MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by halfcat | 2025-08-13 13:49:28+00:00
The point is, you can’t do synchronization reliably using any message/event-based approach alone. You always need a reconciliation mechanism, as you’ve correctly noticed.

It’s always shocking to me how many FAANG people will say, “we want an event driven solution with a message bus, that the right way to do it, we don’t want batch, that can’t scale”, and then need to bolt on a validation/reconciliation step for it to be reliable. Which of course is a batch job.

Unless you control a system end to end (which is rare, there’s usually some data from a system you don’t control the schema of), or are highly incentivized to make sync happen reliably (e.g. bitcoin), you’re always limited by a batch job somewhere in the system.

You could even say the batch job is often doing the heavy lifting, and the message bus is just an optimization (that’s often not adding the value needed to justify the complexity).
by orwin | 2025-08-13 13:50:14+00:00
It's extremely interesting. I do have a suggestion to make sure the question are not in training data:

If this game show is like the ones in my country, people do come together in 'clubs' to train for the event, sometimes organising internal tournaments. Some people in those clubs are question-writers, and write the internal tournaments questions.

Maybe try to contact those clubs, and find those writers, you'll be sure the LLM won't be trained on that specific set.
by bitwize | 2025-08-13 13:50:46+00:00
In his poem "The Raven", Edgar Allan Poe's narrator knows, at least subconsciously, that the bird will respond with "nevermore" to whatever is asked of it. So he subconsciously formulates his queries to it in such a way that the answers will deepen his madness and sorrow.

People are starting to use LLMs in a similar fashion -- to confirm and thus magnify whatever wrong little notion they have in their heads until it becomes an all-consuming life mission to save the world. And the LLMs will happily oblige because they aren't really thinking about what they're saying, just choosing tokens on a mathematical "hey, this sounds nice" criterion. I've seen this happen with my sister, who is starting to take seriously the idea that ChatGPT was actually created 70 years ago at DARPA based on technology recovered from the Roswell crash, based on her conversations with it.

I can't really blame the LLMs entirely for this, as like the raven they're unwittingly being used to justify whatever little bit of madness people have in them. But we all have a little bit of madness in us, so this motivates me further to avoid LLMs entirely, except maybe for messing around.
by DrScientist | 2025-08-13 13:50:59+00:00
The point I'm trying to make is the ways the laws are structured leaves them open to interpretation - and that's deliberate because trying to nail down everything up front is bound to fail and will allow people to evade the spirit of the law.

ie what matters - both in interpreting todays laws and if they are insufficiently clear, drafting future amendments - is why the law was created in the first place.

The UK law is well drafted and makes it very clear that the aim of copyright is not to stop you copying something per se - but to copying something for commercial gain that is simultaneously damages the copyright owner. I suspect those principals are the same the world over - whatever the exact drafting.

So the question you have to address is do the actions of the AI companies fit these critieria.

Are they copying copyright material without permission - tick.

Are they making money as a result ( it's a commercial operation ) - tick.

Are they damaging the original copyright holders in the process - this is the only one remotely in doubt - but I'd argue it's pretty clearly a tick in many areas - bit bit less clear in others.

In terms of lobbying - it's the big tech companies that are currently trying to get the law changed in the UK - to make what they have done legal ( while stil arguing they haven't done anything wrong..... as laws are not typically changed retrospectively ).
by logicprog | 2025-08-13 13:51:22+00:00
> I'd rather try a LLM to whom I through some sources at or refer to them by some kind of ID and ask them to summarise, give me examples based on those (e.g man pages) and they give me just that near 100% accuracy. That will be more productive imho.

That makes sense! Maybe an LLM with web search enabled, or Perplexity, or something like AnythingLM that let's it reference docs you provide, might be more to your taste
by FiddlerClamp | 2025-08-13 13:51:28+00:00
Reminds me of the 'interactive' video from the 1960s Fahrenheit 451 movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOs8U50T3l0

For the 'you're right!' bit see: https://youtu.be/ZOs8U50T3l0?t=71
by elric | 2025-08-13 13:51:59+00:00
They've been doing this for years at protests, using "Forward Intelligence Teams". Even back in 2010 [1] there was an action group trying to protest this growing police-state (Fitwatch). The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember.

Must be a truly dangerous place...

https://web.archive.org/web/20100824175032/http://fitwatch.o...
by bill_mcgonigle | 2025-08-13 13:52:01+00:00
Well if you wanted to compromise F-Droid you could target their build server's ME or a cloud vm's hypervisor.

To do a supply-chain attack on Google's SDK would be much more expensive and less likely to succeed. Google isn't going to be the attacker.

The recent attack on AMI/Gigabyte's ME shows how a zero-day can bootkit a UEFI server quite easily.

There are newer Coreboot boards than Opteron, though. Some embedded-oriented BIOS'es let you fuse out the ME. You are warned this is permanent and irreversible.

F-Droid likely has upgrade options even in the all-open scenario.
by philipallstar | 2025-08-13 13:52:10+00:00
> I’m glad that Roger McNamee, the early Facebook investor, has testified to the U.S. Congress about Facebook’s wildly self-interested near-silence about its amplification of Russian disinformation during the 2016 presidential election.

The linked "article" (which is giving it a little too much credit, having read a bit of it) is nothing to do with this topic. Which makes sense, because testifying about near-silence isn't really a thing.
by dkarl | 2025-08-13 13:52:11+00:00
> it always mentions something about how it’s going to be ‘straight to the point’ or give me a ‘no bs version’

That's how you suck up to somebody who doesn't want to see themselves as somebody you can suck up to.

How does an LLM know how to be sycophantic to somebody who doesn't (think they) like sycophants? Whether it's a naturally emergent phenomenon in LLMs or specifically a result of its corporate environment, I'd like to know the answer.
by majortennis | 2025-08-13 13:52:23+00:00
I would argue you want to get base levels of front end development knowledge to begin with without AI. Frontendmasters is good for modern tech stacks, but much easier to master JS CSS and HTML in vanilla formats using w3schools and khanaccademy etc.

In my opinion you can't solely rely on ai you need to get up to speed on terms definitions and patterns
by willguest | 2025-08-13 13:52:55+00:00
I think an award ceremony would be the best way to draw attention to the outrageous implications of blindly following artificial "intelligence" to wherever it may lead you. something like the Darwin awards, but dedicated to clanker wankers, a term I am coining for those people who are so self-absorbed that they feel a dispropotionate sense of validation from a machine that is programmed to say "you're absolutely right" at every available juncture.

That's not to say this isn't rooted in mental illness, or perhaps a socially-motivated state of mind that causes a total absence of critical thinking, but some kind of noise needs to be made and I think public (ahem) recognition would be a good way to go.

A catchy name is essential - any suggestions?
by MortyWaves | 2025-08-13 13:52:56+00:00
There has to be something going on with iOS Safari and the keyboard because my typing goes to complete shit in ways it never does in any other application.

Here are some random examples I thought of for this comment. Notice how everything is spelled wrong as though the screen input doesn’t match the location of the buttons.

- tomoroww eather in united.kingdom

- lookip exhange rate

- devopper news

- download twotter.video
by Amorymeltzer | 2025-08-13 13:53:06+00:00
I cannot, cannot, cannot recommend Only Connect enough. Readers here should enjoy it. As an American, a lot of UK geography and history questions are beyond my ken, but it's well-worth your time. Victoria Coren Mitchell is a national treasure.

It's sort of exactly what I'd think LLMs would be good at. Maybe not so much the lateral thinking—the occasional "math(s) question but actually it's a word one"—but rapidly assessing "what connects these" or "what would continue this sequence" is right up their alley. The joy, of course, is trying it yourself and seeing others do the same.
by jonfw | 2025-08-13 13:53:27+00:00
This reminds me of a phenomena in motorcyling called "target fixation".

If you are looking at something, you are more likely to steer towards it. So it's a bad idea to focus on things you don't want to hit. The best approach is to pick a target line and keep the target line in focus at all times.

I had never realized that AIs tend to have this same problem, but I can see it now that it's been mentioned! I have in the past had to open new context windows to break out of these cycles.
by mid-kid | 2025-08-13 13:53:48+00:00
I agree, this should be the case, but Gradle specifically relies on downloading prebuilt java libraries and such to build itself and anything you build with it, and sometimes these have prebuilt native code inside. Unlike buildroot and any linux distribution, there's no metadata to figure out how to build each library, and the process for them is different between each library (no standards like make, autotools and cmake), so building the gradle ecosystem from source is very tedious and difficult.
by amadeuspagel | 2025-08-13 13:54:37+00:00
Code and prose isn't really comparable in this context, because in prose you are meant to read and process entire paragraphs at once, which is why it's important to be able to move from the end of one line to the beginning of the next fast, whereas with code you're meant to process it line by line.

> Even before typewriters, consider the average newspaper: why do we call a regularly-occurring featured article in a newspaper a “column”? Because broadsheet papers were too wide to have only a single column; they would always be broken into multiple! Far more aggressive than 80 characters, columns in newspapers typically have 30 characters per line.

Yes because a newspaper has a frontpage and a fold, and you want to have many headlines on the frontpage above the fold, all with a size matching their importance.
by pmarreck | 2025-08-13 13:54:51+00:00
> The risk to the father is that he has children with someone who will change and treat him like dirt, leaving him to choose between staying there for his child and being miserable, vs leaving and being financially ruined and potentially unable to move on

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
by andsoitis | 2025-08-13 13:55:08+00:00
what are the goals of the policy of banning autonomous tractors?

I imagine it is at least twofold:

a) provide jobs for manual laborers

b) more of an equal playing field between large-scale industrial agriculture companies and "sole proprietor" farmers

EDIT: turns out to be a case of safety regulation written before more recent advances in tractor automation. So my guesses were wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_tractor
by qcnguy | 2025-08-13 13:55:17+00:00
> You didn’t need a bar chart to recognize that GPT-4 had leaped ahead of anything that had come before.

You did though. I remember when GPT-4 was announced, OpenAI downplayed it and Altman said the difference was subtle and wouldn't be immediately apparent. For a lot of the stuff ChatGPT was being used for the gap between 3 and 4 wasn't going to really leap out at you.

https://fortune.com/2023/03/14/openai-releases-gpt-4-improve...

In the lead up to the announcement, Altman has set the bar low by suggesting people will be disappointed and telling his Twitter followers that “we really appreciate feedback on its shortcomings.”

OpenAI described the distinction between GPT-3.5—the previous version of the technology—and GPT 4, as subtle in situations when users are having a “casual conversation” with the technology. “The difference comes out when the complexity of the task reaches a sufficient threshold—GPT-4 is more reliable, creative, and able to handle much more nuanced instructions than GPT-3.5,” a research blog post read.

In the years since we got a lot more demanding of our models. Back then people were happy if they got models to write a small simple function and it worked. Now they expect models to manipulate large production codebases and get it right first time. So, the difference between GPT-3 and GPT-4 would be more apparent. But at the time, the reaction was somewhat muted.
by extraisland | 2025-08-13 13:55:43+00:00
> The government also insists the tech is independently tested at the National Physical Laboratory, which found the underlying algorithm to be accurate and free of age, gender, or ethnicity-related bias.

I feel so much better! /sarcasm

How tone deaf can they be?

Whenever there are serious privacy concerns about how this sort of technology, you have a statement like attached. It doesn't address what people are worried about. They never directly address it.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-13 13:55:53+00:00
OK, imma just say the quiet part out loud here: There would be less need for daily transportation commutes if companies allowed 100% WFH wehre applicable and the government would force/incentivise this on companies for the positions that can be done remotely in order to save the environment. Especially given that Geneva labor market skews heavily towards specialized office jobs like diplomats, banking and pharma where most time is spent in front of the PC and on Teams/Zoom calls anyway.

But from my job search there and anecdotes from mates and the internet opinions, Swiss companies have a highly mandatory in-office culture, plus the cross-border commuters from neighboring countries who drive in and out every day to benefit both from high Swiss wages and also from the cheaper living abroad. Well then no shit Sherlock your air quality goes down the shitter.

So I doubt that the public transportation not being free is what caused the higher pollution in the first place, since people drive by car not because public transportation costs too much money, but because on their commute route, it saves a lot of time despite the extra cost of car ownership (you can make more money but you can't make more time).

To me, it just feels like another way for politicians washing their hands of the elephant in the room: the forced need to commute every day for jobs that don't need it. It seems like the lessons from the pandemic have been quickly forgotten since early to mid 2020 when everyone was locked in their homes had the best air quality we ever experienced, but somehow politicians can't put this 2 and 2 together and go fight made up strawmen instand.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-08-13 13:56:33+00:00
Well, productivity is good. It's good to solve important problems and to move them out of other people's way, so that they can solve more important problems to move out of others people's way, and so on and so forth. It's probably a good and natural thing to feel happy when you've been or are being productive. I don't see a problem with that in a vacuum, that just seems normal.

What's less normal is tying yourself to being unhappy to being unproductive, which obviously sucks when you're in a productivity lull. I don't know what the solution is but I think that's the half of the equation I'd focus on.
by fasterik | 2025-08-13 13:56:40+00:00
I don't think it's crazy to talk about plateaus, it just depends on what domain we're talking about. Performance on olympiad-style problems doesn't necessarily translate into success in research, or industry, or creative pursuits. We know this is true for humans, then add on to that all the usual problems with LLMs like hallucinations and you can see why some people are still skeptical.

I'm still in the "wait and see" stage. Maybe throwing more compute at the problem will solve it, but maybe not. I would like to see benchmarks that take a more project-based approach, e.g. tell the LLM to go work on something complicated and ambiguous for a week and see what it comes up with.
by throwaway31131 | 2025-08-13 13:57:01+00:00
> I think this is fundamentally impossible because of dynamic behaviours.

I was thinking that too as it sounds awfully close to a variant of the halting problem.

But since I am not sure that it's actually equivalent, and there might be some heuristic that constrains the problem, in theory, to make it solvable "enough" I went with the softer "I don't know how to do it" rather than "it can't be done"
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-13 13:57:03+00:00
If you honestly think that they're not either backsliding into the full-on military-industrial complex or benefiting from the American military-industrial complex, I have some nice ocean-front property in Kansas City to sell you.

EDIT:

If you don't believe me, ask the USMC about their nice new H&K service rifles. Did we need to do that? No, we could have thrown a nice piston upper on M16 lowers, but that doesn't keep the bier flowing in Oberndorf am Neckar. Or ask someone in the Pentagon about their partners at BAE.
by jebarker | 2025-08-13 13:57:13+00:00
People really over-exaggerate the claim of friendly and polite US service workers and people in general. Obviously you can find the full spectrum of character types across the US. I've lived 2/3 of my life in Britain and 1/3 in the US and I honestly don't think there's much difference in interactions day to day. If anything I mostly just find Britain to be overly pessimistic and gloomy now.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-13 13:57:47+00:00
I like these. They are push back against the sort of… first correction that people make when encountering floating point weirdness. That is, the first mistake we make is to treat floats as reals, and then we observe some odd rounding behavior. The second mistake we make is to treat the rounding events as random. A nice thing about IEEE floats is that the rounding behavior is well defined.

Often it doesn't matter, like you ask for a gemm and you get whatever order of operations blas, AVX-whatever, and OpenMP conspire to give you, so it is more-or-less random.

But if it does matter, the ability to define it is there.
by woodruffw | 2025-08-13 13:57:51+00:00
I don't think it's really a matter of limited attendance. Smaller hacker conferences in the US are not much different in terms of baseline acceptance of government/defense presence. It's more of a cultural thing, and not a new one.

(That's not to say that there aren't conferences that are explicitly anti-MIC, because there are. But if you just sample by size, I suspect you'll find no correlation there.)
by wongarsu | 2025-08-13 13:58:37+00:00
At our supplier $2k would pay for a 1U server with a 16 core 3GHz Epyc 7313P with 32GB RAM, a tiny SSD and non-redundant power.

$3k pays for a 1U server with a 32 core 2.6GHz Epyc 7513 with 128GB RAM and 960GB of non-redundant SSD storage (probably fine for build servers).

All using server CPUs, since that was easier to find. If you want more cores or more than 3GHz things get considerably more expensive.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-13 13:58:50+00:00
> Founded in 2015 as the UK's leading centre of AI research

I couldn't find in the article what the Institute has accomplished. Does anybody know? Their research web page is pretty broad (https://www.turing.ac.uk/research) and it is hard to see concrete breakthroughs from the Institute, though I must imagine there's gotta be some?
by philipallstar | 2025-08-13 13:59:49+00:00
> What many misunderstand about the patriarchy is in thinking its an agreed, secret, organised system of ensuring male dominance. That perspective is so easy to refute, this refutation gets equated with the non-existence of the patriarchy itself.

This confusion is a deliberate outcome of the name "the patriarchy".

> Likewise there has never been a female US president, or chess world champion, or F1 champion, which does not actually point to talent but to inequality.

This is weasel words, though. "Inequality" covers outcome and opportunity. You're pointing at unequal outcomes to imply unequal opportunities, due to a giant anti-female conspiracy. Women in chess even have easier-to-attain rankings (WGM is basically equivalent to IM for men and women). There's nothing unfair about chess rankings or the game, other than women having easier-to-access rankings. It's just outcomes based on population preferences and aptitudes.

> You might say the patriarchy is not a diagnosis, but a symptom.

You might say that the dominance of black players at the top levels of the NBA is not a diagnosis, but a symptom as well. But to say either is still to imply a conspiracy.
by yomismoaqui | 2025-08-13 14:00:09+00:00
After hearing the explanation about why he picked Go for the Typescript compiler I can only be more of a fan of Anders Hejlsber.

He said that Go was chosen due to its suitability for the workload, offering low-level control, optimized native code, automatic memory management, and concurrency.

And this coming from the same guy that created C#, Typescript, Delphi & Turbo Pascal shows how a real engineer takes a decision of this magnitude.

Is Go the best decision for every SW project? No, but in this case the arguments (and the tests they did during their evaluation) check out.

And no, picking F# simply because you love the language is not a mature decision.

You can check his arguments here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNlq-EVld70
by exDM69 | 2025-08-13 14:00:55+00:00
My favorite thing about floating point numbers: you can divide by zero. The result of x/0.0 is +/- inf (or NaN if x is zero). There's a helpful table in "weird floats" [0] that covers all the cases for division and a bunch of other arithmetic instructions.

This is especially useful when writing branchless or SIMD code. Adding a branch for checking against zero can have bad performance implications and it isn't even necessary in many cases.

Especially in graphics code I often see a zero check before a division and a fallback for the zero case. This often practically means "wait until numerical precision artifacts arise and then do something else". Often you could just choose the better of the two options you have instead of checking for zero.

Case in point: choosing the axes of your shadow map projection matrix. You have two options (world x axis or z axis), choose the better one (larger angle with viewing direction). Don't wait until the division goes to inf and then fall back to the other.

[0] https://www.cs.uaf.edu/2011/fall/cs301/lecture/11_09_weird_f...