MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tsunamifury | 2025-09-06 15:34:45+00:00
I’m sure no one will read this but I was on the team that invented a lot of this early pre-LLM math at Google.

It was a really exciting time for me as I had pushed the team to begin looking at vectors beyond language (actions and other predictable perimeters we could extract from linguistic vectors.)

We had originally invented a lot of this because we were trying to make chat and email easier and faster, and ultimately I had morphed it into predicting UI decisions based on conversations vectors. Back then we could only do pretty simple predictions (continue vector strictly , reverse vector strictly or N vector options on an axis) but we shipped it and you saw it when we made hangouts, gmail and allo predict your next sentence. Our first incarnation was interesting enough that eric Schmidt recognized it and took my work to the board as part of his big investment in ML. From there the work in hangouts became all/gmail etc.

Bizarrely enough though under sundar, this became the Google assistant but we couldn’t get much further without attention layers so the entire project regressed back to fixed bot pathing.

I argued pretty hard with the executives that this was a tragedy but sundar would hear none of it, completely obsessed with Alexa and having a competitor there.

I found some sympathy with the now head of search who gave me some budget to invest in a messaging program that would advance prediction to get to full action prediction across the search surface and UI. We launched and made it a business messaging product but lost the support of executives during the LLM panic.

Sundar cut us and fired the whole team, ironically right when he needed it the most. But he never listened to anyone who worked on the tech and seemed to hold their thoughts in great disdain.

What happened after that is of course well known now as sundar ignored some of the most important tech in history due to this attitude.

I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand it.
by ryukoposting | 2025-09-06 15:34:54+00:00
I'd love to hook my development tools into a fully-local LLM. The question is context window and cost. If the context window isn't big enough, it won't be helpful for me. I'm not gonna drop $500 on RPis unless I know it'll be worth the money. I could try getting my employer to pay for it, but I'll probably have a much easier time convincing them to pay for Claude or whatever.
by cousin_it | 2025-09-06 15:35:04+00:00
This is a great point. Everyone who has talked with chatbots at all: please note that all contents of your past conversations with chatbots (that already exist now, and that you can't meaningfully delete!) could be used in the future to target ads to you, manipulate you financially and politically, and sell "personalized influence on you specifically" as a service to the highest bidder. Just wanted to make sure y'all understand that.

EDIT: I want to add that "training on chat logs" isn't even the issue. In fact it understates the danger. It's better to imagine things like this: when a future ad-bot or influence-bot talks to you, it will receive your past chatlogs with other bots as context, useful to know what'll work on you or not.

EDIT 2: And your chatlogs with other people I guess, if they happened on a platform that stored them and later got desperate enough to sell them. This is just getting worse and worse as I think about it.
by ibejoeb | 2025-09-06 15:37:18+00:00
If you're doing R&D and you're actually into the problem, you're probably devoting the majority of your waking hours to "working" regardless. This is a different 996 than stitching shoe welts 996. Hanging around and passively considering the problem with others can be good, productive work.

If someone who actually like this kind of thing freely enters into it, well, best of luck to you. I think the shouting "996" thing is just stirring up attention.
by phkahler | 2025-09-06 15:37:48+00:00
>> My willingness to “go along” with an FSF CLA is much, much greater than for a random company who wants to trade on and benefit from the goodwill of the “we’re open-source!!” banner and yet be able to rug-pull later.

FSF is the only organization that I would trust with a CLA. Everyone else has mixed motives.

As this stuff keeps happening I think the GPL will regain popularity.
by killjoywashere | 2025-09-06 15:38:01+00:00
I have never worked for a company. I have always worked for the government, the taxpayers, quixotically according to a lot of people on the internet, even, dare I say, the citizenry. Most people think these are cush jobs.

I spent decades worked way more than 996, on ships, ashore, in medical school, in residency, on clinical staff while doing entirely uncompensated research. Now I'm a subspecialist physician living in the Valley. I have never worked this little and enjoyed such a high standard of living. One of my seniors said "You don't have to work 2.5 jobs anymore. Just work 1.25 jobs". I work with teams across the spectrum of businesses to figure out how to build the business lines and I see the challenges small companies have. I really do. Not least of which is how the big companies have stacked the deck against new entrants.

Now that I do have some free time I spend it helping my wife build her business, I'm essentially her cofounder. Been incorporated for 8 years now. We think about motivating employees, paying them fairly, the breath-taking amount of money consumed by SaaS, rent, health insurance, travel costs and how that makes it hard to pay employees more. We think about motivating customers and charging them fairly. We see the mind-reeling amounts the big companies charge and then give customer discounts that effectively curb the competition. I see how they get their employees to work harder.

There are two fundamental rules in business:

1) If you're not making money, you're losing money.

2) Don't run out of money.

We watch the end-of-month profit margin going up and down like a rollercoaster. Some months, yeah, "This is great". Some months "Oh, oh, we cannot keep doing this".

We had one employee who really took this whole "I don't have to work ... hard" to heart. She would charge an hour for filling out her timesheet. She consumed her annual sick leave and accumulated PTO in her first 6 weeks. She would bail on scheduled work. Customers loved her but she was literally a net cost to the company money. How? Fixed costs. Overhead is real. Had to let her go. Honestly wasn't a hard conversation with her (she actually never returned some equipment, flat out stole from the company). What was hard was figuring out how to cover those customers and explaining to them why their favorite face of the company was gone.

You want to live a happy, ethical life? Live within your means. But that also entails having the means needed. And everybody else gets a vote. If you live in the US: the whole world wants your quality of life. Even if it's just 10% of the rest of the world, that's still double the entire US population, who are working 996.
by impulsivepuppet | 2025-09-06 15:38:09+00:00
On the topic of working hours, flexitime is highly addicting and I cannot imagine anything that's better for a software developer. Clock in, have meetings, write code, commit, clock out. Overtime? Just leave early without asking your boss. It just makes sense. Plus, the negotiated working hours per week / working days / mandatory hours can be set to whatever value that makes sense.

Nobody is paying you to sit, people care about the working product.
by jfengel | 2025-09-06 15:38:39+00:00
Var can help in maintenance. Change the return type of calculateAccounts and you don't have to modify this code (assuming that it duck-types out equivalently).

That isn't necessarily a huge win: it does force a compile change that isn't obvious from the source. And a refactoring tool could have performed the code change automatically so it's not as big a deal as it might have been.
by leetcrew | 2025-09-06 15:38:53+00:00
the advantage of var is not clear in toy examples. in real life, people write stuff like

Map<String, MyExtremelySpecificAndVeryLongTypeName> myExtremelySpecificAndVeryLongTypeNameMap = myExtremelySpecificAndVeryLongTypeNameMapProvider.provide();

literally anything to reduce the number of line breaks needed for a single statement is welcome.
by mberning | 2025-09-06 15:39:10+00:00
I’ve worked in Java for over 20 years. Being the “lingua franca” of the enterprise is its biggest strength IMO, but it is also perplexing to me that it was able to do that in the first place. The language itself is not bad. The tooling around it is very good. But the codebases you encounter written in it, particularly in the enterprise, are often horrible.
by rsyring | 2025-09-06 15:39:40+00:00
IMO: make all the laws you want. They generally won't be enforced and, if they are, it will take 5-10 years to make it's way through the courts. At best, the fines will be huge and yet account for maybe 10% of the revenue generated by violating the law.

The incentives are all wrong.

I'm fundamentally a capitalist because I don't know another system that will work better. But, there really is just too much concentrated wealth in these orgs.

Our legal and cultural constructs are not designed in a way that such disparity can be put in check. The populace responds by wanting ever more powerful leaders to "make things right" and you get someone like Trump at best and it goes downhill from there.

Make the laws, it will help, a little, maybe.

But I think something more profound needs to happen for these things to be truly fixed. I, admittedly, have no idea what that is.
by danans | 2025-09-06 15:40:04+00:00
> And why not just use LIDAR that can literally see around corners in 3D?

Based on what I've read over the years: it costs too much for a consumer vehicle, it creates unwanted "bumps" in the vehicle visual design, and the great man said it wasn't needed.

Yes, those reasons are not for technology or safety. They are based on cost, marketing, and personality (of the CEO and fans of the brand).
by throw0101c | 2025-09-06 15:40:42+00:00
> The Founders chose this name to signal our strength and resolve to the world.

Meanwhile the folks that had just finished winning WW2 chose "Department of Defence". From Tom Nichols (a now-retired prof at the US Naval War College):

> It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move. The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.”

> These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.

* https://archive.today/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arch...

And on previous presidents opinion of the name:

> That name was good enough for Truman, who served in combat in World War I and dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. And it was good enough for President Dwight Eisenhower, the former supreme allied commander, who oversaw the largest military operations ever undertaken in all of human history.

> It was also good enough for John F. Kennedy, who served his country as a naval officer and nearly got killed during World War II. It was good enough for Lyndon B. Johnson, who won the Silver Star for his military service, and then, as commander in chief, embroiled the United States in a decade-long war in Southeast Asia. It was good enough for Naval Reserve officer Richard Nixon, who took over Johnson’s war and unleashed the fury of American bombers overseas. It was good enough for Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, both former Navy officers. It was good enough for Ronald Reagan, a former Army officer who as president pushed through a huge program of military expansion and modernization. It was good enough for his successor, George H. W. Bush, a decorated naval aviator who was shot down during combat in the Pacific.

* Ibid

And Cullen Roche:

> I like Department of War.

> But only if we change the Fed to Bigly Bank and Dept of Treasury to Ministry of Moolah.

* https://twitter.com/cullenroche/status/1964068303715913843#m
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-06 15:40:56+00:00
I think one of the main problems with defining consciousness (or rather being more specific when you use that word) is that (at least in the English language) it's a heavily overloaded word and is used to refer to a bunch of only loosely related, as well as totally unrelated, things! Also, most people aren't used to teasing apart consciousness-adjacent concepts like consciousness itself (essentially self-observation) and things like free will and sensory qualia, since these are less part of everyday discussion.

It's not so much that consciousness itself is mysterious or hard to define, but rather that the word itself, in common usage, just means different things to different people. It'd perhaps be better to make up a brand new baggage-free word, with a highly specific defined meaning (ability to self-observe), when talking about consciousness related to AI.

Free-will and qualia when separated out as concepts don't seem problematic as part of a technical vocabulary since they are already well defined.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-09-06 15:41:01+00:00
I wish they'd go lower. We are a capitalistic system right? So what they should simply say is that "Our metrics showed our revenue, user retention, and usage numbers were shown to be higher when we blocked this right wing donor spam and content and we have a fiduciary duty to our shareholders". And as a private company their First amendment right allows them to do so.

Watch the bitchfit thrown then.
by jeromegv | 2025-09-06 15:41:50+00:00
You say it keeps outsider out. Let’s not forget people living there already, if you build a car dependant city around them they often get pushed out or have to live through car hell. Not a lot of car dependant city have a thriving and livable downtown, in fact I would love to see which city is having a good quality life in their center while making it easy for cars to come in and out to the suburbs.
by mannykannot | 2025-09-06 15:42:23+00:00
I'm generally OK with the list of push-backs against common misconceptions in the summary, but I have my doubts about the second one:

Claim: Hallucinations are inevitable. Finding: They are not, because language models can abstain when uncertain.

...which raises the question of how reliable the uncertainty estimate could get (we are not looking for perfection here: humans, to varying degrees, have the same problem.)

For a specific context, consider those cases where LLMs are programming and invent a non-existent function: are they usually less certain about that function than they are about the real functions they use? And even if so, abandoning the task with the equivalent of "I don't know [how to complete this task]" is not very useful, compared to what a competent human programmer would do: check whether such a function exists, and if not, decide whether to implement it themselves, or backtrack to the point where they can solve the problem without it.

More generally, I would guess that balancing the competing incentives to emit a definite statement or decline to do so could be difficult, especially if the balance is sensitive to the context.
by benreesman | 2025-09-06 15:43:17+00:00
Well I blame our legislators, our regulators, and a public who tolerates low integrity, low competence leadership. A society gets what it pays for with the standards it sets for its leaders.

Out of a great many outcomes a very topical one today is semiconductors, and the outcomes rival any on anything for corrupt, incompetent, and entirely consistent with our speed run of the road to irrelevance.
by Lerc | 2025-09-06 15:43:40+00:00
I think much of the philosophical discussion on the pertinent issues here have been discussed at length in the context of Legal, Medical, or Financial advice.

In essence, there is a general consensus on the conduct concerting trusted advisors. They should act in the interest of their client. Privacy protections exist to enable individuals to be able to provide their advisors the context required to give good advice without fear of disclosure to others.

I think AI needs recognition as a similarly protected class.

AI actions should be considered to be acting for a Client (or some other specifically defined term to denote who they are advising). Any information shared with the AI by the client should be considered privileged. If the Client shares the information to others, the privilege is lost.

It should be illegal to configure an an AI to deliberately act against the interests of their Client. It should be illegal to configure an AI to claim that their Client is someone other than who it is (it may refuse to disclose, it may not misrepresent). Any information shared with an AI misrepresenting itself as the representative of the Client must have protections against disclosure or evidential use. There should be no penalty to refusing to provide information to an AI that does not disclose who its Client is.

I have a bunch of other principles floating around in my head around AI but those are the ones regarding privacy and being able to communicate candidly with an AI.

Some of the others are along the lines of

It should be disclosed(of the nutritional information type of disclosure) when an AI makes a determination regarding a person. There should be a set of circumstances where, if an AI makes a determination regarding a person, that person is provided with means to contest the determination.

A lot of the ideas would be good practice if they went beyond AI, but are more required in the case of AI because of the potential for mass deployment without oversight.
by lapcat | 2025-09-06 15:43:42+00:00
Let's be honest: many users of LLMs have no interest in uncertainty. They don't want to hear "I don't know" and if given that response would quickly switch to an alternative service that gives them a definitive answer. The users would rather have a quick answer than a correct answer. People who are more circumspect, and value truth over speed, would and should avoid LLMs in favor of "old-fashioned methods" of discovering facts.

LLMs are the fast food of search. The business model of LLMs incentivizes hallucinations.
by pyrale | 2025-09-06 15:44:53+00:00
> Especially when are forcing to use newer JDKs.

Dude, java 8's eol was 8 6 years ago, now. I have nothing gainst waiting a bit for "newer JDKs", but way too often the pattern is that teams use the oldest possible JDK and only migrate several months/years after the last possible vendor has sunset their support.

> Java 8 was the peak of development age for the JDK.

To me it looks it was merely the point where your stopped caring.
by resfirestar | 2025-09-06 15:44:56+00:00
I don't read the article (besides the clickbait headline and the author's "take") as Tesla "giving up". No marketing is changing, no plans for taxi services are changing. This is about the company's famously captured board giving their beloved CEO flexibility on how to meet their ambitious-sounding targets, by using vague language in the definitions. This way if Tesla fails to hit 10 million $100/month FSD subscriptions, they could conceivably come up with a cheaper more limited subscription and get Elon his pay.
by jimmySixDOF | 2025-09-06 15:45:34+00:00
HCF came up in the recent IEEE Hot Interconnect Microsoft talked a few min about deploying in their HPC datacenters for AI latency reduction important to All Reduce/Gather operations typically in rings that need to converge and where slowest process dictates the pace

https://youtu.be/vuo6KfdRRZw&t=479
by hannob | 2025-09-06 15:45:39+00:00
> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

I'm pretty sure the term "pull request" existed before GitHub. (Meaning writing an email saying "I have changes in my copy of repo that I want you to merge into the main repo".) But GitHub put an UI around it, and they may've been the first to do that.
by bwfan123 | 2025-09-06 15:45:59+00:00
I felt the same way. The analogy I use is management dictating the tech-stack to use across the org. It does not make any sense ! They need to stay in their lanes, and let engineering teams decide what is best for their work.

Big tech's general strategy is get-big-fast - and then become too-big-to-fail. This was followed by facebook, uber, paypal, etc. The idea is to embed AI into daily behaviors of people whether they like it or not, and hook them. Then, once hooked, developers will clamor for it whether it is useful or not.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-09-06 15:46:29+00:00
It's not how you interact with the data in your own C++ code, it's for passing this data to other in-process consumers (libraries etc). While in the example it calls the release function, this is usually just passed to a downstream consumer and it's their responsibility to call it.

This seems like a strange rationalizations when you don't need to have explicit release to be able to pass it to something else.
by delichon | 2025-09-06 15:46:48+00:00
This isn't just the oldest recorded transaction, it's nearly the oldest known recognizable sample of human writing. Not a love letter or a sermon or a story, but a receipt. This probably reflects their ubiquity rather than importance. There is one known older writing sample, the Kish Tablet of Jemet Nasr. Since that tablet represents lists and counts of goods (barley, oil, livestock), it may also be a receipt, or perhaps an inventory.

The oldest known non-commercial writing is a set of proverbs from around 2600 BCE, Instructions of Shuruppak.

With my luck my most cringe-worthy diary entries will probably last that long.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-09-06 15:46:59+00:00
Kinda weird though, like with many things in the industry we seem to be doing things that are far from optimal, but for some reasons organizations that do things differently aren't winning the competition.

Ostensibly most successful software is written in languages that aren't very good, with development methodologies that aren't very good, in organizational structures that aren't very good. Where is the existence proof? Why isn't software written in a good language, using a good methodology with sane management winning the race?
by cyanydeez | 2025-09-06 15:47:08+00:00
Theres a whole swath of positive regulatory structure that would both improve the company and its employees, but capitalism is stuck in the delusion that self interest is the only yardstick we need to concern ourselves with.

Why? Because being poor isnt a structural problem, but a moral or ethical or laziness.

Its fascinating watching business culture basically align with prosperity gospel in that if you can grift it, it _must_ be good/just/right.
by Cicero22 | 2025-09-06 15:47:18+00:00
0.02% almost reads like satire. If you're on to something you should consider open sourcing it or give far more details to start a real discussion.

One suggestion I have is that you should run this on many binaries instead of just a single one to get an idea of effect on various binaries. If you're already doing this, my apologies. The post made it sound like you've only tested this on a single binary.