MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tetha | 2025-08-11 20:20:57+00:00
I think the answer is either very simple, or impossible to give without details.

If I recall my crypto classes and definitions correctly, if you have a perfect encryption X, a C = X(K, P) has zero information about P unless you know K. Thus, once X is applied, Y is not relevant anymore.

Once you have non-perfect encryptions, it depends on X and Y. Why shouldn't a structure in some post-quantum algorithm give you information about, say, the cycle length of an underlying modular logarithm like RSA? This information in turn could shave fractions of bits off of the key length of the underlying algorithm. These could be the bits that make it feasible to brute-force. Or they could be just another step.

On the other hand, proving that this is impossible is ... would you think that a silly sequence about rabbits would be related to a ratio well-known in art? There are such crazy connections in math. Proving that something cannot possibly connected is the most craziest thing ever.

But that's the thing about crypto: It has to last 50 - 100 years. RSA is on a trajectory out. It had a good run. Now we have new algorithms with new drawbacks.
by dingnuts | 2025-08-11 20:21:00+00:00
The grandparent was also wryly highlighting the crevasse between post-Nadella Microsoft's PR, which you seem to believe, and their actions.

Despite "MS <3s Open Source" they never changed, you're just referencing a very successful era of marketing.

And poor Linux users are out here catching strays. Very "don't you say that about the $1T company!!!" of you to defend them, "fellow Linux user" (also very hi fellow kids..)
by gmueckl | 2025-08-11 20:21:27+00:00
This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.

IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.

They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.

I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.

Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
by andrew_gs | 2025-08-11 20:21:50+00:00
Working as a contractor programming is a pretty good way of recovering from burn-out. You get paid by the hour/day, it's a super clear relationship.

As you're not a permanent staff member it's much easier to ignore all politics and decisions you don't agree with as it's not really your business. Turn-up, do the work, check-out and don't think about work after you sign-out.

You can still do good work, share your opinion on how you would approach things, but as a contractor it's much easier to accept things.

I don't work as a contractor anymore, as ultimately I like to have a stake in the place where I work, but I did enjoy my time as a contractor, and I think it can genuinely help with recovery from burn-out.
by stouset | 2025-08-11 20:22:55+00:00
> You have to be careful about how you do it because those runtime checks can easily swamp the performance gains you get from SIMD.

That seems surprising, particularly given that autovectorizing compilers tend to insert pretty extensive preambles that check for whether or not it's likely the vectorized one will have a speedup over the looping version (e.g., based on the number of iterations) and postambles that handle the cases where the number of loop iterations isn't cleanly divisible by the number of elements in the chosen vector size.

Why would checking for supported SIMD instructions cause that much additional work?

Also, even if this is the case, you can always check once and then replace the function body with the chosen one, eliding the check.
by normalaccess | 2025-08-11 20:22:57+00:00
He would have to get permission of the governor. I think there is a loop hole for DC because it has no governor.

"The Act (Posse Comitatus Act) does not prevent the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard under state authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within its home state or in an adjacent state if invited by that state's governor."

Wiki Page on the Posse Comitatus Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
by cultofmetatron | 2025-08-11 20:23:03+00:00
> most new hires would have no idea how to write a SQL query.

probably why people think rails is slow. our integration partners and our customers are constantly amazed by how fast and efficient our system is. The secret is I know how to write a damn query. you can push a lot of logic that would otherwise be done in the api layer into a query. if done properly with the right indexes, its going to be WAY faster than pulling the data into the api server and doing clumsy data transformations there.
by mikestorrent | 2025-08-11 20:23:08+00:00
Very much so! I used to write responses online in the classic GPT formula with lots of bullets etc. and now I am deliberately ensuring that I don't over-formalize grammar so as to provide people with a little bit of confidence that I'm real... for what it's worth.

I used to spend a lot of time arguing online. Now, with Dead Internet Theory, it feels like it's just hammering home how useless that all was.
by jFriedensreich | 2025-08-11 20:23:14+00:00
Its not that many people got paid a lot before for their open source contributions (and pride/ attribution will just change as we get used to the reality) and with models improving more, most projects will be possible to recreate from scratch with very little effort anyways. What changed a lot is how i think about accepting contributions, why go through the hell of PR dance and wait for fixes that take forever or get ghosted if i can just have an agent finish or recreate the PR with immediate reactions and no sensibilities to being called an idiot. Similarly, GPL and garbage dual and "custom" licenses by companies pretending to be open source will just be dead as soon as there are standardised cleanroom rebuilding pipelines. Why would i contribute to something prohibiting me to build a business on top if i can spend a few thousand $ and 2 weeks max to have the whole project rebuild as Apache 2.0 based on behaviour analytics and spec extraction? Apache 2.0 and MIT will be the gravitational force that OSS and even closed source goes to because no one has to care anymore. Of course there are exceptions but those will grow fewer and fewer. Also the hurdle for an open source library or project to be viable existing as a real entity will grow immensely, i would consider the cost of anything on npm too high if it can be rebuild at hoc in a few files and save me from dependencies.
by kccqzy | 2025-08-11 20:23:14+00:00
They can already do this just by downloading Mathematica.

Solving integrals is the original selling point of Mathematica: https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/scrapbook/1988/03/04/198...

And yes, I memorized a bunch of integrals for my calculus class and then promptly forgot them all after the final exam. It's not worth it to remember how to do integrals other than simple cases like polynomials or sin/cos on their own.
by robertlagrant | 2025-08-11 20:23:41+00:00
Sorry to hear this. It's such a tricky thing for an org to balance, if not impossible.

One thing I notice is it's very easy to add additional layers of relatively small actual value that look like lots of value. So you might say you've earned a degree of respect by working consistently for years, and people don't mind that you don't always update your status reports. But then if you don't defend vigorously in the org, someone might come in who does very little work in terms of company output, but always gets your status reports in and reports up the chain so you "don't have to". And that looks like value to the person above, but it wasn't really. And now you have a new boss.
by freedomben | 2025-08-11 20:24:07+00:00
I think "shady" is a little too harsh - sounds like they forked an important upstream project, made incompatible changes that they didn't push upstream or even communicate with upstream about, and now have to deal with the consequences of that. If that's "shady" (despite being all out in the open) then nearly every company I've worked for has been "shady."
by waffletower | 2025-08-11 20:24:47+00:00
I have used emacs for more than 30 years, use it as a primary code editor now, and I have never found use of org-mode, despite a few attempts, to become a lasting habit. Of the list of integrations provided here, I only see alert and calendar support being of interest (but because of this, I may give org-mode one more try).
by hkt | 2025-08-11 20:24:51+00:00
In fact, does anybody want to hire a server with me? I suspect it'll work out cheaper than Claude max etc: a server from hetzner starts at £220ish: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-gpu/

It might be fun to work out how to share, too. A whole new breed of shell hosting.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-11 20:24:56+00:00
We can make some educated guesses and extrapolate some trends. But you are right that most of the people currently claiming to know what's going to happen in 3 years were fast asleep when chat gpt launched, which is almost 3 years ago. And I include myself in that group. Most in the industry did not see that coming. Not even a little bit.

At this point we have half the industry being overly pessimistic and the other half being unreasonably optimistic. The median truth would be in the middle. But I don't think that's a very sound position to take either.

The reason is that I think we're actually dealing with a severe imagination deficit in society. That always happens around big technological changes. And this definitely looks and feels like such a thing. Ten years from now it might all seem obvious in retrospect. But right now we have the optimist camp predicting what boils down to the automotive equivalent of "faster horses" (AGI, I robot, self driving cars, and all the rest). It's going to be this wonderful utopia where no-one works and everything runs by itself. I'm not a big believer in that and I don't think that's how economies work.

And we have a bunch of pessimists predicting that it's all going to end in tears. Dystopia, everybody is going to be unemployed, and a lot of other Luddite nonsense.

The optimists basically lack imagination so they just reach for what science fiction told them is going to happen (i.e. rely on other people's science fiction). And then the pessimists basically are stuck imagining the worst always happens and failing to imagine that there might be things that actually do work.

It's fairly easy to predict/bet that both sides are probably imagining things wrong. Just like people did three years ago. Including myself here. So, not making a prediction here. But, kind of curious to see how the next few years will unfold. Lots of amazing stuff in the past three. I'll have some more of that please.
by Ntrails | 2025-08-11 20:24:56+00:00
> 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.

It would be an extraordinary amount of work for a government that can barely keep up with the fires of its own making let alone the many the world is imposing upon them. Along with that, watching the horse trading going on over every change they make - I don't see how they ever get a meaningful final text over the line.

It's not a mainstream political priority at all to my knowledge, so I'm mostly curious why you disagree!
by drysart | 2025-08-11 20:25:08+00:00
Azure DevOps is.... okay. It's functional, and it's not really anything unique or innovative; but it never really strived to be anything like that. It started out as the online, service-based version of Team Foundation Server and was very clearly being cultivated into turning into "Github, but integrated into the Azure ecosystem" and that particular strategic need evaporated for Microsoft when they acquired the actual Github.

Azure DevOps went into zombie mode basically the same day the acquisition closed; I don't think it's received any new features since 2018.
by gorgoiler | 2025-08-11 20:25:13+00:00
Not to sound too pollyannaesque but if you want some good news then (1) Mat Kaplan and The Planetary Society have just started publishing their monthly book reviews on the main stream; and (2) Armando Iannucci (The Day Today, Brasseye, The Thick of It, Veep) and Helen Lewis have also just started doing mini reviews too on their Strong Message Here podcast.

https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/book-club-andy-wei...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0ls28zb

It’s not much, but it’s always nice to follow edges in the taste-graph from nodes I trust to nodes that are new to me.
by anon7000 | 2025-08-11 20:25:49+00:00
Reddit sucks, but it’s also one of the biggest goldmines of human-curated information out there. Alternatives include blogspam, which is worse than useless these days, and forums with limited scope. Figuring out how to sift through dirt to find the nuggets of gold is important for any AI, whether they train on Reddit or not.
by catigula | 2025-08-11 20:26:03+00:00
Apple's marketing on this was a very impressive effort on this, evidenced by:

>...I thought everyone agreed the comparable chips in 2020 weren’t?

Possibly, but it was likely far, far closer (see maybe the AMD Ryzen 7 4800U) than justified defense of the project.

Anyways, with the addition of the Rosetta translation layer there's no way the Apple M1 was as efficient as the Ryzen.
by martin-t | 2025-08-11 20:26:20+00:00
When all public code including GPL and AGPL has been stolen and plagiarized already and the fabled artificial intelligence is nowhere to be seen, stealing all the private and proprietary code will surely make all the difference.

It probably won't but reselling the code to its owners is still good business. Convince people that statistical models of copyrighted work (which can reproduce said copyrighted work both verbatim or disguised) are A"I" and sadly, somehow, most people seem OK with it.
by aw1621107 | 2025-08-11 20:26:24+00:00
> But what matters is run-time behavior for any input. And sorry, C++'s complexity still has the effect that the code is terrible: https://godbolt.org/z/vWfjjf8rP

> In C, the compiler can remove all error paths: https://godbolt.org/z/GGMcc6bxv

For what it's worth, if you actually use the same flags for the C++ example (in particular, -fsanitize-trap) the C++ compilers improve quite a bit, with Clang getting fairly close to the GCC C output (https://godbolt.org/z/M3z5EaGKj ; note that GCC doesn't seem to eliminate the std::optional::value() check unless you use -O3). But perhaps more interestingly, if you make a simplified std::optional that still uses C++-specific features both Clang and GCC produce output that is very close to that from C/GCC: https://godbolt.org/z/PhEW7eT8x

Removing I/O-related stuff makes this clearer:

C: https://godbolt.org/z/e71s9E63f

C++: https://godbolt.org/z/YnhdxYxY4 (Clang seems unable to eliminate the UBSan overflow check for some reason?)

Does make me wonder what exactly it is about std::optional that confuses the optimizers, and whether a similarly complex C maybe implementation can suffer from the same issues that std::optional appears to.
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-11 20:27:02+00:00
33.6 was the highest V.90 specified for output over an analog connection. ISPs would have a digital connection the phone company and the signal (ideally) would stay digital until it was turned analog to send over your local loop. This is why it was 33.6kbps up and 56kbps down. I believe the regulatory limit was 53kbps in the US, and it was not uncommon for my modem to negotiate something in the 40s, as we had a somewhat long local loop (hence my RBOC denying us DSL; we had a local loop that was 2 "kilofeet" too long).
by mynameisvlad | 2025-08-11 20:27:52+00:00
ADO is just the rebranded Visual Studio Team Services which is just the rebranded Team Foundation Service (which itself is the cloud version of ADO/VST/TF Server). It isn't really integrated in Azure aside from the naming, and it is intended to be more of a Jira/Bitbucket/etc replacement than GitHub.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-08-11 20:27:58+00:00
> Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?

They do that by staying out of such countries. Many US companies don't want to work with EU GDPR and just block all european IPs, wikipedia has full right to leave UK. They are under no obligations to provide service to them in the same was as pornhub is under no obligation to provide services in eg. a country that would require them to disclose IP addresses of all viewers of gay porn, etc.

Saying that it was a democratic decision without people actually being asked if they want that (referendum) is just weaseling out instead of directly pointing out that it's a bad policy that very few brits actually wanted. Somehow no one uses the same words when eg. trump does something (tarifs, defunding, etc.), no one is talking about democratic decisions of americans then.

Wikipedia has the full right to say "nope, we're not playing that game" and pulling out, even if an actual majority of brits want that.
by leptons | 2025-08-11 20:28:15+00:00
I, like many developers was handed a Macbook Pro upon starting my first day at the company. I gave MacOS a shot (again, I used to be a mac sysadmin at a design company), but was happier when I could install Windows on it. Finder is a joke, and so many other things about MacOS are just stupid. Sure, Windows has some crap too, but it lacks the pretentiousness and ridiculous things I dislike about Apple products. I also covered the white lit-up Apple logo on the laptop screen with red-circle-strikeout sticker, because I really disliked Apple after being a sysadmin getting all too familiar with their products and OS.
by bko | 2025-08-11 20:28:22+00:00
'Wrapper' in this instance is your primary source of value is a prompt.

I think you can think of it as how long would it take someone to come up with the product given enough information about the product.

Take for instance an app that is a "companion" app. It's simplest form is a prompt + LLM + interface. They don't own the LLM so they have the prompt and interface. The prompt is simple enough to figure out (often by asking the app in a clever way) so the interface is left. How easy is it to replicate? If it's like chatgpt, pretty easy.

Now there are a few complications. Suppose there are network effects (Instagram is a wrapper around a protocol), but the network effects are the value. And LLM wrapper can create network effects (maybe there is a way to share or something) but difficult.

OpenAI is not a wrapper on NVIDIA because it would take billions of dollars to train the LLM with the NVIDIA chips (in energy). It would take me a weekend to recreate a GPT wrapper or just fork an open source implementation. There is also institutional knowledge (which is why Meta is offering 1bn+ for a single eng). Or take something like Excel. People know how it works, people have dissected it endlessly. But the cost to recreate even with perfect knowledge is very high, plus there is network effects.
by UncleMeat | 2025-08-11 20:28:32+00:00
Erlich (and others) said that we needed to do the following

* programs of mass sterilization in the third world

* a "triage" program where we partition the third world into "savable" and "unsavable" zones, block all movement between these zones, and expel the unsavable zones from our world order such that they will simply all starve to death.
by armchairhacker | 2025-08-11 20:28:38+00:00
> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.

I remember when I was trying to find a YouTube video, I remembered the contents but not the name. I tried google search and existing LLMs including Gemini, and none could find it.

It would also be useful for security: give the AI a recording and ask when the suspicious person shows up, the item is stolen, the event happens, etc. But unfortunately also useful for tyranny…
by tantalor | 2025-08-11 20:28:54+00:00
> The test shows famous people with these features removed

Article links to this test: https://www.testmybrain.org/face-blindness/face-blindness.ht...

But this isn't the "famous faces" test.

I think they meant to link to this one: https://v3.testmybrain.org/digitallab/?study=digitallab_s4_2...

That website does some funny stuff with sessions.
by m463 | 2025-08-11 20:29:23+00:00
I think a more nuanced look at this is:

- he needs to get things done

- checks out some tools

- they don't enforce fundamentals

- he needs self-discipline to do fundamentsls

- uses least-common-denominator

thing is, if the person continues with the .txt file at some point the habits will form and maybe tools will support his goals just fine.

the Getting Things Done book starts with pencil and paper.

A lot of people do this with literal tools. They skip from a manual screwdriver to a power screwdriver before they understand the "mechanics feel"¹ of tightening a screw and make a mess of things.

Then they go back to basics, use a hand screwdriver and learn to properly tighten a screw. At some point in the future a power screwdriver will accelerate what they are doing. And when necessary, use the hand screwdriver or the principles learned with it.

1: zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
by rayiner | 2025-08-11 20:30:05+00:00
All that said, I agree with your general point that the situation with the welfare state is probably fixable, if we don’t enter a doom loop. It’s just more burdensome than lifting the SS cap.

I’m more optimistic about non-western countries. I suspect descendants of Puritans will be a historical curiosity in 2500 but I think Muslims and Mormons will still exist.
by cafebeen | 2025-08-11 20:30:29+00:00
Taking a shot at this, one concrete definition might be that the business model is essentially white labeling, that is, the base LLM is rebranded, but task performance in the problem domain is not functionally improved in some measurable way. As a corollary, it means the user could receive the same value if they had gone straight to the base LLM provider.

I think this might be more narrow than most uses of the term “wrapper” though.
by martin-t | 2025-08-11 20:30:31+00:00
You're looking at it from a developer's POV. Your goals are a quality product that helps you with your work.

Microsoft's goal is to make money by making software or ~~selling~~ renting services. You are a cost center.

And what do managers do to cost centers? They outsource them, either to artificial "intelligence" or actual Indians.

By plagiarizing stolen code, disregarding its original license, they hope to make the former actually work.
by freedomben | 2025-08-11 20:30:45+00:00
> startups history is littered with failed companies using the best tech, and they were often beaten by companies using a worse is better approach.

Indeed. In my idealistic youth I bought heavily into the "if you build it, they will come," but that turned out to not at all be reality. Often times the best product loses because of marketing, network effects, or some other reason that has nothing to do with the tech. I wish it weren't that way, but if wishes were fishes we'd all have a fry
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-11 20:31:08+00:00
My friend would queue up downloads on his laptop before 1st period, leave the laptop plugged in, sitting in a desk drawer, and pick it up at the end of the day. He had a CD burner, and if we gave him blank media he would burn us his current collection, alphabetized by artist. I still have one CD from that (labeled "Chris Rock" to "Gravity Kills"), that might be the most 1990s thing I own.