MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2025-08-12 22:29:22+00:00
Many arguments arise over the valuation of future money. See "discount function" [1] At one extreme are the rational altruists, who rate that near 1.0, and the "drill, baby, drill" people, who are much closer to 0.

The discount function really should have a noise term, because predictions about the future are noisy, and the noise increases with the distance into the future. If you don't consider that, you solve the wrong problem. There's a classic Roman concern about running out of space for cemeteries. Running out of energy, or overpopulation, turned out to be problems where the projections assumed less noise than actually happened.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_function
by astrange | 2025-08-12 22:29:51+00:00
> First of all, the point isn't about the map becoming the territory, but about whether LLMs can form a map that's similar to the map in our brains.

It should be capable of something similar (fsvo similar), but the largest difference is that humans have to be power-efficient and LLMs do not.

That is, people don't actually have world models, because modeling something is a waste of time and energy insofar as it's not needed for anything. People are capable of taking out the trash without knowing what's in the garbage bag.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-12 22:30:12+00:00
One of the main problems in the US is that the US has an extremely broad antitrust statute:

> Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal.

> Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, ...

It was passed in the era of robber barons and meant to be a strong hammer against anti-competitive practices. But because it was so broad, the courts kept chipping away at it over time through reinterpretation because by its terms it would prohibit a lot of things the courts didn't really want to get involved in policing, or they just made bad calls in years when the Court's majority wasn't that smart.

Meanwhile monopolists generally have a lot of money to pay expensive lawyers, so they structure their activities to fit within the loopholes the courts have carved out over the years and that makes it hard for an administration to hold them to account even when they have the will to do it.

Hyper-partisanship also makes this worse, because if everyone is convinced the other side is pure evil then they're going to try to undo anything the other party was trying to do without even considering what it is, which isn't compatible with long-term prosecutions that would have to span administrations.
by pvtmert | 2025-08-12 22:30:25+00:00
outside of USA, i do not think that's true,

given the OP nickname is mrtksn, I presume he is a Turkish person. There are many public (ie. govt. funded) universities in Turkey. Except various touristic places in Istanbul, it would also be possible to "hangout" for an hour in many of smaller cities. Obviously this is degrading as the cities are getting more crowded. Although, most shopping malls having food-court with a "public" area. (ie. An area that belongs to none of the food places, but the shopping mall itself) You could just coast there from 10am in the morning until 10pm in the evening, with free-wifi and no drinks.

Similarly, in Europe, some coffee shops kind of span to the street benches or the window-side seating. For the window-side (outside), you may not be able to sit there for an hour or so, but definitely coastable about 30 minutes. (ie waiting for someone). Meanwhile, public areas are always free-for-all, if the WIFI works, then for sure you can coast all day...
by theshackleford | 2025-08-12 22:30:42+00:00
> What Apple is doing with iOS is objectively much worse than what Google is doing with Android, irrespective of any alleged "claims".

It’s objectively not despite what you claim.

Apple never promised you an alternative, you got exactly what you paid for. Google promised you an alternative and while you weren’t looking tried to strangle it in its crib.

You need to look past your fan bias.
by ivm | 2025-08-12 22:31:03+00:00
I'm not familiar enough with their definitions to argue about them, but meditations techniques predate Buddhism. In fact, the Buddha himself learned them from two teachers before developing his own path. Also, the style of meditation taught nowadays (accepting non-reactive awareness) is not how it's described in the Pali Canon.

This isn’t just a "must come from the Champagne region of France, otherwise it’s sparkling wine" bickering, but actual widespread misconceptions of what counts as Buddhism. Many ideas floating in Western discourse are basically German Romanticism wrapped in Orientalist packaging, not matching neither Theravada nor Mahayana teachings (for example, see the Fake Buddha Quotes project).

So the semantics are extremely important when it comes to spiritual matters. Flip one or two words and the whole metaphysical model goes in a completely different direction. Even translations add distortions, so there’s no room to be careless.
by kcplate | 2025-08-12 22:31:37+00:00
Meh. DC federal takeover and Trump/Putin Alaska are the dominant news stories on both CNN and MSNBC. There was one story above the fold on MSNBC homepage regarding Trump and Epstein on MSNBC and that story was more about how Vance’s downplaying comments could be read as supportive of more disclosure. Another story well below the fold on Epstein which is more about his victims than Trump.

CNN has one story way below the fold on their homepage mentioning Epstein *for subscribers only.

The story is effectively dead. Whatever legs people thought this had are effectively gone except for the rabid progressives who just want anything they can to damage Trump…or the Qanon crowds. In my opinion, those two folks belong together and can enjoy their alignment, two ends of the horseshoe.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-12 22:32:26+00:00
"For centuries, the trial of Galileo has received far more attention than any other aspect of his life. The conflict between religion and science still rumbles on in the debates over Darwinism and intelligent design."

To me, it's worse than Dawinism vs intelligent design. Religion is often used to squash inconvenient facts in order to gain/keep control. I never would have thought that in my life time, we'd see this become a major issue instead of just in the smaller niche groups.
by astrange | 2025-08-12 22:33:59+00:00
Tokenization makes things harder, but it doesn't make them impossible. Just takes a bit more memorization.

Other writing systems come with "tokenization" built in making it still a live issue. Think of answering:

1. How many n's are in 日本?

2. How many ん's are in 日本?

(Answers are 2 and 1.)
by eadmund | 2025-08-12 22:34:13+00:00
> I played with RedoxOS a bit in a virtual machine a few years ago, and it seemed cool, so maybe that can be the logical successor to something like Hurd.

A problem with RedoxOS is that it is not GPLed: contributors have no assurance that they and others will be able to use software built with their contributions.

Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook all have plenty of money to pay engineers; they don’t need my contributions for free.
by LinXitoW | 2025-08-12 22:34:39+00:00
They already do, or at least Claude Code does. It will search for a method name, then only load a chunk of that file to get the method signature, for example.

It will use the general information you give it to make educated guesses of where things are. If it knows the code is Vue based and it has to do something with "users", it might seach for "src/*/User.vue.

This is also the reason why the quality of your code makes such a large difference. The more consistent the naming of files and classes, the better the AI is at finding them.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-08-12 22:34:54+00:00
Yes, you cannot hide the callstack when taught with pencil and paper.

But in computer programing it is often hidden.

And then you are misleading people about recursion and not helping them to build mental models that map to the physical/hardware process.

This isn't a big deal or anything, it's hardly worth talking about but it is literally a true thing many don't realize and that does empirically negatively effect education of the concept.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-12 22:35:49+00:00
I did something similar a few months ago, with a similar request never to be "flattering or encouraging", to focus entirely on objectivity and correctness, that the only goal is accuracy, and to respond in an academic manner.

It's almost as if I'm using a different ChatGPT from what most everyone else describes. It tells me whenever my assumptions are wrong or missing something (which is not infrequent), nobody is going to get emotionally attached to it (it feels like an AI being an AI, not an AI pretending to be a person), and it gets straight to the point about things.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-08-12 22:35:51+00:00
Dude you need to find a different payment processor now -- even PayPal, even just Sezzle. Just have something up as a fallback option so that Stripe Customer Service (practically nonexistent) doesn't run you out of business.

Back in the day, one of my companies was using Square. They hit us with weird and arbitrary restrictions from outta nowhere; we set up Stripe the same day and moved everything over. Our business kept moving along without a hitch.
by brulard | 2025-08-12 22:36:16+00:00
You conflate efficient usage of AI with "vibing". Code can be written by AI and still follow the agreed-upon structures and rules and still can and should be thoroughly reviewed. The 3x absolutely does not come for free. But the price may have been paid in advance by learning how to use those tools best.

I agree the vibe-coding mentality is going to be a major problem. But aren't all tools used well and used badly?
by cloverich | 2025-08-12 22:36:28+00:00
> It's actually pretty easy to lose money.

By what mechanism / who exactly? Or referring explicitly to the ultra wealthy? When I think of the normal wealthy, the 1-20 million camp, can't they just stuff all of their money into index funds for the last 20 years and everyone grows 10%+ a year (most years)? That's what the few multi millionaires I personally know have done -> step 1 put money in e.g. Vanguard, step 2 maintain job and spend based on income, not accumulated wealth, step 3 do nothing as wealth builds itself. Once they get past 2 million, I think they are making 80-200k per year at capital gains rates and maybe don't even need to put more in, just ignore it. I don't personally have that situation though so maybe I'm glossing over details or have it wrong.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-12 22:36:55+00:00
> I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done.

It is still true, but it was inaccurately presented as overpopulation, rather than excess resource consumption and entropy generation.

The mass starvation and death is not going to be a sudden nuclear bomb type event, it will be gradual decreases in quality of life due to changing environmental variables leading to changing political climates and eventually physical conflicts.
by astrange | 2025-08-12 22:37:07+00:00
When we ported OpenJDK to macOS, I ended up producing a universal binary by having the Makefile run itself to produce HotSpot twice, and then gluing them together with `lipo` afterwards. There isn't really a better way when the actual project configurations are different.

IIRC it was eventually removed because nobody else needed to do such a thing so it was hard to maintain.
by de6u99er | 2025-08-12 22:37:37+00:00
Thank you for sharing! This is one of the coolest articles I have seen in a while on HN. I did some searches and I think the search results looked very useful so far. I particularly loved about your article that most of the questions I had while reading got answered in a most structured way.

I still have questions:

* How long do you plan to keep the live demo up?

* Are you planning to make the source code public?

* How many hours in total did you invest into this "hobby project" in the two months you mentioned in your write-up?
by Tainnor | 2025-08-12 22:38:10+00:00
> the way you are engaging with others in this thread

The only person I engaged with negatively here was a person who called me "marinated in liberal propaganda", something that notably you didn't take issue with. I will admit that I should have just ignored that person and will try to disengage in the future. Or maybe just avoid this site altogether.

I did however call out that there's a sizable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian and I stand by that assessment. I also disagree that these toxic opinions "rarely get seen", I see them a ton. And my ultimate point is that this serves to ultimately drive away more moderate voices.

Whether or not you consider that to be a problem is up to you.
by itissid | 2025-08-12 22:38:29+00:00
My experience with Claude code beyond building anything bigger than a webpage, a small API, a tutorial on CSS etc has been pretty bad. I think context length is a manageable problem, but not the main one. I used it to write a 50K LoC python code base with 300 unit tests and it went ok for the first few weeks and then it failed. This is after there is a CLAUDE.md file for every single module that needs it as well as detailed agents for testing, design, coding and review.

I won't going into a case by case list of its failures, The core of the issue is misaligned incentives, which I want to get into:

1. The incentives for coding agent, in general and claude, are writing LOTS of code. None of them — O — are good at the planning and verification.

2. The involvement of the human, ironically, in a haphazard way in the agent's process. And this has to do with how the problem of coding for these agents is defined. Human developers are like snow flakes when it comes to opinions on software design, there is no way to apply each's preference(except paper machet and superglue SO, Reddit threads and books) to the design of the system in any meaningful way and that makes a simple system way too complex or it makes a complex problem simplistic.

- There is no way to evolve the plan to accept new preferences except text in CLAUDE.md file in git that you will have to read through and edit. - There is no way to know the near term effect of code choices now on 1 week from now. - So much code is written that asking a person to review it in case you are at the envelope and pushing the limit feels morally wrong and an insane ask. How many of your Code reviews are instead replaced by 15-30 min design meetings to instead solicit feedback on design of the PR — because it so complex — and just push the PR into dev? WTF am I even doing I wonder. - It does not know how far to explore for better rewards and does not know it better from local rewards, Resulting in commented out tests and deleting arbitrary code, to make its plan "work".

In short code is a commodity for CEOs of Coding agent companies and CXOs of your company to use(sales force has everyone coding, but that just raises the floor and its a good thing, it does NOT lower the bar and make people 10x devs). All of them have bought into this idea that 10x is somehow producing 10x code. Your time reviewing and unmangling and mainitaining the code is not the commodity. It never ever was.
by ImaCake | 2025-08-12 22:40:31+00:00
Not sure why you got down voted for this. The opening paragraph of the article reads as suspicious to the observant outsider:

>The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally.

Anyone who had just read a lot about Scientology would read that and have alarm bells ringing.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-08-12 22:41:23+00:00
First: Hurd isn't a new operating system. It's a decades old project from last millennium.

And then: Doing research in operating systems serves a lot of purposes. For some it's just fun. For some it's experimenting which may lead to ideas which may be incorporated into other OSs later, where eit is a lot simpler to do in a small kernel. For some it is an attempt to take over the world, few of those will, but maybe one might. At least for a small part of the world.
by m000 | 2025-08-12 22:41:29+00:00
You can thing of Syncthing as a p2p dropbox. It can also double as a "live-backup" program, similar e.g. to Time Machine, if you enable file versioning in one of the peer nodes.

Rsync is great as there is a clear master copy. But if changes may happen at any copy of the data, it can become a chore.
by evanjrowley | 2025-08-12 22:41:51+00:00
Yes and no. The gaming industry serves as an illustrative example because we know the Sony Playstation 4 and 5 are both based on FreeBSD[0].

Compare Sony PlayStation Network[1]

Monthly active users on PlayStation Network reached 123 million as of June 30, 2025.

with Valve's Steam[2]

Valve reported 132 million active monthly players (that is, they used Steam within the month, as opposed to being logged in at exact the same time) at the end of 2021... This isn't scientific, but if the same ratio of active monthly to peak concurrent users held through to today, back of the napkin math would put Steam's current active monthly users at 221.5 million

With an optimistic estimate of current Monthly Active Users, if gaming on Linux grew overnight from 2.5% to 50% of total players on Steam, then it would still be slightly behind half of the people who are currently gaming on FreeBSD-based Playstation.

FreeBSD code is also in iOS and macOS via Darwin, the Nintendo Switch, and the Microsoft Windows networking stack.

Evidently BSD is a go-to choice for consumers today, but many don't realize it, and those of us who do often do not think about it. That's because the BSD license and the companies that use it result in products that bear no resemblance to the BSD we know.

A similar situation occurred with Minix - to the extent that it's creator Andrew Tannenbaum had no idea it's install base was arguably bigger than Linux until 2017. Intel had put Minix into the Management Engine on their professional grade CPUs for years. The BSD license allowed Intel to put it everywhere without the knowledge of the wider Minix community.

In some key ways, BSD is already taking the Linux spot, however, I'd argue that BSD can't truly take the Linux spot because the GPL license makes the Linux spot what it is. I honestly can't say if this makes Linux better or worse off. The most advanced technology of our time is largely not choosing copyleft licenses, and for those who did choose it, they've taken steps to distance themselves from it[3][4][5][6].

Given all this, I think Hurd has more of a chance to be the spiritual successor to Linux (if it disappeared). The only caveat is there is zero chance for a big-tech-dominated $200M "Hurd Foundation" to arise due to Hurd's's affiliation with the Free Software Foundation. Not much of the Linux Foundation's money actually goes to Linux, so it may not matter in the grand scheme of things[7].

[0] https://wololo.net/2023/03/22/new-freebsd-vulnerabilities-co...

[1] https://www.psu.com/news/psn-hits-123-million-monthly-active...

[2] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/steam-just-cracked-4...

[3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smar...

[4] https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-...

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/

[6] https://lwn.net/Articles/655519/

[7] https://blog.desdelinux.net/en/The-annual-report-of-the-Linu...
by imiric | 2025-08-12 22:42:11+00:00
This is a common workflow that most advanced users are familiar with.

Yet even following it to a T, and being really careful with how you manage context, the LLM will still hallucinate, generate non-working code, steer you into wrong directions and dead ends, and just waste your time in most scenarios. There's no magical workflow or workaround for avoiding this. These issues are inherent to the technology, and have been since its inception. The tools have certainly gotten more capable, and the ecosystem has matured greatly in the last couple of years, but these issues remain unsolved. The idea that people who experience them are not using the tools correctly is insulting.

I'm not saying that the current generation of this tech isn't useful. I've found it very useful for the same scenarios GP mentioned. But the above issues prevent me from relying on it for anything more sophisticated than that.
by orwin | 2025-08-12 22:42:14+00:00
Like I said, I like MTTs, I agree that incentives is necessary for the game to be playable (i.e players don't play truly randomly), but rewards, at least in my opinion, break games.

If I need to be manipulated for me to appreciate playing, is it really worth? Because we know dopamine rushes have effect on your brain outside of the game, when it's over.
by Johnny555 | 2025-08-12 22:42:40+00:00
Managed switches have become much cheaper since that article came out -- you can get a Netgear 8 port managed switch for $25 versus $18 for the unmanaged version.

It's a little harder to compare TP-Link switches (which is the brand used in the linked article), since their $53 managed switch also has 4 ports of PoE, while their $18 unmanaged switch doesn't have PoE.
by 9cb14c1ec0 | 2025-08-12 22:43:21+00:00
The more I use Claude Code, the more aware I become of its limitations. On the whole, it's a useful tool, but the bigger the codebase the less useful. I've noticed a big difference on its performance on projects with 20k lines of code versus 100k. (Yes, I know. A 100k line project is still very small in the big picture)
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-12 22:44:25+00:00
They're not the kind of people that can afford housing nor the kind that are able to get a rental contract in the first place. And if they had money they'd just shoot up more. Not trying to diss them but that's just reality.

There's very few people homeless because they can't afford it even despite the insane rent prices. Usually it's a ton of untreated mental issues and/or drug addiction.

Building more houses will help regular people a ton but not the homeless. More shelters will. Good and affordable mental healthcare too. But that's "communism" so I guess that won't fly in MAGA America.
by tim333 | 2025-08-12 22:44:41+00:00
I don't think it's vibes rather than my thinking about the problem.

If you look at the "legitimate concerns" none are really deal breakers:

>What if "increasing intelligence", which is a very vague goal, has diminishing returns, making recursive self-improvement incredibly slow?

I'm will to believe it will be slow though maybe it won't

>LLMs already seem to have hit a wall of diminishing returns

Who cares - there will be other algorithms

>What if there are several paths to different kinds of intelligence with their own local maxima

well maybe, maybe not

>Once AI realizes it can edit itself to be more intelligent, it can also edit its own goals. Why wouldn't it wirehead itself?

well - you can make another one if the first does that

Those are all potential difficulties with self improvement, not reasons it will never happen. I'm happy to say it's not happening right now but do you have any solid arguments that it won't happen in the next century?

To me the arguments against sound like people in the 1800s discussing powered flight and saying it'll never happen because steam engine development has slowed.