the company tried to get out of it. Turned into an incentive to not put binding arbitration clauses in agreements...
by nebul | 2025-07-19 16:05:10+00:00
I think France is a bit of an exception because there's the CB network[1]. Most cards here are either CB/Mastercard or CB/Visa and a lot of stuff uses CB by default if I understand it correctly. According to their website the network accounts for 65% percent of national transactions[2] but I'm not sure of how to interpret their wording.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CB_Bank_Card_Group

[2] https://www.cartes-bancaires.com/cb/chiffres/