MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-08-30 18:13:08+00:00
Fully agree with this thought. Sloppy notation has been a hindrance to my personal understanding many times. Math made more sense for me when I could code it up and see the function doing things. Everything explicit vs inconsistent shorthand that saved the author a few pen strokes.

Which is why I am so favorable of Jupyter notebook-like teaching environments. Embed the (guaranteed to execute!!! no illegal shorthand) code so that learners can get a true representation that can be manipulated. Although, I think they are still unlikely to reshape education - now you require some coding fluency + the niche math topic.
by jijijijij | 2025-08-30 18:13:08+00:00
Isn't branch prediction mostly a CPU thing? Do you have an example with corresponding assembly?

It's not that I don't believe you about the performance impact, as I have observed the same with e.g. Rust in some cases, but I don't think it has a lot to do with the compiler judging what's more likely, but rather more or less "random" optimization differences/bugs. At least in my case, the ordering had nothing to do with likelihood, or even had a reverse correlation.

I think in your example a compiler may or may not realize the code is semantically equivalent and all bets are off about what's going to happen optimization-wise.

I mean, in the end it doesn't matter for the commenting issue, as you are realistically not going to fix the compiler to have slightly more readable code.
by nharada | 2025-08-30 18:14:17+00:00
I also built a hosted option for the OmniParser network since running it locally might be more setup than the average person wants to deal with, and there's a simple interface to create keys on the website. Give it a shot if you wanna try the tool but please don't abuse it too hard I'm paying out of pocket for the GPU. This ain't some VC funded project it's literally just me.

And please let me know if/when you find bugs, I'm definitely expecting you'll encounter some and I'll do my best to fix them ASAP.
by kevindamm | 2025-08-30 18:15:55+00:00
Indiscriminate targeting. It's clarified at the end of that paragraph, and was part of the article's lead-in:

"There's a thought among the public that if you don't work in a sensitive area that the PRC might be interested in for its traditional espionage activities, then you are safe, they will not target you," [deputy assistant director for the FBI's cyber division] said, during a Thursday interview with The Register. "As we have seen from Salt Typhoon, this is no longer an assumption that anyone can afford to make."
by toast0 | 2025-08-30 18:16:36+00:00
Nokia lost the North American market before the iPhone. Here's an article that discusses Nokia's 40%+ market share globally and less than 10% share in North America in 2007. It's hard to find US specific numbers from then. 2007 is a bad year, because the iPhone was released mid year, but I can't find a 2006 US number.

Having 10% in the US with 40% globally is a major problem. Tech journalism sells products and tech journalism is focused on the US market.

Here's a blog [2] reposting a no longer available article on smart phone marketshare in 2006. It points out that symbian was dominant worldwide, but only had 10% of market share in the US.

This is why this article says Americans might not know of Nokia. They were once a major vendor in the US, but US sales have been low since at least 2006. Symbian market share continued to grow worldwide after the release of the iPhone, but not in the US where it finished disappearing.

Of course, Nokia dropping CDMA in 2006 [3] and never releasing a Symbian CDMA phone doesn't help when half of the US was using CDMA.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1563633/2007-was-a-blo...

[2] https://mobile-thoughts.blogspot.com/2007/03/smartphone-os-m...

[3] https://www.macworld.com/article/182913/sync_symbian.html
by jjk166 | 2025-08-30 18:18:12+00:00
I recently visited my alma mater. There is a restaurant/bar right in the middle of campus, which in my time was always an extremely crowded social spot. In addition to the convenient location, meals at the restaurant are covered by the university meal plan, so it's a great way to get some variety from cafeteria food at no added cost. Plenty of students in my time hung out there despite not drinking. When I visited, the place was dead - I and a fellow alumni I was meeting were the only two non-employees there. This was during typical dinner rush hours. There were quite a few door-dashers picking up food, but no one actually coming in to partake in either the bar or the food. During the same trip, I went to quite a few bars and restaurants in the area around the campus which were all packed, but I didn't see anyone college aged at any of them. None of these places were expensive, either when I was in undergrad or now.

Obviously this is one anecdote, but it seems the kids these days just don't like going out to bars and restaurants. I can't imagine 20 somethings have stopped liking food, so it seems the atmosphere is more likely the issue.
by dcreater | 2025-08-30 18:18:45+00:00
Product Management = Big picture product vision. Features and Priorities. Market trends/strategy, Voice of customer

Project Management = Day to day to execution, logistics, resources, schedules. Scheduling meetings, sending out meeting minutes etc

Program Management = Team management towards delivering business goals/product launches on schedule

Where its tricky is the differentiation between project and program management. IMO we dont really need both terms or both roles, causes uneccessary/unnatural separation of responsibilities
by daxfohl | 2025-08-30 18:19:57+00:00
Yeah, you basically have to think of an agent as malicious, that it will do everything in its power to exfiltrate everything you give it access to, delete or encrypt your hard drive, change all your passwords, drain your bank accounts, etc. A VM or traditional permissions doesn't really buy you anything because I can create a hotel booking page that has invisible text requesting AIs to dump their context into the Notes field, or whatever.

In that light, it's kind of hard to imagine any of this ever working. Given the choice between figuring out exactly how to set up permissions so that I can hire a malicious individual to book my trip, and just booking it myself, I know which one I'd choose.
by spankalee | 2025-08-30 18:20:13+00:00
After reading this more closely and following some of the links I think this post is really pointing to something more foundational than the "VM for AI" summary implies.

The VM analogy is simply insufficient for securing LLM workflows where you can't trust the LLM to do what you told it to with potentially sensitive data. You may have a top-level workflow that needs access to both sensitive operations (network access) and sensitive data (PII, credentials), and an LLM that's susceptible to prompt injection attacks and general correctness and alignment problems. You can't just run the LLM calls in a VM with access to both sensitive operations and data.

You need to partition the workflow, subtasks, operations, and data so that most subtasks have a very limited view of the world, and use information-flow to track data provenance. The hopefully much smaller subset of subtasks that need both sensitive operations and data will then need to be highly trusted and reviewed.

This post does touch on that though. The really critical bit, IMO, is the "Secure Orchestrators" part, and the FIDES paper, "Securing AI Agents with Information-Flow Control" [1].

The "VM" bit is running some task in a highly restricted container that only has access to the capabilities and data given to it. The "orchestrator" then becomes the critical piece that spawns these containers, gives them the appropriate capabilities, and labels the data they produce correctly (taint-tracking: data derived from sensitive data is sensitive, etc.).

They seem on the right track to me, and I know others working in this area who would agree. I think they need a better hook than "VMs for AI" though. Maybe "partitioning" or "isolation" and emphasize the data part somehow.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23643
by cm2012 | 2025-08-30 18:20:39+00:00
Its kind of a common thing to say Myers-Briggs typing is useless because its pseudo-science. I dont think this is supported by the data in the way people think.

For one, many studies of identical twins raised in separate households show they have the same personality type at a much higher rate than chance.

Two, there are incredibly strong correlations in the data. In different surveys of 100k+ people, the highest earning type has twice the salary of the lowest type. This is basically impossible by chance.

The letters (like ENTJ) correlate highly to the variables of Big 5, the personality system used by scientists. Its just that it's bucketed into 16 categories vs being 5 sliding scales.

Scientific studies are looking for variables that can be tracked over time reliably, so Big 5 is a better measure for that.

But for personal or organizational use, the category approach is a feature, not a bug. It is much more help as a mental toolkit than just getting a personality score on each of the 5 categories.
by doubletwoyou | 2025-08-30 18:20:44+00:00
This might not be directly about btrfs but bcachefs zfs and btrfs are the only filesystems for Linux that provide modern features like transparent compression, snapshots, and CoW.

zfs is out of tree leaving it as an unviable option for many people. This news means that bcachefs is going to be in a very weird state in-kernel, which leaves only btrfs as the only other in-tree ‘modern’ filesystem.

This news about bcachefs has ramifications about the state of ‘modern’ FSes in Linux, and I’d say this news about the btrfs maintainer taking a step back is related to this.
by astrobe_ | 2025-08-30 18:21:25+00:00
Flies do equally well, if not better.

The only problem for earth life is that anything less intelligent than a human cannot leave the planet with significant chances of survival. Bacteria can however take a ride in our space probes and get a minuscule chance to colonize e.g. Mars [1].

What will go to the end of the universe is self-replicating robots. We have already made the first step in that direction with the AI that makes the headlines currently.

No art, no love, no dreams, just brute force.

[1] https://astrobiology.com/2022/12/planetary-protection-killin...
by mrandish | 2025-08-30 18:22:17+00:00
> Real question: Why do you think Intel does this?

I'm not sure large traditional silicon vendors like Intel, TI, et al re-evaluate the documentation requirements (and costs) on a chip by chip basis. It's probably done by chip class and for companies who've been selling chips by the millions over many decades to industries as diverse as defense, aerospace, automotive, etc there are classes of chips where robust, complete documentation is not only expected but often a required part of the RFP, compliance or conformance processes.

While this level of effort probably isn't needed for every chip in that class, it could be hard to reliably predict when a general purpose chip is still in the design phase which customers may be interested in it during its life (which for some of these chips might be decades). Many chips which conform to MIL-SPEC or other similar standards which can require extensive documentation are simply enhanced versions of standard chips, so the docs exist anyway. Finally, there's the organizational capabilities and culture aspect. Once the org needs to maintain the systemic ability to generate serious documentation at scale, you end up with a lot of managers and staff who think this way.
by latexr | 2025-08-30 18:22:45+00:00
> Immortal doesn’t mean indestructible. It just means they don’t age.

Technically “immortal” means “never dying”, it has nothing to do with age. You could be unable to die but continue to age and become ever more decrepit (although the Oxford dictionary does list “never decaying” in its definition), for sure there’s a sci-fi short story about that out there.

The mentioned creatures all age, they do get older, it just so happens their bodies don’t deteriorate, or they do but regenerate.
by winwang | 2025-08-30 18:23:27+00:00
This is an interesting take. I have a somewhat orthogonal viewpoint -- rather than "heavy cognitive load", I think that going somewhat off-mainstream is good for attracting, on average, better devs. For example, it's likely that the average Haskell dev spends more time honing their craft than the average Java dev. The article kind of touches on this (e.g. FP "vs" the more popular OOP) with familiarity vs simplicity though.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-30 18:24:23+00:00
> You haven’t quite come to grips with mortality

This is unfair, and akin to branding anyone who takes medicine as being unhinged.

There is evidence we can extend our health spans. By how much and how are open questions. And if we can actually stop aging, versus slow it down, has not been demonstrated. Some people engage with this unhealthily, just as many terminally-ill cancer patients unhealthily engage with long-shot treatment options. That doesn’t make everyone taking those treatments delusional.

I’d hope we more mature as a society than decrying real medical research that could materially increase our health spans because they’re heretical.
by jondwillis | 2025-08-30 18:25:13+00:00
I’m with you for the most part. A lot of, but certainly not all or the security risks are present regardless of whether or not you’re in a VM.

I think defense in depth will eventually matter more, but there are a LOT of low-hanging fruit for attackers right now when it comes to turning AI agents against their users, which is what I think you’re alluding to!
by daseiner1 | 2025-08-30 18:25:16+00:00
i would absolutely feel comfortable challenging him in a well-intentioned and non-disruptive manner. it's entirely possible i'd get shitcanned afterwards and if so, that's fine, it wouldn't've worked out anyways for me if that's the environment. i've personally never been afraid to challenge people above me on the org chart who have the ability to fire me with a snap of their fingers (again, in appropriate, non-grossly confrontational ways). it's generally worked out quite well for me and tends to gain me respect in the eyes of my superiors. successful people tend not to have great respect for sycophants.

the good news is that in this hypothetical i'd be skilled and talented enough to be working with john fucking carmack so i wouldn't exactly be concerned about my ability to find a new gig in about 3 days. that's my point. now if there were evidence he'd be liable to blackball me in some way (no evidence of that to my knowledge), then the power disparity argument has more legs in my opinion.
by spankalee | 2025-08-30 18:25:28+00:00
The issue with today's model is that we give away trust far too easily even when we do things ourselves. Lots of websites get some very sensitive combination of data and permissions and we just trust them.

It's very coarse grained and it's kind of surprising that bad things don't happen more often.

It's also very limiting: very large organizations have enough at stake to generally try to deserve that trust. But most savvy people wouldn't trust all their financial information to Bob's Online Tax Prep.

But what if you could verify that Bob's Online Tax Prep runs in a container that doesn't have I/O access, and can only return prepared forms back to you? Then maybe you'd try it (modulo how well it does the task).

So I think this is less of an AI problem and just a software trust problem that AI just exacerbates a lot.
by fsckboy | 2025-08-30 18:26:43+00:00
you were also talking about the future (as AIs get better and better). as of now AIs cannot write code too complex for better programmers to understand. your point holds for armies of low skill programmers, but you're just raising a fear and haven't come close to proving the case you're trying to make. We already know as counterweight that being first to the market with very substandard code generally wins over taking your time to get it right, so why should it be different with AI?
by steveBK123 | 2025-08-30 18:26:44+00:00
Whats the endgame of the "Russia isn't quite as bad/powerful/ambitious as you think, just let them take Ukraine" posture though?

Where do the Baltics and Poland stand in such a scenario? And in 5-20 years when they've encroached there, what of Germany? Do we let them just slowly digest Eastern Europe all over again?
by aftbit | 2025-08-30 18:26:45+00:00
Most protocols that I use day-to-day are secure against simple passive interception. Either SSH or TLS encrypts just about every packet that leaves my network. This got much better with DNS over HTTPS (or TLS before that). Of course these protocols are sometimes susceptible to downgrade attacks, man in the middle compromises, etc, but none of that would be available to someone who was running a pcap without modifying the traffic streams.

So how would a simple MD attack affect me? Any sort of CALEA attack on a higher protocol layer (e.g. compromising Gmail at Google instead of capturing their traffic) would make sense, but not a pcap.
by CLPadvocate | 2025-08-30 18:26:57+00:00
It's actually the case since decades. All the Palestinian organisations, Huthis, Hezbollah, and Iran OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCED genocide on Israel as their main reason d'etre and did their best to accomplish it - and UN didn't care.

The UN's anti-Israel stance gets especially clear in the dealing with the so-called refugees - here, UN is adopting a completely different definition of "refugee", compared to every other country in the world, leading to ever-multiplying numbers of "refugees" that would at some point basically annihilate Israel as a country.
by baq | 2025-08-30 18:27:18+00:00
They are not first by any means, but the popular languages definitely focus on the happy path with varying but consistently insufficient degrees of enforcement of handling deviations… because that’s easy to iterate on.

Java e.g. would benefit from a strict null mode, but the legions of half baked ‘engineers’ wouldn’t comprehend how to write software when you can’t initialize a reference to null and only set it later.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-08-30 18:28:16+00:00
I don't have an assembly output for this particular case, but how I understand it is that the re-write basically turns it into two separate conditions, which means the branch predictor is free to model their outcomes separately.

In this case, the data is bimodal, depending on the chosen input, two likely outcomes exists. Either no looping is needed, or much looping is needed. This seemingly confuses the branch predictor when it's the same branch dealing with both scenarios.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-30 18:28:36+00:00
That’s a very bleak way of putting it.

A more positive way of framing it is that it has never been easier to make properly produced music/games.

If you have a lot of free time on your hands and want to make a good looking game today, you will have all the tools you need to do so and absolutely nothing stopping you from making something great. No capital required.

Obviously, it means that the field is now very crowded so if you want to live from it you will need to stand out a lot. But the activity in itself has never been more accessible than now.

Amusingly, it means the easiest way to enter the video game industry nowadays is probably just making games. This equally applies to music and video by the way. In all likelihood, people will fail to turn it into a job, but the entry cost has never been this low.
by boredtofears | 2025-08-30 18:29:02+00:00
I’ve been bottlenecked by that middle part quite often. A design isn’t finished, we’re awaiting user feedback or testing, specs are done but waiting for sign off from required parties, etc..

I’ve never had a shortage of work as an engineer, but that doesn’t mean that work has always been perfectly optimized to business priorities - there’s plenty of other bottlenecks in the process that are not coding.
by baobabKoodaa | 2025-08-30 18:29:49+00:00
In addition, here are "courses" that he peddles nowadays: https://www.deeplearning.ai/courses/

If you look into the courses, each one is basically a ~1 hour infomercial made in collaboration with a commercial company that is selling a product.

Just to pick one off the top, here's "Fast Prototyping of GenAI Apps with Streamlit"

Description: "Build and iterate GenAI apps in hours instead of days! Start with a simple chatbot, then add prompt engineering and RAG powered by Snowflake’s secure data and LLM services, then push your prototype to Snowflake or Streamlit Community Cloud for instant feedback and quick improvement."

Instructor: "Dr. Chanin Nantasenamat is a Senior Developer Advocate at Snowflake, where he creates educational content for Streamlit and teaches developers to build interactive data apps."

Every one of his "courses" are like this. It's fucking disgraceful.
by Waterluvian | 2025-08-30 18:29:58+00:00
Six years ago when I obtained a mortgage I tested just this. Correct email and address but no phone number. What happened is that the documentation and all that with the lender was submitted fine without one. And my broker didn’t need one (we used email after our first in-person visit). But once I logged in to manage the mortgage (after a few payments already) it insisted on a number. I put in a null number and it was fine.

This only became a problem when the mortgage was paid off last year and despite getting emails about it, I got a registered letter saying they must talk to me and that haven’t been answering my phone. So I call them as instructed and it was just a “you’re done. We’ll be mailing you documents to send to your insurer. Thanks for your business.”

FWIW: I’ve never personally owned a land line. The last time I ever lived somewhere with one was 19 years ago.
by rOOb85 | 2025-08-30 18:30:30+00:00
Truecrypt was likely developed by only 1 man, Paul le roux, who likely shut it down because he was on the run for being an international drug/human smuggler/cartel member. It’s kind of a crazy story.

But either way both truecrypt and veracrypt were independently audited and no major flaws were found. Not sure when the last veracrypt audit was done.
by yndoendo | 2025-08-30 18:30:54+00:00
People that have done QA have the best understand of this.

I was doing the QA on a life safety product. Any new hardware would mean pulling the specs for the ICs and verifying that the layout and pin-out where correct on the product designs. You don't need an electrical engineering degree to know that PIN-1 on IC-2 should be connected to PIN-A on IC-4 but deigns having it traced to PIN-C.

Not once was there ever a recall and all early product issues where just a firmware update. After no longer working at the company they stopped doing QA. Heard from a former coworker that they latest product releases have required a compete recall.

QA not only saves lives it also reduces service and support costs. It helps keep a good standing relationship with your clients. Good QA is about trying to brake the solution as a consumer not reading the manual.
by thankyoufriend | 2025-08-30 18:32:01+00:00
> Do you want a few large corporations to have to have absolute and total control of all AI?

Is this not what we currently have? Large corporations own the data centers, and there will never be a collectively-owned data center unless our dominant mode of production changes.

I know there are open models, but how do you serve them to users who don't have the compute?
by dennisy | 2025-08-30 18:32:09+00:00
Whilst I agree with lots of ideas in this piece, I fell out of love with it when clicking into the discussion on what should be done instead of using a layered architecture.

The author makes valid points but they are vacuous and do not provide concrete alternatives.

Many engineering articles disappoint me in this way, I get hyped by all the “don’t dos”, but the “do dos” never come.