MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by charleshn | 2025-07-18 21:53:51+00:00
I'm always surprised by the number of people posting here that are dismissive of AI and the obvious unstoppable progress.

Just looking at what happened with chess, go, strategy games, protein folding etc, it's obvious that pretty much any field/problem that can be formalised and cheaply verified - e.g. mathematics, algorithms etc - will be solved, and that it's only a matter of time before we have domain-specific ASI.

I strongly encourage everyone to read about the bitter lesson [0] and verifier's law [1].

[0] http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

[1] https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-...
by testfrequency | 2025-07-18 21:53:54+00:00
Thank you both for the responses and sharing, crazy helpful.

I admittedly haven’t done my research today on the permit, but reading your reply now and seeing you can apply while abroad…that’s great news. I suppose my partner can start the process while we are still here, but glad we have the option it seems to do this once we are slightly more settled abroad.

Hope your family gets the permit soon.
by satyrun | 2025-07-18 21:54:03+00:00
I am not an engineer and I expect my white collar job to be automated.

The reason to be excited economically for this is if it happens it will be massively deflationary. Pretending CEOs are just going to pocket the money is economically stupid.

Being able to use a super intelligence has been a long time dream too.

What is depressing is the amount of tech workers who have no interest in technological advancement.
by mlyle | 2025-07-18 21:54:13+00:00
I think the main thing is: quantum computing doesn't really work right now, at all.

Imagine if you had crummy, unreliable transistors. You couldn't build any computing machine out of them.

Indeed, in the real world progress looked like:

* Useless devices (1947)

* Very limited devices (hearing aids)

* Hand-selected, lab devices with a few hundred transistors, computing things as stunts (1955)

* The IBM 1401-- practical transitorized computers (1959)-- because devices got reliable enough and ancillary technologies like packaging improved.

In other words, there was a pattern of many years of seemingly negligible progress and then a sudden step once the foundational component reached a critical point. I think that's the point of the person you're talking to about this.

And then just a couple of years later we had the reliability to move to integrated circuits for logic.

If you looked at the "transistorized factorization record" it would be static for several years, before making a couple steps of several orders of magnitude each.
by rbanffy | 2025-07-18 21:54:31+00:00
> I rather think the author makes a fundamental category error (by comparing a complete operating system with kernel, system calls, process management, file systems, and userland utilities, with a programming language, runtime environment, and object library)

It compares the whole stack, from kernel to the user environment. You can run Smalltalk on bare metal, if you want. The separation between OS and the user environment is entirely an architectural decision. IMHO, Unix got it right, while ST and Plan 9 are too tied to their UIs.

> And every operating system is a "live system that can be modified while running" to some degree.

That's not the case at all with Unix and Plan 9 - you can't change the semantics of what a file is without recompiling the filesystem module and forcing a reload.
by brailsafe | 2025-07-18 21:54:55+00:00
It's also a circular negative feedback loop until it gets balanced out. Imo, below replacement birthrates can be thought of as "getting worse", but they're skewed by a narrow window of immense prosperity and wealth that was basically fabricated, and could thus be the rebalancing, of governments let them. Less prosperity for a whole generation of people that effectively make up the future market for overvalued static assets, means there is hypothetically a ceiling, likewise if the population is only inflated by economically low-value immigration; if systems are working,(they're not) then there simply won't be enough domestic money flowing around to keep supporting that type of hockey stick growth. That's my theory anyway
by bokohut | 2025-07-18 21:55:14+00:00
I have been following this for many years now because immediately to my North along the very water source that provides our area our lives critical liquid is the originating source of PFAs for the planet - W.L.Gore. Our water was lab certified tested in April 2025 and we came in at a whopping 70 parts per trillion, yes 70 ppt! I made a ten minute presentation based on my data and findings in May 2025 before the town and the board was very reluctant to believe my findings yet my persistence has prevailed in my attempt to bring this issue to the forefront of all other local issues. On Wednesday of this week in the public hearing my town board requested the presence of InfraMark which handles our local resource facilities under contract and they very somberly presented what I already knew and have been getting others to act upon. InfraMark disclosed that the town will be forced to clean all the water source wells along with the sewer plants handling of PFAs however as with any government, even MORESO now, they do not have the money. I educated myself and acquired and installed all the needed solutions to remove my own home and family's PFA exposure. I retested in May 2025 and we now have <1 ppt PFA/PFOS in our water and I share that anyone waiting for their government to act to clean their water will likely be dead, naturally or otherwise, before it happens because of the size and costs of such municipal systems. No one cares more about you than you.

Stay Healthy!
by hcs | 2025-07-18 21:55:16+00:00
Warren Robinett wrote an interesting one on Atari VCS Adventure http://www.warrenrobinett.com/inventing_adventure/

It doesn't go super deep, he had a more technical book in the works but I haven't heard any updates about it for a while: http://www.warrenrobinett.com/ecv/annotated_adventure_toc/in...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-18 21:55:32+00:00
> If this goose is also pricing others out of housing market it's not entirely unreasonable

It's self-defeating but predictable. (Hence why the protests were tolerated to backed by NIMBY interests.)

My point is the same nonsense can be applied to someone not earning a tech wage celebrating tech workers getting replaced by AI. It makes them poorer, ceteris paribus. But they may not understand that. And the few that do may not care (or may have a way to profit off it, directly or indirectly, such that it's acceptable).
by jayd16 | 2025-07-18 21:55:50+00:00
I kind of think the author simply pulled the concept of yielding execution out of the definition of concurrency and into this new "asynchrony" term. Then they argued that the term is needed because without it the entire concept of concurrency is broken.

Indeed so, but I would argue that concurrency makes little sense without the ability to yield and is therefore intrinsic to it. Its a very important concept but breaking it out into a new term adds confusion, instead of reducing it.
by akerl_ | 2025-07-18 21:56:40+00:00
Yay is a 3rd party package manager. The 1st party package manager does not interact with the AUR.

Yay itself is in the AUR. You have to go out of your way to install it.

The Archlinux docs on AUR helpers lead with a red warning: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers
by adrianwaj | 2025-07-18 21:57:17+00:00
"Companies like PayPal, Visa, and BlackRock are already building on blockchain rails."

Which rails in particular and to what extent? Any problems?

I read recently:

"Saying the vast majority of regulated financial assets will ultimately settle on blockchain rails is 'not a crazy prediction' anymore."

https://coinwy.com/ripple-ondo-finance-us-license-acquisitio...
by oytis | 2025-07-18 21:57:58+00:00
It's very different from chess etc. If we could formalise and "solve" software engineering precisely, it would be really cool, and probably indeed just lift programming to a new level of abstraction.

I don't mind if software jobs move from writing software to verifying software either if it makes the whole process more efficient and the software becomes better as a result. Again, not what is happening here.

What is happening, at least in AI optimist CEO minds is "disruption". Drop the quality while cutting costs dramatically.
by root_axis | 2025-07-18 21:58:07+00:00
IMO the effects of Section 174 are way overstated. Time will tell, but my bet is that the market for software engineers continues to decline indefinitely. Maybe super low interest rates could mitigate the trend but other than that we're probably not going back to the days of high demand software engineering roles.

Why? A dozen different reasons. Of course LLMs are one facet, there's also the commodification of software and infrastructure which means buying something off the shelf is far cheaper than running an engineering org in-house, there's also the fact that the market is extremely oversaturated with software engineers with hundreds of thousands laid off over the last few years, then there's the aggregate effect of advancements in PL and software system design which makes it a lot easier to do more with less, the broader homogenization of runtime systems with modern browsers and mature cross-platform toolkits... and many many other factors. All these trends are converging on downward pressure for demand, and I personally don't see any reason why the trend will reverse.
by nemothekid | 2025-07-18 21:58:07+00:00
Consider:

readA.await readB.await

From the perspective of the application programmer, readA "block" readB. They aren't concurrent.

join(readA, readB).await

In this example, the two operations are interleaved and the reads happen concurrently. The author makes this distinction and I think it's a useful one, that I imagine most people are familiar with even if there is no name for it.
by robocat | 2025-07-18 21:58:20+00:00
But at least iPhones are fabulously secure.

Security is a major reason I changed to an iPhone from Android (I also think Apple beats Google for privacy). I'm definitely no fanboi (actually I've disliked Apple as a company after ][). I'm really impressed with some of Apple's security features - especially the custom hardware-backed measures.

I'm unsure the financial argument makes much sense.

A browser is hard to make secure, and a third party browser would need access to deeper Apple security information than App developers currently get (Apple only allows their JavaScript for scripting at present).

I do hope that we get a competitor browser (I remember Microsoft Internet Explorer), but I also hope that Apple manage to do it without fucking up security.
by flanbiscuit | 2025-07-18 21:58:58+00:00
so many things

First, there's a world coding championship?! Of course there is. There's a competition for anything these days.

Why is he exhausted?

> The 10-hour marathon left him "completely exhausted."

> ... noting he had little sleep while competing in several competitions across three days. "I'm completely exhausted. ... I'm barely alive."

oh! That's a lot.

> beating an advanced AI model from OpenAI ...

> On Wednesday, programmer Przemysław Dębiak (known as "Psyho"), a former OpenAI employee,

Interesting that he used to work there.

> Dębiak won 500,000 yen

JPY 500,000 -> USD 3367.20 -> EUR 2889.35

I'm guessing it's more about the clout than it is about the payment, because that's not a lot of money for the effort spent
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-07-18 21:58:59+00:00
What people mean by "concurrency is not parallelism" is that they are different problems. The concurrency problem is defining an application such that it has parts that are not causally linked with some other parts of the program. The parallelism problem is the logistics of actually running multiple parts of your program at the same time. If I write a well-formed concurrent system, I shouldn't have to know or care if two specific parts of my system are actually being executed in parallel.

In ecosystems with good distributed system stories, what this looks like in practice is that concurrency is your (the application developers') problem, and parallelism is the scheduler designer's problem.
by smeej | 2025-07-18 21:59:25+00:00
The great thing about sending it in an email is the record.

If you insist on hammering it out in a meeting, somebody still needs to record the details or you can renege on whichever parts didn't suit you later. And if you wait until it gets more and more terse, you can come back later and accuse the other person of not having given you enough detail.

Email is an excellent tool for the job when details matter.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-18 21:59:28+00:00
Doesn't multiple tasks at the same time make it simultaneous?

I think there needs to be a stricter definition here.

Concurrency is the ability of a system to chop a task into many tiny tasks. A side effect of this is that if the system chops all tasks into tiny tasks and runs them all in a sort of shuffled way it looks like parallelism.
by jrussino | 2025-07-18 22:00:04+00:00
I just want a simple/quick/easy way to scan all of the books in my house and print spine labels like the ones they use in a library.

Dewey decimal or Library of Congress or whatever. We just have too many books (mainly children's books) and I want an easy low-thought/low-friction way to identify exactly where each book should be put away.

Would this help with my problem? Is there already a solution for this?

> Most library management apps are either too basic or designed for institutional libraries with rigid workflows that don't fit personal use.

That what I concluded after a cursory search of this space as well.
by dekhn | 2025-07-18 22:00:59+00:00
I remember, as a kid, seeing the first ad for M&M in a computer journal I read. At the time I was happy playing Ultima and it looked like it was going to be a better ultima, and ordered it. Waiting for the floppy disk to arrive seemed like an eternity and at some point I literally dreamed I was playing the game. The game itself, I barely remember- it wasn't that great, kind of like ultima and wizardry but didn't really improve on either of them significantly.
by ruralfam | 2025-07-18 22:02:03+00:00
I have a friend nearing mid-60s. Retired military so now covered by Medicare, then Tri-Care. Having prostate issues. PSA went from 12 to 19. Desperate to get a PET scan to determine his is benign BPH, or cancer. Cannot get his scan approved since both insurances will not approve a PET as an early diagnostic tool (scan is about $7500). Cannot imagine what will happen if everyone getting a cancer DNA signal of this type tries to get clarification via additional tests. USA health care really does not work that way. HTH, RF
by bigyabai | 2025-07-18 22:02:21+00:00
People assume (rightly so) that the progress in AI should be self-evident. If the whole thing is really working that great, we should expect to see real advances in these fields. Protein-folding AI should lower the prices of drugs and create competitive new treatments at an unprecedented rate. Photo and video AI should be enabling film directors and game directors to release higher-quality content faster than ever before. Text AI should be spitting out Shakespeare-toppling opuses on a monthly basis.

So... where's the kaboom? Where's the giant, earth-shattering kaboom? There are solid applications for AI in computer vision and sentiment analysis right now, but even these are fallible and have limited effectiveness when you do deploy them. The grander ambitions, even for pared-back "ASI" definitions, is just kicking the can further down the road.
by jsnell | 2025-07-18 22:02:31+00:00
That seems like a non sequitur.

He is making two arguments. One is that AI capex is starving other industries. And the other that AI capex is causing major GDP growth, attributed to both the direct investments themselves, as well as the multiplier effects.

One of those could be true. But I assert that both cannot be true at the same time. If these direct investments were going to happen elsewhere if they weren't happening for AI infrastructure then that counterfactual spending would show up in the GDP instead, as would the multiplier effect from that spending.
by ribosometronome | 2025-07-18 22:02:32+00:00
>skyrocketed in the span of 75 years are immutable facts of life

A number of them seem to have skyrocketed with quality of life and personal wealth. I suspect my ancestors were skinny not because they were educated on eating well but because they lacked the same access to food we have in modern society, especially super caloric ones. I don't super want to go back to an ice cream scarce world. Things like meat consumption are linked to colon cancer and most folk are unwilling to give that up or practice meat-light diets. People generally like smoking! Education campaigns got that down briefly but it was generally not because people didn't want to smoke, it's because they didn't want cancer. Vaping is clearly popular nowadays. Alcohol, too! The WHO says there is no safe amount of alcohol consumption and attributes lots of cancer to even light drinking. I suspect people would enjoy being able to regularly have a glass of wine or beer and not have it cost them their life.
by ada1981 | 2025-07-18 22:03:08+00:00
Have you seen function health? It’s now a unicorn.

As far as I can tell, they did a wholesale deal with quest diagnostics, and run your results through ChatGPT and give you supplement / diet recs via a pretty web portal 2x a year for $499.

Claim is it’s 100 biomarkers and would cost avg person $15k retail.

I’m a member and love it.
by drdaeman | 2025-07-18 22:03:50+00:00
> Evolution probably does not require any changes whatsoever to fix this. This problem is not specific to Evolution; it very probably affects Balsa and Geary at least, and all other applications using WebKitGTK that wish to audit outgoing HTTP requests. The problem is that WebKitGTK is making HTTP requests that bypass its API for blocking HTTP requests, which Evolution relies on.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/3095#note_...
by smsm42 | 2025-07-18 22:04:43+00:00
> this isn't the case for many on their way to work in a construction work van.

How many of those van-traveling green card holding construction workers have been fined or imprisoned for failure to carry the green card lately? I don't mean brief detention - anybody can be detained by the police, especially when not having any identification - I mean actual conviction under 1304(e) and court-assigned fine or jail time. How many such cases do you know?
by umanwizard | 2025-07-18 22:04:49+00:00
Some situation being the "entropic norm" that things tend to without intervention is not a good reason to prefer it. If we allowed everything that costs nonzero effort for the state to prohibit, we wouldn't have a civilization at all -- the ultimate "entropic norm" is pure anarchy.

So rather than arguing from these philosophical principles I think it makes more sense to answer a pragmatic and very concrete question: is the world would be better off, or worse, for having intellectual property protections? I think it's clearly better because the existence of these protections encourages people to spend time and effort making creative works (including software). That said; I think software patents are counter-productive, as are extremely long copyright protections for software. But I think that for pragmatic reasons, not abstract ones that seem to fall apart when you examine them closely.
by kibwen | 2025-07-18 22:05:23+00:00
> Code runs to completion until it deterministically yields

No, because async can be (quote often is) used to perform I/O, whose time to completion does not need to be deterministic or predictable. Selecting on multiple tasks and proceeding with the one that completes first is an entirely ordinary feature of async programming. And even if you don't need to suffer the additional nondeterminism of your OS's thread scheduler, there's nothing about async that says you can't use threads as part of its implementation.
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-07-18 22:07:19+00:00
China is rapidly building an army at a pace larger than germany or the US in WW2.

They actively threaten their neighbor and openly say force is being considered while also designing specialized equipment to enable this.

China actively is trying to expand territory and have plans to expand to the different island chains by certain years.

US military analyst have been warning for nearly a decade that china is planning for war between 2025-2030. All recent US actions under Biden and Trump both correlate with senior US officials taking this seriously.

Even JAPAN a openly pacifist country is increasing military spending. Europe just made a plan for like 800B$ of military spend.

Even a conservative viewer should see this as pretty clear sign that the world is preparing for war no?
by nick__m | 2025-07-18 22:07:29+00:00
The mood improvement was predictable but what surprised me is the motor improvement. But it's not a silver bullet, one patient reported feeling more anxious and felt a worsening of his motor symptoms even if no such decline was measured. Another reported wanting medically assisted suicide when I would not be able to care for himself but like the researchers I don't see that as an adverse effect since it wasn't immediate suicidal ideation but a long term plan for when the inevitable happens.
by keyringlight | 2025-07-18 22:08:33+00:00
I wonder if it's a consequence of Valve's core business is dealing with delivering data for games regularly in the 10's of GB range, they assume most of their customers are on connections good enough for game downloads so they must be using the store and chat via the same. I guess if it's not unpleasant enough for a large group of people to prevent commerce from happening, then it's not worth putting engineering effort into (or however they allocate effort at Valve now).
by LinXitoW | 2025-07-18 22:08:44+00:00
It's allowed our lifestyle for a short period of time, to small amount of people. It's not given to poor people, to people in places we've bombed, or extracted resources from, or people in the future since it's destroying the planet.

We're all far closer to poor than we are to having enough capital to live off of efficiency increases. AI is the last thing the capitalist class requires to finally throw of the shackles of humanity, of keeping around the filthy masses for their labor.
by ModernMech | 2025-07-18 22:08:58+00:00
"By the seventh go-round, this was no longer quite the shock it once was, but series tradition must be served."

To be fair, MM7 was the first time for some of us, and it was quite a shock. What do you mean all the points I put into might and magic are now moot, as the only endgame weapons worth using are blasters?!
by constantcrying | 2025-07-18 22:10:04+00:00
Clearly selection plays an enormous part here. The average engineering graduate is average, obviously. He did what was expected of him and he had enough drive and curiosity to carry himself through university.

To self teach an entire field takes enormous drive and curiosity. It takes struggling against adversity and ingenuity.

The idea that the latter path is generally superior is delusional. In all likelihood it involved far more effort, frustration and time. Comparing a self taught engineer and a graduate of the same skill level it will be clear that the graduate had a much easier time. He had the opportunity to build upon a solid theoretical foundation, when being forced to engage with practical problems, which every engineering program does.

Engineering is also a profession, not a competition. Average engineers aren't a problem, they are absolutely necessary and represent success,not failure.