MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FredPret | 2025-07-15 19:06:19+00:00
It's a great book!

The question of what "works" will probably never be settled since any decision, even a globally optimal one, will probably leave some of the agents worse off than they could have been under some other regime.

But I do expect this question to become less and less emotionally relevant as prosperity continues to increase exponentially for the bulk of the agents in the system. The rising tide of technology-enabled economic growth lifts all ships, even imperfect systems or unlucky agents.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 19:06:45+00:00
That. And the aspect I'm trying to emphasize is, those profit-maximizing people are technically free to choose to not profit-maximize, but then the system will happily punish them for it. They can nudge the system, but the system can nudge them back, all the way to ejecting them from whatever role they played in that system so far. And yes, the system is just made of other people.

That's the nature of self-reinforcing feedback loops.
by lubujackson | 2025-07-15 19:07:07+00:00
100%. AGI is some arbitrary threshold that has nothing to do with LLMs and their broad application, rapid improvement and exploding ecosystem. The only comparable shift in memory is the advent of the Internet, and that was much slower for obvious reasons (everyone needs a computer, needs to use the phone line, needs to upgrade to faster internet, etc., etc.)

LLMs are just here and accessible to everyone with all kinds of uses. And people that hate them and don't want LLMs shoved in their face: it doesn't matter. Chatbots were already a thing for customer service, now they are almost implicit. SaaS in general is going to be completely revamped. Huge companies are going to have a shift like they did when they first digitized paper files. This is seismic and a large-scale structural upgrade to many institutions.

And that is without giving a shit about public facing LLMs or Ghibli art or writing your term papers for you. It doesn't have anything to do with AI making you dumb or being shoved into products. That is random noise, big picture. Anyone that can't see the real changes to business and knowledge retrieval isn't thinking this through or is actively burying their heads in the sand.
by pokemyiout | 2025-07-15 19:07:19+00:00
Is there a typo in the induction section? Should `simplifyTree` and `simplifyGraph` be the same function?

function simplifyTree(root: Node): Node {

let newChildren = [] as Array<Node>; for (const child of root.children) { const simplifiedChild = simplifyGraph(child); if (shouldContract(simplifiedChild)) { for (const grandChild of simplifiedChild.children) { newChildren.push(grandChild); } } else { newChildren.push(simplifiedChild); } } root.children = newChildren; return root; }
by Sharlin | 2025-07-15 19:07:21+00:00
People have always been ascribing agency and sapience to things, from fire and flowing water in shamanistic religions, to early automatons that astonished people in the 18th century, to the original rudimentary chatbots, to ChatGPT, to – more or less literally – many other machines that may seem to have a "temperament" at times.
by rvz | 2025-07-15 19:07:22+00:00
Absolutely correct.

There is a reason why there was a cult-like behaviour on X amongst the employees in supporting to bringing back Sam as CEO when he was kicked out by the OpenAI board of directors at the time.

"OpenAI is nothing without it's people"

All of "AGI" (which actually was the lamborghinis, penthouses, villas and mansions for the employees) was all on the line and on hold if that equity went to 0 or would be denied selling their equity if they openly criticized OpenAI after they left.
by anarazel | 2025-07-15 19:08:15+00:00
> Postgres codebase is a shining example of good engineering. They walk a very fine line between many drawbacks. Code is battle tested (and surprisingly readable). Not many people (or groups) can do much better - and if they think they can, they are probably going to learn a lesson in humility.

To be fair, we have/PG has plenty crud-y code... Some of it even written by yours truly :(. Including some of the code involved here.

But just saying "go back to the drawing board" without really understanding the problem isn't particularly useful.
by pj_mukh | 2025-07-15 19:08:30+00:00
The constant drum of limited-pie headlines is getting really grating. Stock/Personal "paper-money" valuations coupled with Citizens United has really broken our brain into thinking that everything everywhere is just Billionaires stealing stuff, when realistically this is just water that will be recycled, available for anyone else to use.

But the imagery of Mark Zuckerberg personally guzzling 500,000 gallons of water to simply waste it away is too attractive to pass up.

Lets Anti-Trust! Let's Break Citizens United! But let's also stop with this sensationalist pablum.

P.S: In the dry western deserts, couldn't this just be salty ocean water just piped through too? Doesn't even need to be de-salinated? Or hell, use the heat to boil the water and de-salinate it. Win-Win!
by dredmorbius | 2025-07-15 19:08:57+00:00
At these scales, several orders of magnitude literally makes no difference.

Hydrogen bomb yields range from roughly 0.1 MT to 100 MT (the full design yield of the Tsar Bomba), or four orders of magnitude. They can be considered equivalent for the purposes of this comparison. The principle warhead of the US ICBM force, the W87 warhead, has yield of ~0.3 to 0.475 MT.

Even at a distance of several tens of metres from your eye, destructive effects would remain significant.
by toast0 | 2025-07-15 19:09:27+00:00
Drawing on ground water and releasing it into the atmosphere isn't great if the demand exceeds the aquifer's ability to recharge. Discharging heated water into a retention pond might allow it to recharge the aquifer (although some would evaporate), and form a less open loop. Or, discharging it into sewers might offset fresh water needs at a downstream treatment plant, and the temperature differential may or may not be important. Sometimes, reclaimed water from treatment plants can be used for cooling as well, and that's better than pulling fresh water directly.
by devmor | 2025-07-15 19:10:49+00:00
> I don’t rely on “willpower” or “discipline” - I try to design each day with intention

This point is the most important callout to me. This is a macrocosm of how I focus on tasks as a person with already disastrous dopamine interactions (severe ADHD).

I was actually thinking about this last night, when I noticed that I approached the self-checkout at the grocery store with more items than the two people who'd been there before me, and left before either of them had finished checking out despite not being in any particular rush.

When I'm going about my day, I am thinking about the actions I'm going to take, deliberating on them and deciding my intent prior to when I will need to execute it. Not to a significant degree, but to go back to my grocery store anecdote: when I was waiting in line I was preparing myself to execute these tasks:

1. Set my re-usable bags in the bagging area.

2. Respond to the prompt asking me if I have placed bags there.

3. Enter my loyalty code.

4. Scan the rigid and heavier items first, placing them in the bottom of the bags.

5. Scan the lighter, crushable items last.

6. Select my payment method.

7. Tap my payment card, and respond to the PIN prompts.

8. Retrieve my bags and receipt.

This sounds like a lot, looking at it. Maybe it was early on, but now this is such a natural part of my cognitive load that I didn't even specifically notice that I do it until I wondered about the speed difference I observed.

To further reinforce the hypothesis, I thought about the most recent times that I did something completely unstructured with no idea what I would have to do (or at least no solid plan due to the event being controlled by other people) and concluded that I was generally slower to act and felt less able to respond to stimuli appropriately.

This is all to say, given these observations and the initial recognition of what I use as an ADHD-coping strategy, I wonder if the overuse of social media and similar stimuli effectively reproduces the negative aspects of ADHD on otherwise "normal"-brained individuals.
by daft_pink | 2025-07-15 19:11:19+00:00
It’s obviously an extremely efficient way to identify those in the country illegally as it will provide their address, work location, information that can be easily, whether they’ve stolen someone’s identity and quickly linked to another database that can verify work authorization. Third parties like employers/banks/payors have to provide the information that they have into the system.

Whether you like it or not, it totally makes sense that ICE would want information from the IRS.
by ijk | 2025-07-15 19:11:26+00:00
Public control over AI models is a distinct thing from everyone having access to an AI server (not that national AI would need a 1:1 ratio of servers to people, either).

It's pretty obvious that the play right now is to lock down the AI as much as possible and use that to facilitate control over every system it gets integrated with. Right now there's too many active players to shut out random developers, but there's an ongoing trend of companies backing away from releasing open weight models.
by rixed | 2025-07-15 19:11:47+00:00
Cooling towers can take water from a stream for instance, and return it mostly to that stream (just a few °C hotter). The quantity of water that is lost to the atmosphere is quite small. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower it's less than 1% of the circulating water.

At first approximation, water "lost" to cool down industrial installation seems not a concern at all compared to water lost to grow corn to feed cows for human consumption.
by surge | 2025-07-15 19:11:51+00:00
It didn't specify if fresh water meant non-salt water from a natural water source, or treated drinkable water. I'd need to see the rainfall averages for the region the data center is in, susceptibility to drought to know how much of a problem this actually is. Data center locations are often chosen based on cooling costs, availability of greener electricity, water, etc. This blanket statement, "only 3% of the world is fresh water" is pointless and alarmist language because a good portion of the world is desert or arid. Some places have very little water, others have an over-abundance, and location matters. Most of the water problems regarding access to clean water and access to drinkable water have more to do with over populating a region because of the nice weather (LA, CA for example) beyond what is sustainable or practical. Putting a data center in Illinois or something has very little do to with the problems of access to water in southern CA, where movies like Chinatown as far back as the 70s depicts the problem of access to water being a huge problem because it gets little rainfall being close to the desert and isn't a good place to put a large populace and not have that problem.

If they're building the data center in the desert or a drought susceptible region, where fresh water usage is way past its limits, fine, but if the data center is in the Upper Midwest or parts of the Pacific NW, the consumption of water there isn't going to have any impact on the areas that have a consumption issue.
by strange_quark | 2025-07-15 19:12:06+00:00
> There are many technologies that have seemed inevitable and seen retreats under the lack of commensurate business return (the supersonic jetliner)

I think this is a great analogy, not just to the current state of AI, but maybe even computers and the internet in general.

Supersonic transports must've seemed amazing, inevitable, and maybe even obvious to anyone alive at the time of their debut. But hiding under that amazing tech was a whole host of problems that were just not solvable with the technology of the era, let alone a profitable business model. I wonder if computers and the internet are following a similar trajectory to aerospace. Maybe we've basically peaked, and all that's left are optimizations around cost, efficiency, distribution, or convenience.

If you time traveled back to the 1970s and talked to most adults, they would have witnessed aerospace go from loud, smelly, and dangerous prop planes to the 707, 747 and Concorde. They would've witnessed the moon landings and were seeing the development of the Space Shuttle. I bet they would call you crazy if you told this person that 50 years later, in 2025, there would be no more supersonic commercial airliners, commercial aviation would basically look the same except more annoying, and also that we haven't been back to the moon. In the previous 50 years we went from the Wright Brothers to the 707! So maybe in 2075 we'll all be watching documentaries about LLMs (maybe even on our phones or laptops that look basically the same), and reminiscing about the mid-2020s and wondering why what seemed to be such a promising technology disappeared almost entirely.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-15 19:12:27+00:00
If that happens, I would like the "non AI" side to also not allow AI-generated content. (But how would that be enforced? I don't know.)

More generally: You could think about creating "sub HNs" for AI, politics, functional programming, startups, and several other categories. You could think about having something in your settings which specified which sub-HNs would put stories on your front page, with the default being "all".
by TacticalCoder | 2025-07-15 19:13:44+00:00
> Totally tangential, but I love to read post-mortems of people fixing bugs.

I know I already posted it moons ago but... Around 1991 I made a little game, similar to Canon Ball on the MSX (which later on Pang / Buster Bros did copy).

I had one weird case where sometimes the game would crash. Plain crash. But sometimes after playing for 15 minutes and already passing several levels. I just couldn't find it. I couldn't reason about it. I was stuck.

So I decided to rewrite not the entire game but the part dealing with the inputs / game logic to make it 100% deterministic. It took me a long time to do that. Then eventually I could record myself playing: I've record only the player inputs and at which moment they'd happen, which would make for tiny savefiles btw.

And eventually while I was playing and recording, the crash occured. I tried my replay: it worked... It replayed the savefile flawlessly and the game crashed again.

At that point I knew the bug was gone: being able to reproduce a bug in a deterministic way means I was going to fix it.

Turns out it was a dangling pointer (ah, C...): when the hero would catch an extra allowing him to fire two shots at once on screen (usually he'd only be allowed one) and would the first shot kill the last ball on screen, then on the next level the second shot would somehow (due to an error on my part) continue to live its live, eventually corrupting memory.

Fun stuff.

FWIW having deterministic game engines wasn't a thing back then. It became common later on, with games like Age of Empires and Warcraft III etc. using them: it was obvious for savefiles allowing to replay/exchangs games were tinier than tiny: they'd only save at which frame a player input happened and they'd replay the entire game from there [1]

I still have the code to that game, it was surprisingly fun. Someone here already offered help in the past to get it back on its feet. I've also got an executable that runs. I just don't remember how the tooling worked. Still have the BAT files etc. to build it, but not the tools. I really should look into that one of these days but I'm kinda busy with other projects / life.

[1] which also raised another issue: when game engines were upgraded, you could have savefiles only playing on older version of the game, so players would exchanges games and add the version of the game they were destined to
by eqvinox | 2025-07-15 19:14:50+00:00
Worse, it's offline MIMO processing! ;D

I would guesstimate that if you try to run it live, the receiver [or rather its DSPs] would consume >100W of power, maybe even >1000W. (These things evolve & improve though.)

(Also, a kilowatt for the receiver is entirely acceptable for a submarine cable.)
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 19:15:21+00:00
That's a very naive take - but also a popular one, because it gives people license to hate those who seem to be better off.

The truth is, no one just acquires power on their own - people with power have it because other people let them, and they can wield this power only as long, and only in ways, as others allow it. Gaining power doesn't make one more free to exercise it - on the contrary, the more power you have, the more constrained you are by interests of those who provide you that power.
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-15 19:16:13+00:00
The problem is, any streaming device that's not fully locked down and blessed by the holy gods themselves (i.e. iPhone, un-rooted Android, Fire TV, Chromecast 4K, Apple TV) will not be able to get more than 720p/1080p quality. The streaming providers are really really nasty about that, no matter that enough ways exist to dump any and all shows in full quality anyway.
by nodesocket | 2025-07-15 19:16:13+00:00
I just spun up a AWS EC2 g6.xlarge instance to do some llm work. The GPU is NVIDIA L4 24GB and costs $0.8048/per hour. Starting to think about switching to an Apple mac2-m2.metal instance for $0.878/ per hour. Big question is the Mac instance only has 24GB of unified memory.
by wqaatwt | 2025-07-15 19:16:29+00:00
> Sounds like he engaged in violence

Seems that you didn’t read the article you have linked or your definition of engaging in violence is rather obtuse.

Surely you would not equate standing still when a policeman orders you to move and then resisting when they to forcibly move you to murdering a random person for no particular reason? Nor would you agree that the second violent offense deserves a significantly more lenient punishment than the first?
by wonderwonder | 2025-07-15 19:16:30+00:00
It seems at least to me that they don't really make very good movies anymore. The last time I remember watching a movie and thinking "That was pretty good" was the Dune films. Before that I can't even remember. I watched Thunderbolts and remember I thought it was the first Marvel movie that wasn't just terrible since End Game and that was primarily due to the Russian guy as a comedy source.
by scj | 2025-07-15 19:17:10+00:00
Consider a spoon-fed spectrum for AIs working in large codebases, where is state-of-the-art AI?

"Here's a bug report, fix it."

"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, fix it."

"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, and ideas for what needs to change in code, fix it."

"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, and an exact plan for changing it, fix it."

If I have to spoon-feed as much as the last case, then I might as well just do it. The second last case is about the level of a fresh-hire who is still ramping up and would still be considered a drain under Brook's Law.

I suppose the other axis is: How much do I dread performing the resultant code review?

Put them together and you have a "spoon-fed / dread" graph of AI programmer performance.
by perihelions | 2025-07-15 19:17:20+00:00
> "A reminder that Meta tried to go green/nuclear, but couldn't because some bees were on or near the proposed location."

https://www.ft.com/content/ed602e09-6c40-4979-aff9-7453ee284... ("Meta’s plan for nuclear-powered AI data centre thwarted by rare bees")

https://archive.is/gPkii
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-15 19:19:16+00:00
>Masked individuals running around stealing people from the streets, their jobs, their homes, etc.

Yes, that's the process of law enforcement, what do you expect? Hugs and awards for breaking the law?

Go commit a crime and see masked individuals "stealing" you from your home or the street for breaking the law and taking you to court or to jail, those masked individuals are called law enforcement officers and are employed by our elected governments to enforce our democratic laws against those who break them.

They're masked because the criminal gangs love taking revenge on LEOs or their families. Don't be a criminal, follow the law, it's literally that easy.
by mkw5053 | 2025-07-15 19:19:50+00:00
Very cool! Clever use of WebAuthn’s PRF to reuse synced passkeys for file encryption without the hassle of managing private keys directly. The catch is credential revocation: leaked passkeys mean full rotation and bulk re-encryption of files. That works fine for casual backups, but production usage will need tooling to handle automated rotation cleanly.
by snowwrestler | 2025-07-15 19:19:59+00:00
> There's a data center east of Atlanta that has damaged local wells and caused municipal water prices to soar, which could lead to a shortage and rationing by 2030. The price of water in the region is set to increase by 33 percent in the next two years.

This is a real issue that could get much worse.

Data centers do open-loop cooling systems because water is cheap… to them. The market reaction would be to raise water prices until it is “worth it” for data centers to invest in closed-loop, low-loss cooling systems. However they have WAY more purchasing power than local residents. So long before the market solution can kick in, social unrest will show up.

In the U.S. we just had a massive cultural shift over ~9% increase in food costs. Imagine how things will go when water starts getting too expensive. And BTW potable water availability is decreasing globally due to global warming.

> Mike Hopkins, the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority, says that applications are coming in with requests for up to six millions of water per day, which is more than the county's entire daily usage.

> “What the data centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up the community wealth,” he said. “We just don’t have the water.”
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-15 19:20:49+00:00
> It should make skilled pros faster and more productive while helping non-pros achieve more of their creative vision on their own.

The problem is, AI is good enough to replace juniors. That means companies are already cutting positions at that level and some are just itching to ditch intermediates as well once quality improves.

But when juniors and intermediates are all gone... how are the beancounters expecting to get new seniors when the old ones go to retirement or hand in their 2 week notice because they are fed up cleaning up after crap AI?
by driverdan | 2025-07-15 19:21:15+00:00
I've been using PMBs for about 20 years. If you don't own real estate it can definitely help anonymize your location, even to the government. You rent one home, get a PMB using that location as your home, then move. Use the PMB for everything and never give out your new home address.

If you own real estate it's much harder, especially now that companies have to report their owners and directors.

At the very least PMBs help protect your home address from companies and the public.
by AIorNot | 2025-07-15 19:21:23+00:00
I'm 50, worked at few cool places and lots of boring ones. to paraphrase, Tolstoy tends to be right -all happy families are similar and unhappy families are unhappy in unique ways

OpenAI is currently selected for the brightest and young excited minds, (and a lot of money).. bright, young (as in full of energy) and excited people will work well anywhere- esp if given a fair amount of autonomy.

Young people talking about how hard they worked is not a sign of a great corp culture, just a sign that they are in the super excited stage of their careers

In the long run who knows, I tend to view these companies as groups of like minded people and groups of people change and the dynamic changees overnight -so if they can sustain that culture sure, but who knows..