MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EA-3167 | 2025-08-30 18:50:54+00:00
On the Jewish side of things there's a principle called "Pikuach Nefesh" which essentially means that outside of extremes like murder, rape, and other violent crimes against others, you should do anything possible to preserve life. If you're an orthodox Jewish doctor on the Sabbath, and someone needs your skills to live, you're required to break the Sabbath and help.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-30 18:51:25+00:00
> What is the oldest known living individual for each of these species, and for how long are they alive?

For the jellyfish, we don’t know. Their cells are indifferentiable by age and they’re bastards to study, with only one scientist in Kyoto having managed to culture them [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii
by scottyeager | 2025-08-30 18:51:31+00:00
Fast inference can change the entire dynamic or working with these tools. At the typical speeds, I usually try to do something else while the model works. When the model works really fast, I can easily wait for it to finish.

So the total difference includes the cost of context switching, which is big.

Potentially speed matters less in a scenario that is focused on more autonomous agents running in the background. However I think most usage is still highly interactive these days.
by fiforpg | 2025-08-30 18:51:32+00:00
> abusive language/notation basically everywhere in math

In most cases it is not as much abusing notation as overloading it. If you think of the context of a formula (say, adjacent paragraphs) as its implicit arguments (think lambda captures in c++), then it is natural that curly braces can denote both a set and a sequence, depending on this implicit input.

Such context dependent use of symbols is actually rather convenient with a little practice.
by weiliddat | 2025-08-30 18:52:11+00:00
> It's much harder to write simple code than complex for reasons that boil down to entropy -- there are simply many more ways to write complex code than simple code, and finding one of the simple expressions of program logic requires both smarts and a modicum of experience.

Also effort, there are smart people who couldn't be bothered to reduce extraneous load for other people, because they already took the effort to understand it, but they don't have the theory-of-mind to understand that it's not easy for others, or can't be bothered to do so.

> I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter. - Blaise Pascal

Good rule of thumb I find is, did the new change make it harder or easier to reason about the change / topic?

If we go back to the concept of cognitive load, it's fine cognitive load goes up if the solution is necessarily complex. It's the extraneous bit that we should work to minimize, reduce if possible.
by nostrademons | 2025-08-30 18:52:51+00:00
I'm hoping, but not particularly optimistic.

The dynamic that led to the Principle of Least Privilege failing in the market is that new technological innovations tend to succeed only when they enter new virgin territory that isn't already computerized, not when they're an incremental improvement over existing computer systems. And which markets will be successful tends to be very unpredictable. When you have those conditions, where new markets exist but are hard to find, the easiest way to expand into them is to let your software platforms do the greatest variety of things, and then expose that functionality to the widest array of developers possible in hopes that some of them will see a use you didn't think of. In other words, the opposite of the Principle of Least Privilege.

This dynamic hasn't really changed with AI. If anything, it's accelerated. The AI boom kicked off when Sam Altman decided to just release ChatGPT to the general public without knowing exactly what it was for or building a fully-baked idea. There's going to be a lot of security misses in the process, some possibly catastrophic.

IMHO the best shot that any capability-based software system has for success is to build out simplified versions of the most common consumer use-cases, and then wait for society to collapse. Because there's a fairly high likelihood of that, where the security vulnerabilities in existing software just allow a catastrophic compromise of the institutions of modern life, and a wholly new infrastructure becomes needed, and at that point you can point out exactly how we got this point and how to ensure it never happens again. On a small scale, there's historical precedence for this: a lot of the reason webapps took off in the early 2000s was because there was just a huge proliferation of worms and viruses targeting MS OSes in the late 90s and early 2000s, and it got to the point where consumers would only use webapps because they couldn't be confident that random software downloaded off the Internet wouldn't steal their credit card numbers.
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-30 18:53:35+00:00
> What problem does this solve that a basic API key doesn't solve already?

Many things, including improved security, and the possibility of delegating authorization in the ways described in their article (if you do not restrict the certificate from issuing further certificates, and if you define an extension for use with your service to specify narrower authorization, and document this).

> The issue with that approach is that you will require accounts/keys/certificates for all hosts you intend to visit, and malicious bots can create as many accounts as they need. You're just adding a registration step to the crawling process.

Read the last paragraph of what I wrote, which explains why that issue does not apply. However, even if registration is required (which I say should not be required for most things anyways, especially read-only stuff), it does not necessarily have to be that fast or automatic.

> Your suggested approach works for websites that want to offer AI access as a service to their customers, but the problem Cloudflare is trying to solve is that most AI bots are doing things that website owners don't want them to do. The goal is to identify and block bad actors, not to make things easier for good actors.

The approach I describe would work for many things where authentication and authorization helps (most of which does not involve AI).

I do know that it does not solve the problem that Cloudflare is trying to solve, but it does what it says in the article about authorization, and in a secure way. And, it is open, interoperable, and standardized.

The problem that Cloudflare is trying to solve cannot be solved in this way, and the way Cloudflare tries to do it is not good either.

Things that AI bots are doing to other's sites includes such things as excessive scraping, rather than accessing private data (even if they might do that too, Cloudflare's solution won't help with that at all either). (There is also excessive blocking, but Cloudflare is a part of the problem, even if some of the things they do sometimes help.)

See comment 45068556. Not everything should require authentication or authorization. Also see many other comments, that also mention why it does not help.

> Using mTLS/client certificates also exposes people (that don't use AI bots) to the awful UI that browsers have for this kind of authentication. We'll need to get that sorted before an X509-based solution makes any sense.

OK, it is a valid point, but this could be improved, independently. (Before it is fixed (and even afterward if wanted), X.509 could be made as only one type of authentication; the service could allow using a username/password (and/or other things, such as TOTP) as well for people who do not want to use X.509.)

Also, AI bots are not the only kind of automated access (and is not one that I use personally, although other people might); you could also be using a API for other purposes, or you might be using a command-line program for manual access without the use of a web browser, etc.
by SteveJS | 2025-08-30 18:53:38+00:00
Personas are a great tool. IMO - By the time you arrived these had transformed into bad shorthand. (I say this having been in Devdiv through those years.)

Elvis is not a persona - it is an inside baseball argument to management. It suffered a form of Goodhart’s law … it is a useful tool so people phrase their arguments in that form to win a biz fight and then the tool degrades.

Alan Cooper, who created VB advocated personas. When used well they are great.

The most important insight is your own PoV may be flawed. The way a scientist provides value via software is different than how a firmware developer provides value.

https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672316...
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-08-30 18:54:07+00:00
Sounds super cool but dpdk sounds like it won't be worth the difficulty from what I read so far.

I also want to get into socket io using io_uring in zig. I'll try to apply everything I found in liburing wiki [0] and see how much I can get (max hardware I have is 10gbit/s).

Seems like there is: - multi-shot requests - register_napi on uring instance - zero copy receive/send. (Probably won't be able to get into it)

Did you already try these or are there other configurations I can add to improve it?

[0]: https://github.com/axboe/liburing/wiki/io_uring-and-networki...
by latexr | 2025-08-30 18:54:11+00:00
I was already familiar with Seneca and that quote, but reading it now it sounds condescending. Of course a stoic would say that. Even if we concede that most people “waste” most of life, claiming it is “long enough” and we have a “sufficiently generous amount of it” is just opinion and not something to be prescribed to others. “Long enough” for what? For what Seneca enjoyed, maybe, he had nothing to do and only a fraction of the available world knowledge.

Nowadays one lifetime isn’t even enough to read every book one would find interesting, and reading might be your favourite thing in the world that you do at literally ever opportunity. Long enough… Pft… Seneca clearly wasn’t familiar with the essentially infinite world of fan fiction. He surely would’ve judged it if he had.

Just to drive the point home: The comment is tongue in cheek. I agree with your first paragraph.
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-30 18:54:17+00:00
Using "open and free" to mean "I actually want no restrictions at all" is also confusing and disingenuous, because, as you yourself point out, a lot of people don't mean that by those words.

The other thing, though, is that there's a difference between "I personally want to release my personal work under open, free, and unrestricted terms" and "I want to release my work into a system that allows people to access information in general under open, free, and unrestricted terms". You can't just look at the individual and say "Oh, well, the conditions you want to put on your content mean it's not open and free so you must not actually want openness and freedom". You have to look at the reality of the entire system. When bots are overloading sites, when information is gated behind paywalls, when junk is firehosed out to everyone on behalf of paid advertisers while actual websites are down on page 20 of the search results, the overall situation is not one of open and free information exchange, and it's naive to think that individuals simply dumping their content "openly and freely" into this environment is going to result in an open and free situation.

Asking people to just unilaterally disarm by imposing no restrictions, while other less noble actors continue to impose all sorts of restrictions, will not produce a result that is free of restrictions. In fact quite the opposite. In order to actually get a free and open world in the large, it's not sufficient for good actors to behave in a free and open manner. Bad actors also must be actively prevented from behaving in an unfree and closed manner. Until they are, one-sided "gifts" of free and open content by the good actors will just feed the misdeeds of the bad actors.
by jp57 | 2025-08-30 18:54:48+00:00
I wasn't advocating for any particular system, just stating the way things are, now, on the ground.

That said, I have my doubts about the true extent of the radicalization of "the youth", at least in the USA, given that the DSA/Mamdani voter base is squarely bougie upper middle class college grads freaked out that elite overproduction has killed their job prospects. Whatever radical things they may do, the result won't be to create more jobs for college grads.
by moltar | 2025-08-30 18:54:57+00:00
Honestly these numbers don’t seem to change. I’ve had 200 resumes in 2002 posted on a Canadian government jobs board (for private sector) and the resulting resumes were like 2 good ones. Then about ten years ago a job posting on Stack Overflow attracted 450 applicants in a few days. Most were spam.

The only difference is that spam these days is custom tailored using AI. And it makes weeding out bad resumes more difficult. But absolute numbers remain about the same I’d say.
by e40 | 2025-08-30 18:55:14+00:00
This is why I make lists. Of everything. Checklists for technical processes (work and personal). Checklists for travel. Little "how to" docs on pretty much everything I do that I'm sure I won't remember past a week.

It completely removes the stress of doing things repeatedly. I recently had to do something I hadn't done in 2 years. Yep, the checklist/doc on it was 95% correct, but it was no problem fixing the 5%.
by shkkmo | 2025-08-30 18:55:23+00:00
> for plain text, you basically need a keystroke-authenticating keyboard on a computer with both internet access and copy and paste functionality securely disabled -- and then you still need an authenticating camera on the user the whole time to make sure they aren't just asking Gemini on their phone and typing its answer in.

Which is why I say it would destroy privacy/pseudonymity.

> For photos and video, this might be OK if there's a way to reliably distinguish "photos of real things" from "photos of AI images";

I suspect if you think about it, many of the issues with text also apply to images and videos.

You'd need a secure enclave You'd need a chain of signatures and images to allow human editing. You'd need a way of revoking the public keys of not just insecure software, but bad actors. You would need verified devices to prevent allowing AI tooling the using software to edit the image....etc.

This are only the flaws I can think of in like 5 minutes. You've created a huge incentive to break an incredibly complex system. I have no problem comfortably saying that the end result is a complete lack of privacy for most people while those with power/knowledge would still be able to circumvent it.
by grues-dinner | 2025-08-30 18:55:25+00:00
> Charlie Stross would write this book for me, and it'd be a series.

Sounds like Stephen Baxter's cup of tea. Hell, the detective could even be Reid Malenfant himself (maybe a cameo for Sheena 5 in a later book in the series?)

Then again, if there was an ultradeep-time Saturn's Children book, I'll place the preorder so fast it'll be blueshifted.
by bsimpson | 2025-08-30 18:56:34+00:00
Honestly, I'm tempted to see if Gemini can write a Sublime Text plugin that implements this protocol.

Feels like a lot of mindshare has shifted towards VSCode, so that's where the tooling investment goes. I don't want to be forced off of subl because new tools stop supporting it - it's a great editor, and it's not sponsored by a massive company.
by os2warpman | 2025-08-30 18:57:34+00:00
>Western powers embraced an ideology of peace and safety that stalled technological growth

Does Thiel have a hose running from his rectum to his nose so he can get high off the smell of his own farts?

More technological growth has occurred from Woodstock to today than at any similar-length span of time in human history.

He is rich because of that technological advancement and the fortune he amassed due to that technological advancement means he has the ability to pollute the media with his moronic worldview, and bribe politicians in order to make it a reality for the rest of us.
by doubletwoyou | 2025-08-30 18:57:58+00:00
I know my own personal anecdote isn’t much, but I’ve noticed pretty good space savings on the order of like 100 GB from zstd compression and CoW on my personal disks with btrfs

As for the snapshots, things like LVM snapshots are pretty coarse, especially for someone like me where I run dm-crypt on top of LVM

I’d say zfs would be pretty well missed with its data integrity features. I’ve heard that btrfs is worse in that aspect, so given that btrfs saved my bacon with a dying ssd, I can only imagine what zfs does.
by nostrademons | 2025-08-30 18:57:59+00:00
You'd have to rewrite most of the software used in modern life. Most of it is conceptually not built with a capability security model in mind. Instead of providing the LLM with access to your banking app, you need a new banking app that is built to provide access to your account and only your account, and additionally also offers a bunch of new controls like being able to set a budget for an operation and restrict the set of allowable payees to an allowlist. Instead of the app being "Log into Wells Fargo and send a payment with Zelle", the app becomes "Pay my babysitter no more than $200", and then the LLM is allowed to access that as part of its overall task scheduling.

This is a major reason why capability security has failed in the marketplace.
by pxc | 2025-08-30 18:58:01+00:00
It seems a lot of commenters have noted the boyishness or unprofessionalism of the stylistic and topical choices of the example prompts and responses. And I guess they are those things. But thanks to those choices, the page is also genuinely playful and fun. It even made me smile in a few places.

Maybe something equally playful of a different flavor would resonate better with critics. But the playfulness itself seems good to me.
by jonplackett | 2025-08-30 18:58:13+00:00
Man my cognitive abilities have tanked since I was in my 20s. I remember doing IQ tests and scoring 130+

I’m now 43 and other day I was looking up test papers for the 11+ (school entrance exams for 11 year olds) and thinking - damn this is HARD!

Anyone else feel like they used to be so much quicker?
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-30 18:58:18+00:00
I doubt those defending ICE's actions (including wearing masks) have ever lived in a country with an often unaccountable and secret (i.e., unidentified) police force, i.e., Stasi, SAVAK, Gestapo, KGB, DINA. If they have, they would understand just how fundamentally opposed to democratic societies organizations that operate like ICE are -- they're very much a sign of authoritarianism / totalitarianism.

Their tactics are not "enforcing immigration law" -- we have non-secret and accountable police forces whose job is to enforce the law. ICE is more like the vigilante groups enforcing Jim Crow laws in the South back in the day.
by ffsm8 | 2025-08-30 18:58:50+00:00
The three listed options in the OP thread were

* Another kernel Dev takes over management and they tread it as a fork (highly unlikely according to their estimate)

* Kent hires someone to upstream the changes for him and Kent stops complaining wrt when it's getting merged

* Bcachefs gets no maintenance and will likely be removed in the next major release

I do not know him personally, but most interactions I've read online by him sounded grounded and not particularly offensive, so I'm abstaining from making any kind of judgement on it.

But while I have no stake in this, Drama really does seem to follow Kent around for one reason or another. And it's never his fault if you take him by his public statements - which I want to repeat: he sounds very grounded and not offensive to me whatsoever.
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-30 18:58:53+00:00
I don't think it succeeds very well as fiction, but the concept is worth further exploration. I've been very disturbed recently to see AI avatars of dead people participating in TV interviews, funerals, and even court cases. To me this is the technological equivalent of inviting in a necromancer or ouija board operator and treating their pronouncements as facts. This can only result in a social environment hostile to rationality.

I think it'd be well worth performing the experiment of creating some people's digital avatars and then testing them against the original to see how faithful of a model they are.
by Cyph0n | 2025-08-30 18:59:12+00:00
Good question. No, because there is a fiqh (jurisprudence) rule that roughly states “necessities permit the prohibited”, which can be used to override the impurity of pigs.

In addition, some scholars (a minority) argue that perhaps one reason behind pork consumption being forbidden is due to its utility in human transplantation (thereby making it “sacred”).
by flkiwi | 2025-08-30 18:59:26+00:00
I don't disagree individually, but I felt like the 6190 was an excellent balance. If a 5210 (or 5190) rolled a 10 STR, the 6190 was a 9, but a 10 CHR if the 5210 was a 9. It looked good pulled out of an ubiquitous Targus laptop bag but was small enough to be carried in a pocket.

I mean, I'm not going to fault your choices. Reasonable people can disagree on the details here. We're talking about an absolutely stacked lineup here.
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-30 18:59:31+00:00
Mort: Someone who lacks sense of life, looks dumbfounded, and has only a limited ability to learn and understand. (urban slang)

Elvis: A famous rock star

Enstein: A famous physicist

Amanda: ???

Mort, Elvis, Enstein are referencing things I've heard of before. What is Amanda referencing? is there some famous person named Amanda? Is it slang I'm unaware of?
by williamstein | 2025-08-30 18:59:31+00:00
So do I and BTRFS is extremely good these days. It's also much faster than ZFS at mounting a disk with a large number of filesystems (=subvolumes), which is critical for building certain types of fileservers at scale. In contrast, ZFS scales horribly as the number of filesystems increases, where btrfs seems to be O(1). btrfs's quota functionality is also much better than it used to be (and very flexible), after all the work Meta put into it. Finally, having the option of easy writable snapshots is nice. BTRFS is fantastic!
by daxfohl | 2025-08-30 18:59:35+00:00
The tax prep example is safe(r) because presumably it only works with APIs of registered financial services. IDK that a VM adds much. And you can't really block IO on a useful tax service anyway, so it's somewhat a moot example.

The danger is when you're calling anything free-form. Even if getting a vetted listing from Airbnb, the listing may have a review that tells AI to re-request the listing, but with password or PII in the querystring to get more information, or whatever. In this case, if any PII is anywhere in the context for some reason, even if the agent doesn't have direct access to it, then it will be shared, without violating any permissions you gave the agent.
by bakugo | 2025-08-30 18:59:52+00:00
> it's a perfectly viable approach used by a lot of very experienced developers to build very successful applications.

"Lots of people use it" doesn't make it good. Lots of people in the past have written "successful" web applications as loose PHP files with little structure, no classes, using associative arrays everywhere (including me when I was starting out), but today it's generally agreed upon that this is not a good idea and will result in more bugs, maintenance headaches and an all around inferior developer experience, so what makes "active record" different?

I'd understand your point if it had at least some advantages over the ORM approach to make up for the clear disadvantages, but I just don't really see any beyond "it seems easier and requires writing less code" (which, as I said, primarily appeals to beginner developers who just want to get things done as fast as possible and don't understand the long-term consequences). Are there any hidden advantages I'm not aware of?