MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rendaw | 2025-08-13 04:20:53+00:00
I'm not sure why that links a subthread, this is the top level: https://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1mopzhz/16...

It's kind of frustrating how many people there are like "hire a lawyer" and OP is like "I did hire a lawyer".

It is weird that there'd be a minimum use requirement. What about for not yet publicly released projects? Or really, why would trademarking be essentially reserved for bigger companies?
by DoctorOetker | 2025-08-13 04:21:21+00:00
By this token, most scientists would be considered cultists: normal people don't have "specific tensile strength" or "Jacobian" or "Hermitian operator" etc in their vocabulary. "Must be some cult"?

Edit: it seems most people don't understand what I'm pointing out.

Having terminology is not the red flag.

Having intricate terminology without a domain is the red flag.

In science or mathematics, there are enormous amounts of jargon, terms, definitions, concepts, but they are always situated in some domain of study.

The "rationalists" (better call them pseudorationalists) invent their own concepts without actual corresponding domain, just life. It's like kids re-inventing their generation specific words each generation to denote things they like or dislike, etc.
by wild_egg | 2025-08-13 04:22:23+00:00
I asked about "worse", not "home-grown".

Anyways you have a false equivalency there. Something being "less developed" doesn't automatically make it "worse". On the contrary, projects with larger active development effort generally trend to enshittification whereas smaller projects can stay focused on solving their core use cases.

For a macOS-specific example, see https://x.com/ryolu_/status/1954598993515962707
by pabs3 | 2025-08-13 04:22:48+00:00
Would a stronger signal from the attacker increase that distance? Or one of these:

https://blog.nuoplanet.com/en/long-range-rfid-readers

Since at least 2009 it has been possible to duplicate keys using photography, a hobbyist replicated the work in 2018. So take a photo when the keys are out somewhere; on a table, or when unlocking the car.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/10/reproducing_k... https://hackaday.com/2009/09/22/photographic-key-duplication... https://markhedleyjones.com/projects/duplicating-keys-from-p...
by bglazer | 2025-08-13 04:26:19+00:00
Yudkowsky seems to believe in fast take off, so much so that he suggested bombing data centers. To more directly address your point, I think it’s almost certain that increasing intelligence has diminishing returns and the recursive self improvement loop will be slow. The reason for this is that collecting data is absolutely necessary and many natural processes are both slow and chaotic, meaning that learning from observation and manipulation of them will take years at least. Also lots of resources.

Regarding LLM’s I think METR is a decent metric. However you have to consider the cost of achieving each additional hour or day of task horizon. I’m open to correction here, but I would bet that the cost curves are more exponential than the improvement curves. That would be fundamentally unsustainable and point to a limitation of LLM training/architecture for reasoning and world modeling.

Basically I think the focus on recursive self improvement is not really important in the real world. The actual question is how long and how expensive the learning process is. I think the answer is that it will be long and expensive, just like our current world. No doubt having many more intelligent agents will help speed up parts of the loop but there are physical constraints you can’t get past no matter how smart you are.
by nhaehnle | 2025-08-13 04:27:19+00:00
I just find it hard to take the 3x claims at face value because actual code generation is only a small part of my job, and so Amdahl's law currently limits any productivity increase from agentic AI to well below 2x for me.

(And I believe I'm fairly typical for my team. While there are more junior folks, it's not that I'm just stuck with powerpoint or something all day. Writing code is rarely the bottleneck.)

So... either their job is really just churning out code (where do these jobs exist, and are there any jobs like this at all that still care about quality?) or the most generous explanation that I can think of is that people are really, really bad at self-evaluations of productivity.
by ipnon | 2025-08-13 04:28:21+00:00
A lot of terrible people are self-aware, well-read and ultimately concerned with doing good. All of the catastrophes of the 20th century were led by men that fit this description: Stalin, Mao, Hitler. Perhaps this is a bit hyperbolic, but the troubling belief that the Rationalists have in common with these evil men is the ironclad conviction that self-awareness, being well-read, and being concerned with good, somehow makes it impossible for one to do immoral and unethical things.

I think we don't believe in hubris in America anymore. And the most dangerous belief of the Rationalists is that the more complex and verbose your beliefs become, the more protected you become from taking actions that exceed your capability for success and benefit. In practice it is often the meek and humble who do the most good in this world, but this is not celebrated in Silicon Valley.
by intended | 2025-08-13 04:28:38+00:00
This is the goalpost flip which happens in AI conversations. If goalpost is even the right term, conversation switch?

Theres 2 AI conversations on HN occurring simultaneously.

Convo A: Is it actually reasoning? does it have a world model? etc..

Convo B: Is it good enough right now? (for X, Y, or Z workflow)
by sleepyguy | 2025-08-13 04:28:45+00:00
The United States would never engage in direct combat with a nation that is well-armed, such as China or Russia. They lack the resolve and would ultimately back down. History shows that when the U.S. does go to war, it is typically against a much weaker, less-developed nation — for example, Iraq or Afghanistan. I doubt anyone in NATO truly believes they can rely on the U.S. to join a fight, except perhaps to supply weapons if Russia were to invade Europe. This administration might argue that it’s “not our backyard” (as JD Vance has said), while Trump would likely issue deadlines that come and go, all the while complaining about the costs of destroying an enemy of the United States.

So, does the American soldier need to be prepared for a major war? I don’t think so — not if the U.S. will never face a truly formidable opponent.
by pabs3 | 2025-08-13 04:29:01+00:00
> I don't think Debian intentionally shields you from privacy-invading software

There is a culture of valuing privacy though, including patching out privacy issues. Especially since a lot of Debian folks are from Europe, with corresponding GDPR knowledge.

I know that the lintian warnings pointing out privacy issues in HTML documentation do get a lot of patches.

Also, opensnitch is packaged as a mitigation.

You are right about the policy problem, Debian really needs to do something about that.

There is at least a privacy policy for Debian services.

https://www.debian.org/legal/privacy
by windowshopping | 2025-08-13 04:29:37+00:00
No. But editing a handwritten journal would hardly be any easier. It's a matter of what features you care about, I guess. I have never needed to edit past entries - that would be historical revisionism. It's not a feature I personally need for my journal. If I cared about that for some reason, I suppose I might use a different method.

If I realize I forgot something from yesterday, I just add it the next day.
by klipt | 2025-08-13 04:30:23+00:00
> A person legally living in the US for enough time (5 years or so) on a variety of visas can apply to get it.

There is no "5 year" requirement to get a green card. A company can even sponsor an employee from abroad (e.g. a satellite office) to get a green card and if approved they will be a permanent resident the moment they arrive in the USA.

Perhaps you are thinking of the five years of a green card needed to apply for citizenship?
by dotwaffle | 2025-08-13 04:30:44+00:00
Just watch as most libraries now update their go.mod to say 1.25, despite using no 1.25 features, meaning those who want to continue on 1.24 (which will still have patch releases for six months...) are forced to remain on older versions or jump through lots of hoops.

It's a "minimum" version, not a dependency lock!
Era of Bloated Software Is Over
by pushkar_aditya | 2025-08-13 04:31:44+00:00
The bloated internet with laggy, slow websites is coming to an end. Over time, it’ll drastically decrease, and once again, average sites will load fast, render smoothly, and have fewer unnecessary animations.

You might ask why ?

Let me give you a simple example:

Say a developer is creating a button that increases in width by 3% on hover, with smooth transition. Right now, most designers/UI devs would just slap on framer-motion without thinking, which increases the load and build time of that component. But it could be done using just default Tailwind classes.

Now in the case of AI platforms if they have the option to use motion vs raw Tailwind classes, they will (or should) take the Tailwind route. Why? Because these AI companies rent a lot of GPU to render the UI, and using framer-motion will costs more than just using plain Tailwind bcs more build time equal to more money spent on gpu.

And the positive side effect of this?

We’ll start seeing more optimized code. And since a lot of devs are lazy (let’s be real), they’ll directly paste whatever they get from the platform. So that’s a good side effect.
by kwillets | 2025-08-13 04:32:13+00:00
Vertica runs on commodity hardware, and there's no license cost for cpu, so it's very economical for large workloads. The quickest way to 10x your costs is to move a Vertica workload to Snowflake (last I heard my old job is now up to 40x). I'll have numbers on Databricks in a few months.

It's true that Vertica sales are optimized for large enterprises -- they just don't have the VC cash to hire 3000 sales people to sell it to the low end, so it doesn't appear on many people's radar.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-08-13 04:32:28+00:00
fine, the jargon of a "social group" of science is a red flag?

sure, theres lots of nasty side effects of how academia is run, rewarded, etc..

but thats not because of precision of language employed.

do you want scientists recycling the same words and overloading ever more meanings onto ever more ambiguous words?
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-13 04:32:51+00:00
Is that likely to keep working? With GNOME moving to depend on systemd even more strongly ( https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-... ), I kinda assumed that even non-systemd Linux distros may or may not keep it, let alone non-Linux OSs.
by doubleunplussed | 2025-08-13 04:34:16+00:00
How do you reconcile e.g. AlphaGo with the idea that data is a bottleneck?

At some point learning can occur with "self-play", and I believe this is already happening with LLMs to some extent. Then you're not limited by imitating human-made data.

If learning something like software development or mathematical proofs, it is easier to verify whether a solution is correct than to come up with the solution in the first place, many domains are like this. Anything like that is amenable to learning on synthetic data or self-play like AlphaGo did.

I can understand that people who think of LLMs as human-imitation machines, limited to training on human-made data, would think they'd be capped at human-level intelligence. However I don't think that's the case, and we have at least one example of superhuman AI in one domain (Go) showing this.

Regarding cost, I'd have to look into it, but I'm under the impression costs have been up and down over time as models have grown but there have also been efficiency improvements.

I think I'd hazard a guess that end-user costs have not grown exponentially like time horizon capabilities, even though investment in training probably has. Though that's tricky to reason about because training costs are amortised and it's not obvious whether end user costs are at a loss or what profit margin for any given model.

On the fast-slow takeoff - Yud does seem to beleive in a fast takeoff yes, but it's also one of the the oldest disagreements in rationality circles, on which he disagreed with his main co-blogger on the orignal rationalist blog, Overcoming Bias, some discussion of this and more recent disagreements here [1].

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/yudkowsky-contra-christiano...
by glitchc | 2025-08-13 04:36:13+00:00
Sorry to burst bubbles, but I've been in a few: The new cars really do drive better. Smoother shifts, better engines, effective climate control, better seats, just more comfy, more driveable, more responsive, even feel better. This isn't like vintage pens I'm afraid, where old meant high quality materials. Old cars are mostly just crappy (barring a very small set of outliers).

I think it boils down to the fact that cars represent the pinnacle of engineering for that time period. Engineering only gets better with time.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-13 04:38:35+00:00
Datacenter build-outs are being financed by mega caps with fortress balance sheets and free cash flows that are coming in well above expectations. They are still able to do things like route hundreds of billions in buybacks.

And regardless of being great investments or not, all of those companies have a burning desire for accelerated depreciation to lower their effective tax rate, which data center spend offers.

The more bubbly names will likely come down to earth eventually, but the growth stock sell-off we say in '22 due to the termination of the zero interest rate environment will probably dwarf it in scale. That was a true DotCom 2.0 bubble, with vaporware EV companies with nothing more than a render worth 10 billion, fake meat worth 10 billion, web chat worth 100 billion, 10 billion dollar treadmill companies... Space tourism, LIDAR... So many of those names have literally gone down 90 to 99%. It's odd to me that we don't look at that as what it was - a true dotcom bubble 2.0. The AI related stuff looks tame in comparison to what we saw just a few years ago.
by josephcsible | 2025-08-13 04:39:11+00:00
> Most modern software is built upon libraries that support either Wayland or X (assuming it has a GUI), so they should be blissfully ignorant of whether their application is running under Wayland or X. Most of the outliers are older programs that are built on top of libraries that haven't been updated for Wayland, but most of those programs will work under Wayland assuming that xwayland is installed.

That's true of software that just receives input from the keyboard and mouse and sends output to the screen, but for anything that does more advanced stuff than that, e.g., xrdp, there's often either no way at all to do so in Wayland, or doing so requires custom code for every DE instead of being able to write it once and having it work everywhere.
by toasterlovin | 2025-08-13 04:39:59+00:00
My preferred argument against the AI doom hypothesis is exactly this: it has 8 or so independent prerequisites with unknown probabilities. Since you multiply the probabilities of each prerequisite to get the overall probability, you end up with a relatively low overall probability even when the probability of each prerequisite is relatively high, and if just a few of the prerequisites have small probabilities, the overall probability basically can’t be anything other than very small.

Given this structure to the problem, if you find yourself espousing a p(doom) of 80%, you’re probably not thinking about the issue properly. If in 10 years some of those prerequisites have turned out to be true, then you can start getting worried and be justified about it. But from where we are now there’s just no way.
by zugi | 2025-08-13 04:41:52+00:00
Exactly. We all love a fun epistemological debate about truth and objectivity. But the whole field of journalism, first in academia and then in practice, used such philosophical questions to then intentionally abandoned the goals of objectivity. Today searching for objective journalism yields only articles about how it's a myth and there never was such a thing.

Sure, we all understand that biases exist and perfect objectivity can never be achieved. But today schools and newsrooms teach journalism as advocacy for causes and effecting change, and no longer even aim for objectivity.

Are we really surprised or disappointed that people finally figured out that they're being preached to, not informed, by most modern "journalism?"
by jrussino | 2025-08-13 04:42:14+00:00
> Cold War era crowns scientists, engineers, policy wonks as aristocracy. Broadcasting elites as clergy legitimize the scientific consensus.

> Aristocracy (from Ancient Greek ἀριστοκρατίᾱ (aristokratíā) 'rule of the best'; from ἄριστος (áristos) 'best' and κράτος (krátos) 'power, strength') is a form of government that places power in the hands of a small, privileged ruling class, the aristocrats. [1]

It seems plain to me that in no sense have "scientists, engineers, policy wonks" been the "privileged ruling class" in the USA.

Senators and presidents and the executives and board members of multinational corporations and other large institutions are the "elite ruling class" you're looking for, and they're not scientists and engineers and academics...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristocracy
by fakeasf | 2025-08-13 04:42:37+00:00
I understand but this post would of been a lot better if you simply admitted you don’t want H1B slaves who set the work ethics bar so high. I get it. When someone works until 10pm it makes those who work until 2pm looks bad especially if they have similar capabilities. Keep in mind, a lot of the AI talent started off are young people starting from entry regular level engineer roles. If you want the the quantum computer folks, they don’t even need H1B they can do the phd track.

Everyone has their own perspective. Your friend who referred to as “rented mules” probably will question you as a friend because you actually want them to be out of this country lol. Just be real, we don’t want H1B slaves who set the bar so high for work ethics. Just stop fake being nice as if you care about their well being. They chose to stay in the US after college knowing the expectation. You are shutting down the door for those who really could of developed into great tech talents.
F-Droid build servers can't build modern Android apps due to outdated CPUs
by nativeforks | 2025-08-13 04:43:39+00:00
On August 7, 2025, a new build problem started hitting many Android apps on F-Droid. Many Android apps on F-Droid have been unable to publish updates if they use Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) 8.12.0 or Gradle 9.0.

The root cause: Google’s new aapt2 binary in AGP 8.12.0 started requiring CPU instructions (SSE4.1, SSSE3) that F-Droid’s build farm hardware doesn’t support. This is similar to a 2021 AGP 4.1.0 issue, but it has returned, and now affects hundreds of apps.

As an example, my open-source app MBCompass hit this issue. I downgraded to AGP 8.11.1 with Gradle 8.13 to make it build, but even then, F-Droid failed due to a baseline profile reproducibility bug in AGP. The only workaround was disabling baseline profiles and pushing yet another release.

This has led to multiple “maintenance” versions in a short time, confusing users and wasting developer time, just to work around infrastructure issues outside the developer’s control.

References:

- F-Droid admin issue: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/593 - Catima example: https://github.com/CatimaLoyalty/Android/issues/2608 - MBCompass case: https://github.com/CompassMB/MBCompass/issues/88
by TheDong | 2025-08-13 04:43:46+00:00
If you look at the github issue related to the PR, you'll see some examples: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/56025#issuecomment-20667...

Looks like the original poster on that thread is making it because Mailgun uses Go, and was running into issues related to this: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/56025#issuecomment-26720...
by nine_k | 2025-08-13 04:44:13+00:00
Regarding IPv4 auctions: does a small ISP even need a pool of IPv4 addresses? Mobile providers, such as T-Mobile, happily run IPv6-only networks, and provide 4-6-4 address trssncoding to access IPv4-only sites (hello GitHub).

Would this be more expensive for a small ISP than paying for /26, or whatever pool size is practical?
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-13 04:44:21+00:00
I suspect (but obviously can't confirm, although this is a thought I've had before) that they are now much more of a "normal" company than they were before. I doubt the workforce feels like a god-tier supergroup either - after all there are many places you can work as an AI researcher now, and no doubt many of them left to make a startup or take that hundred million dollar zuck paycheck.

Which leaves Altman frankly looking increasingly awkward with his revolutionary proclamations. His company just isn't as cool as it used to be anymore. Jobs era Apple was arguably a cooler company.
by josephcsible | 2025-08-13 04:48:32+00:00
Stripe does this to people all the time, through no fault of their own, and never seeming to get fixed. I recommend giving up trying to get reinstated and just moving to one of their competitors instead. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44521363 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44075038 for two other recent occasions (on the latter I posted a bunch more links of it happening).
by joe_the_user | 2025-08-13 04:50:11+00:00
I think I misunderstood that you talking of axiomatization of mathematical or related systems.

The original discussion are about the formulation of "axioms" about the real world ("the bus always X minutes late" or more elaborate stuff). I suppose I should have considered with your username, you would have consider the statement in terms of the formulation of mathematical axioms.

But still, I misunderstood you and you misunderstood me.
by toasterlovin | 2025-08-13 04:50:32+00:00
I don’t think we disagree. I’m not taking issue with scientists having jargon, which I agree is good and necessary (though I think the less analytical academic disciplines, not being rooted in fact, have come to bear many similarities to state-backed religions; and I think they use jargon accordingly). I’m pointing out that I specifically intended to exclude professionals by scoping my statement to “social groups”. Primarily I had in mind religion, politics, certain social media sites, and whatever you want to call movements like capital R Rationality (I have personally duck typed it as a religion).
by libraryofbabel | 2025-08-13 04:51:22+00:00
This. I think we’ve about reached the limit of the usefulness of anecdata “hey I asked an LLM this this and this” blog posts. We really need more systematic large scale data and studies on the latest models and tools - the recent one on cursor (which had mixed results) was a good start but it was carried out before Claude Code was even released, i.e. prehistoric times in terms of AI coding progress.

For my part I don’t really have a lot of doubts that coding agents can be a useful productivity boost on real-world tasks. Setting aside personal experience, I’ve talked to enough developers at my company using them for a range of tickets on a large codebase to know that they are. The question is more, how much: are we talking a 20% boost, or something larger, and also, what are the specific tasks they’re most useful on. I do hope in the next few years we can get some systematic answers to that as an industry, that go beyond people asking LLMs random things and trying to reason about AI capabilities from first principles.
by andrewflnr | 2025-08-13 04:51:43+00:00
They didn't have to be "counter". They just have to be an additional constraint that requires taking into account more facts in order to implement. Even for humans, language that is both accurate and empathic takes additional effort relative to only satisfying either one. In a finite-size model, that's an explicit zero-sum game.

As far as disheartening metaphors go: yeah, humans hate extra effort too.