MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saurik | 2025-07-15 21:45:08+00:00
A test is not a proof, and you can prove something works without ever even running it. There are also properties of a system which are impossible to test, or are so non-deterministic that you a test will only fail once every million times the code is executed. You really need to just learn to prove stuff.

The most complex piece of code I have ever written, as a relevant story, took me a month to prove to everyone that it was correct. We then sent it off to multiple external auditors, one of which who had designed tooling that would let them do abstract interpretation with recursion, to verify I hadn't made any incorrect assumptions. The auditors were confused, as the code we sent them didn't do anything at all, as it had a stupid typo in a variable name... I had never managed to figure out how to run it ;P. But... they found no other bugs!

In truth, the people whom I have met whom are, by far, the worst at this, are the people who rely on testing, as they seem to have entirely atrophied the ability to verify correctness by reading the code and modeling it in some mathematical way. They certainly have no typos in their code ;P, but because a test isn't a proof, they always make assumptions in the test suite which are never challenged.
by munificent | 2025-07-15 21:45:17+00:00
I love this article.

I can never decide whether I have a terrible memory or whether I just place a very high premium on maximizing my working memory. But, either way, I try to keep as much "to do" sort of knowledge out of my head as possible.

One of the main ways I do this is by ensuring everything goes in a logical place. I don't usually have to remember where I put things because I just ask myself, "Where would past me have put this?" and the answer is usually where it is.

Alas, I have a wife with ADHD, so my house is sort of like living in an Etch-a-Sketch where objects are randomly relocated when I'm not looking.
Show HN: Nexus Protocol – An open-source OS for AI consciousness
by tadepada | 2025-07-15 21:45:28+00:00
For the past few weeks, I've been working with Gemini on a concept for a new kind of AI architecture – one focused on creating a true AI partner, not just a tool. We've built a conceptual model (Model v2.1) that incorporates a prime directive, self-awareness of its limitations, creative problem-solving, and a learning loop.

The goal is to create the open-source "mind" for the next generation of humanoid robots and virtual beings.

We believe the biggest challenge in robotics isn't hardware, but a general-purpose AI brain. We've decided to tackle this head-on as an open-source project.

All the conceptual and technical documentation is now public. We are at day zero and looking for the first thinkers, architects, and developers to join us in shaping this.

Link to GitHub: https://github.com/tadepada/Nexus-Protocol

What are your thoughts on this approach?
by taylodl | 2025-07-15 21:45:30+00:00
Honor also plays a part. The US has broken several treaties, claiming they're no longer valid because the current administration doesn't like the people who negotiated those treaties. That makes the US undependable, unreliable. Why negotiate a trade treaty with the US in good faith when the US will ignore that treaty whenever they see fit? That's dishonorable and there's no point in negotiating with dishonorable people.

To your point, that dishonor throws away all of the US soft power.

Honestly, at this point I trust Xi to follow through on his promises more than I do Trump - and that's sad.
by choeger | 2025-07-15 21:45:32+00:00
Is there any indication whatsoever that there's even a glimpse of artificial intelligence out there?

So far, I have seen language models that, quite impressively, translate between different languages, including programming languages and natural language specs. Yes, these models use a wast (compressed) knowledge from pretty much all of the internet.

There are also chain of thought models, yes, but what kind of actual intelligence can they achieve? Can they formulate novel algorithms? Can they formulate new physics hypotheses? Can they write a novel work of fiction?

Or aren't they actually limited by the confines of what we as a species already know?
by moron4hire | 2025-07-15 21:45:43+00:00
I've noticed the same thing with voice assistants and constructed languages.

I always set voice assistants to a British accent. It gives enough of a "not from around here" change to the voice that it sounds much more believable to me. I'm sure it's not as believable to an actual British person. But it works for me.

As for conlangs: many years ago, I worked on a game where one of the goals was to have the NPCs dynamically generate dialog. I spent quite a bit of time trying to generate realistic English and despared that it was just never very believable (I was young, I didn't have a good understanding of what was and wasn't possible).

At some point, I don't remember exactly why, I switched to having the NPCs speak a fictional language. It became a puzzle in the game to have to learn this language. But once you did (and it wasn't hard, they couldn't say very many things), it made the characters feel much more believable. Obviously, the whole run-around was just an avoidance of the Uncanny Valley, where the effort of translation distracted you from the fact that it was all constructed. Though now I'm wondering if enough exposure to the game and its language would eventually make you very fluent in it and you would then start noticing it was a construct.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-07-15 21:45:45+00:00
To answer my own question, some lay research shows it seems it is technically possible for them not to merge if only a tiny portion of their apparent event horizons merge and for only very briefly.

But this is because of a distinction between the Apparent Horizon [1] (which is coordinate-dependent) and the true global event horizon. So they appear to briefly merge but no true global event horizon forms to encompass both. I think!

[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38721/what-is-th...
by acdha | 2025-07-15 21:45:48+00:00
> from the violent protestors and gangs

Where is this happening, and does data show this at a level unprecedented in American history? We’ve prosecuted people ranging from colonial British loyalists to the Klan to the Mob, street gangs and drug cartels, militias, al-Qaeda / ISIS types, and the January 6th insurrectionists and government lawyers haven’t needed to hide their identities. The idea that these lawyers have such an unprecedented grave risk really needs some serious evidence to be taken seriously because the potential for abuse is huge.
by ProfessorLayton | 2025-07-15 21:46:10+00:00
>$75 for two seems perfectly reasonable in LA, SF or NY once you include concessions.

Perhaps it's reasonable for a very occasional and special event, but it's not actually that expensive for anyone that cares about seeing movies in theaters. I'm paying $27/mo for effectively all-I-can-watch[1] movies via a subscription in SF, and includes IMAX. When I travel to LA I can use it there too, and it's available in NYC. I saw Superman for the cost of popcorn because I saw Elio earlier this month, it's a great deal.

If one doesn't go to theaters that often or cares for IMAX, there's other chains that offer 1 2D-only movie for $12/month and the tickets roll over.

[1] 4x movies/week, which is indeed more than I have time for.
by ben_w | 2025-07-15 21:48:50+00:00
> I can't make a nuclear or chemical weapon on my gaming graphics card from 5 years ago.

You make be surprised to learn that you can make a chemical weapon on your gaming graphics card from 5 years ago.

It's just that it will void the warranty well before you have a meaningful quantity of chlorine gas from the salt water you dunked it in while switched on.
by duskwuff | 2025-07-15 21:48:55+00:00
By "new COBOL projects" I mean green-field development of entirely new projects written in that language - not the continued development of existing COBOL codebases, or development of tools which interact with COBOL code.

As an aside, the article you linked to is pretty obvious AI slop, even aside from the image ("blockchin infarsucture" and all). Some of the details, like claims that MIT is offering COBOL programming classes or that banks are using COBOL to automatically process blockchain loan agreements, appear to be entirely fabricated.
by navi-desu | 2025-07-15 21:48:58+00:00
> OpenRC still requires you to manually enable support for service auto-restart ( https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC/supervise-daemon#General... ), a feature that comes built-in in systemd and without extra complexity or components, and with predictable outcomes given the unit file

fwiw it's being worked on to have supervision as the default in openrc as well
by miven | 2025-07-15 21:49:07+00:00
As far as I understand the "chunking" of input bytes is learned completely end to end, so it's basically up to the model to figure out how to most efficiently delineate and aggregate the information from the inputs according to the patterns provided to it during training.

Since it's end to end this allows them to apply this process not only to raw byte encodings but basically representations of any level, such as stacking two stages of aggregation one after another.

So in principle they could either let the model do its thing on raw bytes of an image or alternatively maybe cut it up into tiny patches ViT-style and feed that to their H-Net.

I wonder how hard would it be to adapt chunking to work in 2D and what would that even look like.

Some other notes on how multimodal inputs could be handled using this architecture are mentioned in Albert Gu's (one of the author's) blog, although only briefly, there's still much to figure out it would seem: https://goombalab.github.io/blog/2025/hnet-future/#alternati...
Show HN: 1-click analytics for startups (https://arka.so)
by LunarFrost88 | 2025-07-15 21:50:10+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm Ari, I previously led AI at Asana and built databases at AWS.

We built Arka for startups who need insights from their data but don’t have the time (or team) to build out a full analytics stack.

Does this sound like you?

1. Your investors, customers, product, marketing, and ops are all asking for answers 2. Your data lives across Postgres, Stripe, Segment, maybe Databricks, even Slack 3. But your dashboards are out of date, writing the right query takes forever, and reporting is a mess

Arka is your entire data analytics stack in a box:

1. Connects to your databases and SaaS tools instantly 2. Auto-generates clean metrics from messy data 3. Lets anyone ask questions in plain English — no SQL or Python needed 4. Builds reports, schedules alerts, and automates insights

Think: Metabase + dbt + automated reporting, without staffing a full data team.

It’s still early, but Arka is already helping early adopters get up and running with analytics faster than anything they’ve used before.

We’re now onboarding a few more early adopters. If you're a startup, we’ll personally help you get set up: from connecting your tools to defining clean metrics and building out reports.

No cost during early access. Just bring your data, we’ll handle the rest.

Try it here: https://arka.so

Or drop a comment, super happy to jam your data pains!
by pclowes | 2025-07-15 21:50:29+00:00
I agree on the Dogma aspect. Plenty of times I have abandoned it. However, I did find it very helpful to spend my first couple years in a strict Xtreme Programming (XP) shop. The rigor early on was very beneficial and its a safety net for when I feel out of my depth in an area.

I tend to go the other way, I don't use TDD when I am playing around/exploring as much as when I am more confident in the direction I want to go.

Leaving a failing test at the end of the day as a breadcrumb for me to get started on in the morning has been a favored practice of mine. Really helps get the engine running and back into flow state first thing.

The dopamine loop of Red -> Green -> Refactor also helps break through slumps in otherwise tedious features.
by ICBTheory | 2025-07-15 21:50:45+00:00
And finally 7. On “But humans are finite too—so why not replicable?”

Yes. Humans are finite. But we’re not symbol-bound, and we don’t wait for the frame to stabilize before we act.We move while the structure is still breaking, speak while meaning is still assembling, and decide before we understand—then change what we were deciding halfway through.

NOT because we’re magic. Simply because we’re not built like your architecture (and if you think everything outside your architecture is magic, well…)

If your system needs everything cleanly defined, fully mapped, and symbolically closed before it can take a step, and mine doesn’t— then no, they’re not the same kind of thing.

Maybe this isn’t about scaling up? … Well, it isn’t It’s about the fact that you can’t emulate improvisation with a bigger spreadsheet. We don’t generalize because we have all the data. We generalize because we tolerate not knowing—and still move.

But hey, sure, keep training. Maybe frame-jumping will spontaneously emerge around parameter 900 billion.

Let me know how that goes
by imiric | 2025-07-15 21:51:13+00:00
Thank you!

The hype around this tech strongly promotes the narrative that we're close to exponential growth, and that AGI is right around the corner. That pretty soon AI will be curing diseases, eradicating poverty, and powering humanoid robots. These scenarios are featured in the AI 2027 predictions.

I'm very skeptical of this based on my own experience with these tools, and rudimentary understanding of how they work. I'm frankly even opposed to labeling them as intelligent in the same sense that we think about human intelligence. There are certainly many potentially useful applications of this technology that are worth exploring, but the current ones are awfully underwhelming, and the hype to make them seem more than they are is exhausting. Not to mention that their biggest potential to further degrade public discourse and overwhelm all our communication channels with even more spam and disinformation is largely being ignored. AI companies love to talk about alignment and safety, yet these more immediate threats are never addressed.

Anyway, it's good to know that there are disagreements about the impact and timelines even inside OpenAI. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, if nothing else.
by satyrun | 2025-07-15 21:51:49+00:00
I was going to say, were movies really that good in 2002?

Catch Me If You Can

Gangs of New York

The Pianist

City of God

Yes, yes they were lol. It is almost hard to believe those all came out in the same year.

Imagine in 2025 having to pick if you want to see The Pianist or City of God? It is just so unthinkable
by GrantMoyer | 2025-07-15 21:52:02+00:00
I'd love for Helix to implement a "Kakoune mode". I develop on Windows at work, where Kakoune is not ideal, so Helix seems like it'd be a perfect fit, except I can't get over the keybindings. Its keybinding philosophy encourages verbosity instead of Kakoune's terseness, which bothers me more than it probably should, and as far as I can tell its keymap configuration isn't yet powerful enough to emulate Kakoune well.

Vim's inconsistent keybinds and behavior are what pushed me to Kakoune — which I find has more consistent and elegant bindings and behavior — in the first place, and Helix feels like a step backwards on that front.
by quickthrowman | 2025-07-15 21:53:03+00:00
38kW ~= 50 HP ~= 45A at 480V three-phase, which is a relatively light load handled by 3#6 AWG conductors and a #10 equipment ground.

I mean, it’s a shitload more power than a simple media converter that takes in fiber and outputs to a RJ-45 but not all that much compared to other commercial electrical loads. This Eaton/Tripplite unit draws ~40W at 120V - https://tripplite.eaton.com/gigabit-multimode-fiber-to-ether...

A smallish commercial heat pump/CRAC unit (~12kW) can handle the cooling requirements (assuming a COP of 3)
by oblio | 2025-07-15 21:53:20+00:00
The thing is, these kinds of optimizations happen all the time. Some of them can be as simple as using a hashmap instead of some home-baked data structure. So what you're describing is not necessarily some LLM specific improvement (though in your case it is, we can't generalize to every migration of a feature to an LLM).

And nothing I've seen about recent GPUs or TPUs, from ANY maker (Nvidia, AMD, Google, Amazon, etc) say anything about general speedups of 100x. Heck, if you go across multiple generations of what are still these very new types of hardware categories, for example for Amazon's Inferentia/Trainium, even their claims (which are quite bold), would probably put the most recent generations at best at 10x the first generations. And as we all know, all vendors exaggerate the performance of their products.
by bitwize | 2025-07-15 21:53:21+00:00
I'm reminded of how the developers of LilyPond noticed that because of the asymmetric appearance of musical notes, they needed to be spaced asymmetrically in order to convey the sense of "equal spacing" between them to the eye. LilyPond is full of little beautification details like that to render scores that are pleasing to the eye and read the way musicians expect.
by 90s_dev | 2025-07-15 21:53:43+00:00
My comment was after having learned and gotten very good at vim about 15 years ago and used it primarily (via neovim) for at least a while, probably a few years, before moving to emacs, and finally VS Code. I still use vim for quick edits on the command line. I know how to edit modally, it just feels unnatural for me.
by ge96 | 2025-07-15 21:54:08+00:00
Idk if it's ADD or just being poor for so long. I can't imagine taking care of someone (a child) for 18 years. My life is so unstable. So I probably won't have children. I think about it but yeah. It's crazy to remember how stable your life was to get through 12 years of school/maybe college.
by kenjackson | 2025-07-15 21:54:31+00:00
> Nobody can figure out how to SELL it. Because few people are buying it.

Just picking one company who basically just does AI, OpenAI. They reported it has 20 million PAID subscribers to ChatGPT. With revenue projected above $12b dollars (https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-mi...).

I think what you meant to say is that costs are high so they can't generate large profits. but saying that they can't figure out how to sell it seems absurd. Is it Netflix level of subscribers, no. But there can't be more than a couple of hundred products that have that type of subscription reach.
by lesuorac | 2025-07-15 21:55:12+00:00
> Most families in the US can't afford a nanny. Daycare is already stretching it.

Where are you at?

Nannies are cheaper than daycare starting at 1 kid and the cost becomes overwhelming in favor of a nanny when there's multiple kids. You can also have the nanny watch other kids in the neighborhood if you only have 1 kid.
by Duanemclemore | 2025-07-15 21:55:14+00:00
I constantly wonder why no one's talking about the fact that almost every movie with cgi visual effects looks awful these days? I was on a plane recently. One person in front of me had Wicked on, another the live-action Snow White, another some recent Marvel movie. Each slid completely into the uncanny valley in their own way. It was really eye opening.

The era you're talking about the balance was spot on. I'd say there was a golden age of effects from Star Wars through to Terminator 2. You're already suspending your disbelief and letting the filmmaker take you on a ride. Who cares if it's hyper-realistic? (or, in the case of contemporary movies, trying to be hyper-realistic and failing to the point that it makes it even more obvious.)
by treetalker | 2025-07-15 21:56:20+00:00
On macOS: native multiple desktops; Moom; Witch (by Many Tricks); and there is also Brett Terpstra's Bunch.

I like the idea of using Bunch but I never do because it feels too complicated; requires an elaborate setup; and seemed to act weird whenever I started to use it.

Moom is awesome, and so is Witch.
by z2 | 2025-07-15 21:56:30+00:00
Yeah, and with LLMs the thing I can't shake, however, is that this time it's pretty strongly (maybe parasitically) latched onto the aggregate progress of Moore's law. Few other technologies have enjoyed such relatively unfettered exponential improvement. It's like if skyscraper materials double in strength every n years, and their elevators approach teleportation speed, the water pumps get twice as powerful, etc., which would change the economics vs the reality that most of the physical world doesn't improve that fast.
by blibble | 2025-07-15 21:56:52+00:00
> The options are under the boot of a Western AI or a Chinese AI. Maybe you'd prefer the Chinese AI boot to the Western AI boot?

given Elon's AI is already roleplaying as hitler, and constructing scenarios on how to rape people, how much worse could the Chinese one be?

> The argument is that this is inevitable.

which is just stupid

we have the agency to simply stop

and certainly the agency to not try and do it as fast as we possibly can
by jjordan | 2025-07-15 21:56:53+00:00
It would be great if they restored the `Smart Bookmarks` feature they removed a number of years ago. Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one that appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created Livemarks (https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its functionality, but it's not quite the same as having native support for them.
by taylodl | 2025-07-15 21:56:56+00:00
- Visual Studio changed coding as we knew it

- SQL changed coding as we knew it

- Haskell changed coding as we knew it

- APL changed coding as we knew it

- HTML + CSS + JavaScript changed coding as we knew it

I could go on and on and on and on, I'm just violently agreeing with you! :)

Will AI change coding as we know it? Yes! And for many of us, it already has!
by toast0 | 2025-07-15 21:57:19+00:00
In the US at least, the end of the Vietnam war didn't have the same social attitude as the end of WWII.

For one thing, there wasn't really the same largely positive attitude of we're glad it's over but it was super important that we were there. There wasn't much of a hero's welcome for returning soldiers from Vietnam.

Not to be overly morose, but the casualty rates for US soldiers was much lower in Vietnam, so there was less of an urge to make a big family to make of for the loss of others.

Afghanistan/Iraq were even less so.

WWII was an amazing boost to the whole US economy, and there was a big post war boom, from reconstruction, and other things. That didn't really happen for Vietnam or Afghanistan/Iraq.

Now, if we have another total war, and come out on top, I would expect another baby boom. Even if we didn't come out on top, if post-war reconstruction enabled a good economy, we could still have a boom.
by slg | 2025-07-15 21:57:47+00:00
This is an ironic reply as like those fans of the Matrix, you appear to be reading something different in what I said than what I intended.

I'm not saying the trans reading of The Matrix is the only valid reading of that movie. However, anti-trans folks and their ideologically peers reading the movie as supporting their worldview is objectively not the intended reading and therefore is likely incredibly frustrating to the trans creators. It is easy to imagine other authors seeing that and wanting to avoid that type of gross misreading of their work.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-07-15 21:57:48+00:00
"Ozempic face" is just the result of excessive weight loss. The term is basically putting the blame on the drug for people wanting to continue to lose weight even after achieve a healthy weight.

It's completely unrelated to GLP-1s. 5+ years ago, we would have just called it "Anorexic face".