MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ivan_gammel | 2025-07-20 19:38:28+00:00
> North Korea and South Africa* getting nukes are both independent proofs that it's not hard for a nation to get nukes

Define „hard“ then. Both started early in 1960s, both had access to uranium (North Korea is actually mining it - not every country can do that), both used foreign support for their nuclear programs. Neither achieved ICBM range to deliver nuclear warheads to any location on this planet or had submarine component. Ukraine may have theoretical ability to design and produce nuclear weapons, but it is a technologically advanced nation far ahead of many developing countries and it is not going to have resources for a nuclear program any time soon being heavily dependent on foreign aid.
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-20 19:38:36+00:00
> But in Commonlisp all numbers are "eq"

No, that's not true.

>> numbers with the same value need not be eq,

http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/f_eq.htm#eq

It's not guaranteed that eq will return true for two numbers of the same value in Common Lisp. It happens to work much of the time, but it is never guaranteed to work. For a given implementation it could even be true all the time (as it's not disallowed), but for portability it should not be relied upon.
by llbbdd | 2025-07-20 19:39:08+00:00
Again I think these are different concerns. On a plane I am with a section of the public that can hold their life together enough to buy a plane ticket, and I do not feel overtly physically threatened by them. On a subway I am with a section of the public so prolifically jumping over turnstiles that it's a systemic concern for for the subway itself. Concerns about the engineering mettle at Boeing or whoever provides the subway cars for NYC are separate.
by Arn_Thor | 2025-07-20 19:39:29+00:00
I spoke with an Amazon AI production engineer who’s talking with prospective clients about implementing AI in our business. When a colleague asked about using generative AI in customer facing chats the engineer said he knows of zero companies who don’t have a human in the loop. All the automatic replies are non-generative “old” tech. Gen AI is just not reliable enough for anyone to stake their reputation on it.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-20 19:39:30+00:00
Of course I'm familiar with it. But beyond an unfortunate name clash the ideas aren't very related.

Materialism is the view that everything is fundamentally matter. Historical materialism is almost the opposite. It's the idea that there's some supernatural force guiding human history.

To quote Bertrand Russell:

> His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology.
by mamcx | 2025-07-20 19:39:47+00:00
You need to answer this from many directions:

* Hardware * Network * Storage * Electricity

Before go to software, because if the hardware break then what?

After it, you need an OS where you can be certain don't depend on the cloud or phone home ever, then after that you probably need a decent set of:

* Solid programing lang: Like Rust * Or very barebones: Like C * A RDBMS like sqlite

Set of tooling like code editor, image, etc
by walleeee | 2025-07-20 19:40:12+00:00
> One must have a very warped understanding of Marx

Materialism is an extraordinarily overloaded word/concept.

OP's proposing an idiosyncratic take on Marx's reading of one of his main influences seems rather more in the dialectical spirit than a no true Scotsman (no true Marxist? ;) flung without substantiation. No offense.

Given Marx was famously "not a Marxist", and given the laboriousness/verbosity of his writing, and his tendency to change his mind over time, you could argue he had merely the first in a long lineage of warped understandings of himself.
by moffkalast | 2025-07-20 19:40:23+00:00
Yeah it's only really viable for chat use cases, coding is the most demanding in terms of generation speed, to keep the workflow usable it needs to spit out corrections in seconds, not minutes.

I use local LLMs as much as possible myself, but coding is the only use case where I still entirely defer to Claude, GPT, etc. because you need both max speed and bleeding edge model intelligence for anything close to acceptable results. When Qwen-3-Coder lands + having it on runpod might be a low end viable alternative, but likely still a major waste of time when you actually need to get something done properly.
by jeffbee | 2025-07-20 19:40:43+00:00
What's baffling to me about this post is that anyone would believe that io_uring was even capable of speeding up this workload by 10x. Unless your profile suggests that syscall entry is taking > 90% of your CPU time, that is impossible. The only thing io_uring can do for you is reduce your syscall count, so the upper bound of its utility is whatever you are currently spending on sysenter/exit.
by zahlman | 2025-07-20 19:41:17+00:00
> The wealthy and upper middle class can afford real plants.

I have never understood the implicit premise here.

I can get a 4 lb. bag of split yellow peas for $6 CAD locally without even trying to look for a sale; most of my supply has been purchased at about $4. By weight, it's on par with raw ground beef for protein content, and 4 lb. of that would cost several times as much.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-20 19:41:20+00:00
> Even the most simple person should understand that a closed system with finite resources won’t sustain infinite growth

As you say, this is simple.

Growth doesn’t require increasing use of finite resources. A more-productive widget can (and generally is) less material intensive than its predecessor. The material and even energy intensity of GDP has been falling in the developed world for decades. Value is subjective; its substrate isn’t finite. A world of artists producing digital works could be incredibly materially unintensice, but still feature growth, as an absurd example.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-20 19:41:29+00:00
AI is the opposite, it will do what you prompt and never stop to tell you its a terrible idea

That's not true at all, and hasn't been for a while. When using LLMs to tackle an unfamiliar problem, I always start by asking for a comparative review of possible strategies.

In other words, I don't tell it, "Provide a C++ class that implements a 12-layer ABC model that does XYZ," I ask it, "What ML techniques are considered most effective for tasks similar to XYZ?" and drill down from there. I very frequently see answers like, "That's not a good fit for your requirements for reasons 1, 2, and 3. Consider UVW instead." Usually it's good advice.

At the same time I will typically carry on the same conversation with other competing models, and that can really help avoid wasting time on faulty assumptions and terrible ideas.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-20 19:42:54+00:00
Meat consumption being linked to adverse health effects isn’t disputed. Replacing meat with Beyond Meat being a healthy choice is.

> negative and positive aspects in the composition, no tests and thus no conclusion about the overall health aspects

This is sort of like saying a study that shows a certain food contains lead that doesn’t also test for the effects of that specific way of ingesting lead is useless.

That said, what you ask for exists [1]. Though I suppose now we’ll need a double-blind controlled study.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8909876/
by WalterBright | 2025-07-20 19:42:58+00:00
> due to ideological aversion

Nobody cares if they're buying from a collective or a conventional business.

> no policy incentives

Are you saying they should get special government incentives not available to businesses?

> lack of funding platforms

Nobody is stopping anyone from funding a collective. The reason they don't is they won't get ownership shares in return. That's one of the problems with a collective.
by palata | 2025-07-20 19:42:59+00:00
Not saying that you're wrong at all, but that feels pretty specific to the US. Which to me confirms that it is an urban planning failure.

In many places in the world, it's not remotely like that. I understand that "public transportation sucks in the US", but I feel like US people conclude from it that "public transportation sucks". And this is wrong. It's really a failure in the US.
by mhuffman | 2025-07-20 19:44:09+00:00
Hi! I don't have a need for your products directly, but I was very intrigued when I saw TB's demo and talk on ThePrimeagen YT channel. I have be developing software for a looooong time and it was a breath of fresh air in a sea of startups to see a company champion optimization, speed, and security without going too deep in the weeds and slowing development. These days, that typically comes more as an afterthought or as a response to an incident. Or not at all. I would recommend any developer with an open mind to read this short document[0]. I have been integrating it into my own company's development practices with good results.

[0]https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TI...
by loeg | 2025-07-20 19:44:15+00:00
I think FreeBSD tried to opaque FILE[1], but it was reverted[2] and still non-opaque in main[3].

[1]: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commit/c17bf9a9a5a3b5...

[2]: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commit/19e03ca8038019...

[3]: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/include/std...
by ttul | 2025-07-20 19:44:16+00:00
I spent an unhealthy number of hours working in XUL in 2000-2001 working on the Komodo editor, which, bizarrely, used Firefox as its GUI platform. XUL was neat, but oh god so complicated. XML was the new hotness around the peak of the DotCOM era and Mozilla’s use of XML for a GUI framework fit the zeitgeist.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-20 19:44:50+00:00
> Major Cloud providers would still need to invest eu-customer money in providing eu IT services, this is more a legal, security and privacy isolation for big tech players in order to maintain their share, extract royalties etc.

That's already done today with little-to-no acrimony, and none of the regulations you mentioned. Where do you think much of that FDI in Ireland, Poland, Czechia, Romania, and Bulgaria is coming from?

> Startups that are not in a large marketshare situation wouldn't trigger the need for intermediary/isolation so the effect on FDI would be limited, and anyway, the tides are turning on US capital in general

It's not just startups. American BigTech GCCs represent the bulk of tech related FDI in Czechia, Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria, and Ireland's US-friendly business law has lead to a severe dependency on the US for capital [1].

> the tides are turning on US capital in general.

American Capital markets continue to remain larger in size than the entire EU's combined [0]. And China's is roughly in size to the entire EU. An the reality is, European capital markets are nowhere near as unified as either the US or China's.

> its time the EU levelled the field to protect its citizens, a small loss of regional sovereignty for those companies in exchange for the EU revenue they continue to make

But how?

The EU isn't significantly unified, and depends on unanimity within the European Council. As I mentioned before, Ireland, Czechia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland would be a significant veto to any shift against the US.

Furthermore, French and German domestic giants continue to compete against each other in every industry, which has lead to cooperation failures such as the FCAS snafu recently [2].

There is no "EU grand strategy", as major member states like Germany, France, and others push back or compete with each other internally.

And given the fact that the Chinese players are cannibalizing European competitors within China, major European companies like Volkswagen and Siemens are now heavily dependent on the US as an alternative market.

[0] - https://www.sifma.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/2024-SIFMA-...

[1] - https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-fdi/forei...

[2] - https://on.ft.com/4n77YpQ
by hammyhavoc | 2025-07-20 19:44:53+00:00
> Once conversational intelligence machines reach a sort of godlike generality,

Sums up fantastical inevitablism.

Why would they? How could they? The data is telling us that they won't. Anybody who believes otherwise is ignoring the science.

The assumed path to "AGI" was more tokens, but more tokens actually means worse output, and if LLMs aren't a total technological dead-end, period, then the data is supporting smaller models meant for more specific things, ergo, LLMs are not giving AGI any time, ever.

Pure fantasy. Can't even call it sci-fi when it ignores the science entirely.
by moron4hire | 2025-07-20 19:45:09+00:00
I agree with you that Moore's Law being dead means we can't expect much more from current, silicon-based GPU compute. Any improvement from hardware alone is going to have to come from completely new compute technology, of which I don't think there is anything mature enough to expect any results in the next 10 years.

Right now, hardware wise, we need more RAM in GPUs than we really need compute. But it's a breakpoint issue: you need enough RAM to hold the model. More RAM that is less than the model is not going to improve things much. More RAM that is more than the model is largely dead weight.

I don't think larger models are going to show any major inference improvements. They hit the long tail of diminishing returns re: model training vs quality of output at least 2 years ago.

I think the best anyone can hope for in optimizing current LLM technology is improve the performance of inference engines, and there at most I can imagine only about a 5x improvement. That would be a really long tail of performance optimizations that would take at least a decade to achieve. In the 1 to 2 year timeline, I think the best that could be hoped for is a 2x improvement. But I think we may have already seen much of the low hanging optimization fruit already picked, and are starting to turn the curve into that long tail of incremental improvements.

I think everyone betting on LLMs improving the performance of junior to mid level devs and that leading to a Renaissance of software development speed is wildly over optimistic as to the total contribution to productivity those developers already represent. Most of the most important features are banged out by harried, highly skilled senior developers. Most everyone else is cleaning up around the edges of that. Even a 2 or 3x improvement of the bottom 10% of contributions is only going to grow the pie just so much. And I think these tools are basically useless to skilled senior devs. All this "boilerplate" code folks keep cheering the AI is writing for them is just not that big of a deal. 15 minutes of savings once a month.

But I see how this technology works and what people are asking it to do (which in my company is basically "all the hard work that you already weren't doing, so how are you going to even instruct an LLM to do it if you don't really know how to do it?") and there is such a huge gap between the two that I think it's going to take at least a 100x improvement to get there.

I can't see AI being all that much of an improvement on productivity. It still gives wrong results too many times. The work needed to make it give good results is the same sort of work we should have been doing already to be able to leverage classical ML systems with more predictable performance and output. We're going to spend trillions as an industry trying to chase AI that will only end up being an exercise in making sure documents are stored in a coherent, searchable way. At which point, why not do just that and avoid having to pressure the energy industry to firing up a bunch of old coal plants to meet demand?
by Defletter | 2025-07-20 19:45:14+00:00
> This wasn't the case until relatively recently (the 1700s or so, depending on where you live)

While that's true, that comes from the secularisation of law and the emergence of the concept of the nation distinct from the King. Prior to this, to break the law was to insult the King. This dynamic was at the forefront of the trial of King Charles I, who argued that he could not have committed treason since treason was to act against the King - the King was the nation.

That said, I do take your point that different places in the world have/had different approaches to law. I talk more about Anglosphere-law because that's ultimately what's won out, particularly with the system of the sovereign nation states.
by airstrike | 2025-07-20 19:46:35+00:00
> There are a lot of people out there on a H-1B visa working for companies that have gone through the process of trying to hire a US citizen first and failed to find anyone for that role (that isn't a software developer).

Yes, but I still think those positions are better solved by increasing the salary for those positions.

Even if you don't believe that, the H-1B as it exists today is trying to do too many things at once and it's failing at most of those. My specific policy proposal is on fixing it for the use case of finding high-skilled workers for high-paying jobs US citizens do not want to do today.

I'm not at all against having other visa programs to solve other needs, including temp workers for tech consulting gigs, teachers or anything else, for that matter. I'm 100% pro immigration, as is anyone who understands Economics.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-07-20 19:46:36+00:00
Sounds like your complaint is with str() and not bool().

Which becomes a different issue - what do you think str(True) and str(False) should produce. Integer representations? That then makes other things unintuitive with changing the form of a boolean.

print(0, 1, False, True) # today: 0 1 False True # as ints: 0 1 0 1 # new str: 0 1 "True" ""
by palata | 2025-07-20 19:47:33+00:00
That's not what I meant.

I understand that there are uncomfortable experiences in the subway in big cities. But statistically, what percentage of the people get physically hurt as compared to the total number of travellers?

Same applies to planes: the quality of Boeing seems to have gone down in the last few years to the point where I choose airlines flying Airbus. That's my feeling, it is valid as a feeling. But statistically, the likelihood of my flight with Boeing ending up in a crash is very small.
by hammyhavoc | 2025-07-20 19:47:51+00:00
For me, the battery swap interest is down to using CGMs and uploading that data to a mesh of local "follower" devices belonging to family members, as well as to my Nightscout server. That's quite intensive with new data every minute. We've had blackouts here before, and it's those moments you really value stuff like battery banks, however, keeping them charged and making sure others don't siphon your juice from time to time can be annoying (lol!). Would be nice to keep an additional battery just for my device in my pouch of diabetes-related paraphernalia.

Once upon a time, I had a Motorola A920 in the early '00s that came with a dock to put a second battery into to charge it (pre-CGM era of course), but something like that would be lovely when combined with a foldable or flip phone.

After Google pushed a firmware update to my Pixel 6a today, it definitely gives a feeling of vulnerability. https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/16340779?hl=en

Would love to recommend the Fairphone, but not available in every country. One of my cousins wanted one (his dad is diabetic too), but unfortunately not available to buy in Canada.

Hopefully Framework humour the idea of a phone at some point, but it'll be difficult to please everybody, and I'm not sure it's economically viable.

The Samsung XCover are mil-spec with swappable batteries (major selling point on their site) and don't struggle with being waterproof, so it can be done. I don't think it's as niche an idea as people would expect.

I excitedly followed the Ara for years! Was gutted it never amounted to anything.
by minraws | 2025-07-20 19:48:15+00:00
Wasn't Crypto supposed to solve this like a decade ago? Genuinely curious, as a 20 something, software developer who never understood why we don't have decentralized/globally neutral payments/transactions systems like internet.

Though for most of my life internet has been getting more and more centralized. At least everything outside of China is centralized almost entirely in US these days.

Rather sad reality of things, but what can we do heh...
by armchairhacker | 2025-07-20 19:48:19+00:00
This is really cool. Tangentially, it's an example of an important life lesson, "work smarter not harder". To see the impossible color, you could build a super-expensive, super-complicated laser to directly stimulate the exact cells; or you could desensitize the other ones with an optical illusion that works on a personal device (effectively zero cost and minimal complexity since it uses existing technology).

Not to say the laser is a waste, despite the above I'd argue it's very useful. It lets us test how effectively the above actually works, and has other applications.
by DennisP | 2025-07-20 19:48:19+00:00
Meanwhile, pretty much everybody else doing safety-critical real-time control prefers multiple sensor types.

For an example of that in self-driving, Huawei uses vision, lidar, radar, and ultrasound. Out of Spec let it drive them around for an hour in busy traffic in a city in China. It looked about as good as FSD, without having had several million cars providing training data for years.
by hammyhavoc | 2025-07-20 19:48:31+00:00
This inevitablism is going to be as funny as the cryptobros and monkeypics are today.

This comment also stinks of trite LLM output with the breathlessness and total ignorance of how unreliable and inappropriate LLMs are for the overwhelming majority of things you're describing.

Oh, want to live in a world where your "news" is just hallucinated nonsense? Already in it. The media is having a very rough time and LLM garbage is everywhere, diminishing the signal-to-noise ratio.

As for users submitting stories, we already see mass propaganda via AI on social media platforms with how it sways trending topics, opinions, and even targeted harassment.

Who wants to read an AI-generated picture book let alone pay for one? If an author couldn't be bothered writing it, why would people be bothered reading it or paying for it if they could just prompt their own slop in your fantasy world?

Vibe coded slop is security disaster after security disaster.

Businesses using LLMs to run themselves? You're living in la la land. https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1

Complete and utter dogshit.

> These agents are just machines processing the data we feed them. And that data will fuel the economy. It will create value, and the more data you produce or control, the more influence and wealth you'll have.

Slop alert.
by WalterBright | 2025-07-20 19:48:40+00:00
> doesn't have a meaningful reward function for quality products

I.e. people aren't willing to pony up the money to buy them.

BTW, when I buy tools, I look at what tradesmen use and buy the tools they buy. Hasn't let me down yet.

If you want good kitchen appliances, buy them from a restaurant supply business.

If you want good tools for working on your car, look at what racing teams use.

Of course, you're going to pay much more for that quality, and the only people willing to pay are the people whose livelihoods depend on them.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-20 19:49:08+00:00
1. "People here" are a very small fraction of the economy. They may in fact buy superior products over cheap ones, but their numbers are too small to matter much.

2. People don't always do what they say. They want superior quality, but they also want it at the same price as the inferior alternative. When push comes to shove, which will they choose? Not all will choose quality over cheapness. That doesn't mean they didn't want quality. It just means they didn't want it as much as they say they did.