MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ForHackernews | 2025-09-24 09:30:31+00:00
Betteridge's law of headlines in effect.

As I commented elsewhere...

Human brains are not computers. There is no "memory" separate from the "processor". Your hippocampus is not the tape for a Turing machine. Everything about biology is complex, messy and analogue. The complexity is fractal: every neuron in your brain is different from every other one, there's further variation within individual neurons, and likely differential expression at the protein level.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11711151/
by vidarh | 2025-09-24 09:30:50+00:00
By your defdinition, life is obviously a computation.

The symbolic nature of digital computers is our interpretation on top of physical "problems". If we attribute symbols to the proteins encoded by DNA, symbolic computation takes place. If we don't attribute symbols to the voltages in a digtal computer, we could equally dismiss them as not being computers.

And we have a history of analogue computers as well, e.g. water-based computation[1][2], to drive home that computers are solving physical problems in the process of producing what we then interpret as symbols.

There is no meaningful distinction.

The question of whether life is a computation hinges largely on whether life can produce outputs that can not be simulated by a Turing complete computer, and that can not be replicated by an artificial computer without some "magic spark" unique to life.

Even in that case, there'd be the question of those outputs were simply the result of some form of computation, just outside the computable set inside our universe, but at least in that case there'd be a reasonable case for saying life isn't a computation.

As it is, we have zero evidence to suggest life exceeds the Turing computable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator

[2] https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2015/06/computer-water-dro...
by Vinnl | 2025-09-24 09:31:10+00:00
I don't think you always have to invite every Anna to everything. Usually, there are somewhat natural groups that are relevant to invite, and you invite the Anna's that are part of that. So if I'm having drinks with colleagues, I'll also invite my colleague Anna, but not my former college classmate Anna.

Nowadays this happens even more naturally, as my different groups will also be organised in their own Signal groups. So I'll just send a group message to my colleagues group, and there will always be people in there that never go - but they're welcome to.
by isoprophlex | 2025-09-24 09:31:18+00:00
Extremely impressive, but can one really run these >200B param models on prem in any cost effective way? Even if you get your hands on cards with 80GB ram, you still need to tie them together in a low-latency high-BW manner.

It seems to me that small/medium sized players would still need a third party to get inference going on these frontier-quality models, and we're not in a fully self-owned self-hosted place yet. I'd love to be proven wrong though.
by Maro | 2025-09-24 09:31:26+00:00
The only direct quote from DHH in the article seems to be this, which is quoted as being offensive (?):

> “First-world problems” shouldn’t be seen as an insult, but a celebration! Hurraaaay, I have ascended from the daily toils and tribulations of a life in the third world, so my worries may now include slow laundry machines and air conditioning, not starvation or failed states

How is this offensive? Seems like a nothing burger.

I don't know anything about this topic other than what was in this post.
Chat Control is already live on Facebook Messenger
by sputr | 2025-09-24 09:31:26+00:00
I don’t use Facebook Messenger much, but I did recently to reconnect with a friend from my teenage years.

Today I woke up to the following message: “You can’t send messages for 3 days. Something you sent in a chat went against our Community Standards.” This was followed by a button linking to those standards. And yes, all my chats are locked.

So I’ve been put in “time out.” An American corporation has decided I’m not allowed to speak to my friend for 3 days (our only way to communicate—a mistake in hindsight).

And before you ask: what did I say? Most of the conversation was entirely banal. But at one point I was asked about the most memorable things from my time in politics. Among other things, I mentioned a quiet rumor about a ch#ild pros#####on ring (see, I’m self-censoring! I’m a good and obedient citizen!) in a bar frequented by the local political elite. That was last night. And no, my friend did not report me.

People believe private chats to be, well, private. They also believe that Facebook Messenger is encrypted. Neither is true.

Except that when I tell people about this, the most common response is not surprise or anger, but a kind of weary acceptance - as if the problem isn’t the censorship, but my failure to follow the rules.

I was part of the politically active youth a decade ago, fighting for free speech, net neutrality, against censorship, and against corporate power taking over and corrupting what we saw as a beautiful force for good: the internet. It seems we failed. The well-paid IT jobs turned out to be too sweet to pass up.

I guess we still have Signal. For now.
by junon | 2025-09-24 09:32:08+00:00
Writing rust fulltime for my personal projects, I have to disagree that Rust isn't ergonomic.

In fact, I find it more ergonomic than any other language I ever work with. I'm consistently more productive with it than even scripting languages.

Getting tired of this quip being asserted as fact. Ergonomics are subjective; memory safety is not.
by skylurk | 2025-09-24 09:32:31+00:00
No writing class at 16 of course, although all assignments were still required to be submitted in cursive until around then, with points quickly docked for spelling and tidiness lapses.

But the curriculum was years behind, so by the time something showed up in the school material, a lot of kids had already learned it. Either outside of school, or just the previous year... the material always seemed recycled from year to year, just with ever increasing page count requirements for assignments. It was a private school, and thereby avoided scrutiny.

Come to think of it, I actually do remember a lot of rote memorisation of religious texts, though. Not sure how I forgot about it, it was a pretty stressful subject. We had to write those from memory in cursive too.
by TheCapeGreek | 2025-09-24 09:32:37+00:00
I tried CP2077's Deck mode but it really seemed like a tech demo level of "you could do this if you really wanted to" more than it actually being playable.

The game felt like it had significant input lag, and at 720p with upscaling text becomes very hard to read. The game's visual style of "glitch" effects also translates badly with upscaling and I really had a tough time actually understanding what I'm looking at on the screen.

Perhaps the situation is better on OLED.
by Jolter | 2025-09-24 09:33:30+00:00
As soon as what you have in your machine doesn’t literally match the stated system requirements, you’re on your own. It’s up to the user to research and understand which CPU or GPU is ”better” or ”worse” than the required one. These things are nontrivial when comparing between generations and across tiers, not to mention across different vendors.

A knowledgeable user might be able to predict their performance reasonably well, based on publicly available benchmark databases, but you still can’t really get a good estimate FPS unless you find someone with exactly your hardware setup who benchmarked the game (and is willing to share).
by Ghoelian | 2025-09-24 09:36:14+00:00
> - No ⌘. sending CTRL-C (muscle memory and being advertised as native to the Mac is what one would expect).

For what it's worth, that shortcut also doesn't work in the Jetbrains terminal, Alacritty, Kitty, and even iTerm2. The only terminal emulator I've tried so far where that works is the built-in Terminal.app.
by iainmerrick | 2025-09-24 09:36:35+00:00
Again you're making unsupported assertions ("trained most on Python code") and coming to unsupported conclusions ("they seem to prefer it") -- my own very quick experiment shows that it depends on how you ask ("app" versus "code") at the very least.

The choices of JS and Python were pretty solid for the prompts I gave. Maybe the LLM is, well, making a reasonable decision in context, rather than just defaulting to Python!

"LLMs prefer Python" is an over-simplification. Python was already very popular, so I agree that LLMs are likely to entrench that popularity, but that doesn't mean Python will grow into other areas where it wasn't being used much before.
by noobermin | 2025-09-24 09:37:08+00:00
For the aid of the unfamiliar and those unwilling to just google (I often am one of these in other discussions), a number of functions in fortran that operate on array types are built-in to the language and do not require linking in, these are called "intrinsic procedures" in fortran's parlance. They are generally implemented for modern compilers on modern OS'es as libraries of course linked in during runtime like the C stdlib is in C (gfortran's are a C library last I checked although I'm not super knowledgeable about the details there). From the user's perspective, they need not be linked during compilation. External libraries (modules in modern fortran) on the other hand require you to link them in and also have their modules in the compiler's module path, similar to includes but not quite the same as modules are binary files.

Anyway, this is discussion is all for the sake of teaching students. For a python learning student, I assume they do not start from zero and instead told to using anaconda or some build script that gives them a standard jupyter install. From then on in the code they use, matplotlib and numpy appear on equal footing, a set of function calls that just have different prefixes, in their eyes. This surface level similarity is what I mean by them appearing to have convenience level. The fact that jupyter installs are pretty standard and have loads of documentation helps ameliorate potential issues during installation.

In fortran on the other hand, you do not need an external module for the array facilities (things like shape, dot_product, things for initialising arrays, etc) given the built-ins and the first class nature of arrays. However, you will need to `use` a module for plotting (fairly easy, essentially one line for importing) and link it and add it to the module path (potentially fraught). This is what I mean about them appearing on different footing, from a naive student's perspective.

While there are attempts to provide a nice package system for fortran, it's generally the wildwest out there just like it is for c++ and c, so unless the instructor essentially has them work only on lab machines they control, using external libraries seems to me to be a huge source of headaches when dealing with students once they go off to install it themselves.
by vidarh | 2025-09-24 09:40:03+00:00
The very immediate utility is that if life is computation, would be to tell us that life is possible to simulate, and that AGI is possible (because if there is no "magic spark" of life, then the human brain would be existence proof that a power and space- efficient computer capable of general intelligence can be constructed; however hard it might be).

If life is not a computation, then neither of those are a given.

But it has other impacts too, such as moral impacts. If life is a computation, then that rules out any version of free will that involves effective agency (a compatibilist conception of free will is still possible, but that does not involve effective agency, merely the illusion of agency), and so blaming people for their actions would be immoral as they could not at any point have chosen differently, and moral frameworks for punishment would need to center on minimising harm to everyone including perpetrators. That is hard pill to swallow for most.

It has philosophical implications as well, in that proof that life is computation would mean the simulation argument becomes more likely to hold.
by latexr | 2025-09-24 09:40:04+00:00
> And for God's sake, whatever you do, don't, under any circumstances...

I’ve only seen the movie when it came out, so I didn’t remember this scene and thought you might’ve been doing the ellipsis yourself. So I checked it out. For anyone else curious, the character was interrupted.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240772/characters/nm0000093?it...
by te0006 | 2025-09-24 09:40:51+00:00
Interesting - do you need to take any special measures to get OSS genAI models to work on this architecture? Can you use inference engines like Ollama and vLLM off-the-shelf (as Docker containers) there, with just the Radeon 8060S GPU? What token rates do you achieve?

(edit: corrected mistake w.r.t. the system's GPU)
by cyberpunk | 2025-09-24 09:40:52+00:00
Sparkasse and VR aren't the two largest German banks. DB is at least double the size of Commerzbank which is again 100mn in assets ahead of DZ. I don't find it all that surprising that these small banks are still trying to keep their legacy systems alive, but it's not the case for the bigger boys. (Source: work for several of them)
by dbspin | 2025-09-24 09:42:39+00:00
Thanks, really appreciate the concrete examples. They're not quite what I was referring to (developer praised by company / media - then attacked for issues with the company beyond their purview), but they do point to a (largely invisible from outside the industry / twitter bubble) truly worrying and frightening level of animosity and aggression pointed towards devs that I wasn't sufficiently aware of.
by thinkingemote | 2025-09-24 09:43:52+00:00
found this on twitter: https://x.com/Hannibal9972485/status/1970540224867365060

no idea if its accurate. the replies appear to be disagreeing with it

>>>

It’s a Telecom Bypass Scam Using SIM Farms…Grey-routing is when international calls are re-routed through SIM farms like the one in those photos, instead of going through legitimate telecom carrier infrastructure.

Someone overseas makes a call to a U.S. number Let’s say someone in Nigeria calls a U.S. bank or friend.

Normally, the call would be routed through official international telecom carriers, and each leg of that call would cost money.

The person calling (or their carrier) pays international calling fees to reach the U.S. phone network.

Scammers hijack the call and reroute it through their SIM farm

Instead of going through legit U.S. carrier infrastructure like AT&T or Verizon, the call:

Enters a VoIP (internet call) gateway.

Is then re-routed to one of the SIM cards in the SIM farm, which is sitting on U.S. soil and connected to a local mobile network (like T-Mobile or Boost).

This SIM answers and makes the call look like a local one like it’s just a guy in Houston calling a local pizza shop.

The call completes, but the real telecom carriers get screwed

The call appears as a local mobile call on U.S. networks, not international traffic. For the record, someone may find this interesting.

The scammers avoid all the expensive international “termination” fees.

The telcos (Verizon, AT&T, etc.) get paid nothing, because it looks like local traffic.

Meanwhile, the grey-router charges the VoIP client a discounted rate, pockets the cash, and repeats the process at scale.
by nromiun | 2025-09-24 09:44:10+00:00
Why are you verbosely repeating my own replies? You asked why, I told you a theory that MAYBE because they were trained on Python code. You do know that's how a LLM or even a simple neural network works right?

Of course it is an over-simplification. Should I do an empirical scientific study before I can reply that MAYBE LLMs seem to prefer Python? I was talking from my own personal experience.

Are you using a LLM to write your replies? Because they seem very odd to me.
by ckbkr10 | 2025-09-24 09:44:22+00:00
My workday is 95% terminal, I work on a company managed windows 11 machine using git-scm as an easily updateable min-gw environment. A git-bash has been my configurable linux terminal on windows.

Why would one need a gpu accelerated terminal? What's the use case here?

I mean, I've worked on connections offering a an mbit of throughput. That was enough for the kind of work I'm doing.

I really do not understand what this is for, can someone enlighten me please?
by gloosx | 2025-09-24 09:45:11+00:00
Life is a form of predictive processing, like LLMs try to mimic life by predicting the next word, brains are constantly predicting the state of the world itself.

LLMs run on billions, gigawatts, and all of human knowledge to predict the next word.

Life runs on scraps to predict the next world.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe it’s computation alone.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-24 09:45:41+00:00
> Note they may even believe that today's AI systems may not be much of a net benefit, but they probably see the state of the art advancing quickly so that companies who take a wait-and-see approach will be late to the game when AI is a substantial productivity enhancer.

This doesn't make a huge amount of sense, because the stuff is changing so quickly anyway. It's far from clear that, in the hypothetical future where this stuff is net-useful in five years, experience with _today's_ tools will be of any real use at all.
by integralid | 2025-09-24 09:45:45+00:00
After, sometimes, the initial scanning, the security and AV industry deals with file hashes, not actual files. This means that if you wrote a legitimate, harmful program, and a malicious version with the same hash, you would be able to troll the security rolls in many cases. Basically, those two files would look the same to the security program.

The thing that makes this blog post not realistic is:

* Such tricks would make much more sense with normal programs, where you're trying to trick an user to download and execute it. Webshells are downloaded by the attacker knowingly.

* Md5 is not used anymore (although I know security vendors who used it for embarrassingly long time). If this was SHA256, that attack would be devastating for many more severe reasons.

But it's still a fun PoC.
by zaiyiqi | 2025-09-24 09:45:48+00:00
Thanks for the feedback, that's a really good point.

To be honest, I added that text hoping to improve search engine visibility, but I wasn't sure if it was the right approach. It seems like it hurts the user experience.

Is the general consensus that this kind of content should live on a separate "blog" or "about" page for a single-page application like this? I'm new to this and would love to learn the best practice.

Thanks again!
by simianparrot | 2025-09-24 09:46:24+00:00
And this type of person seems to be exactly why Ruby Central did what it did: To save the projects from being misused as protest tools by histrionic people that make sweeping derogatory remarks about other people whose benign opinions they dislike.

I am not affiliated with either “side” so I allow myself this small outburst of my own because I see no receipts and the tone of this blog post set the stage for it.
by immibis | 2025-09-24 09:46:31+00:00
First thing I thought when reading it. This story makes no sense. Nothing they mentioned in the article is actually illegal. Having lots of phones (even in a rack-mount form factor) isn't illegal. Even if the phone network could conceivably be DoSed with that many phones all calling at once, it's not illegal unless you actually do that or intend to do it. And their other justification was that this equipment could be used to send anonymous or encrypted communications - that's not illegal either. Even this government hasn't gotten to the point of making encryption illegal.
by kace91 | 2025-09-24 09:47:00+00:00
>What's wrong with Java? It's used everywhere from FinTech startups to banks/insurers

As the OP, it’s not even the language for me but the implications of companies that use it.

It’s a non starter for startup/scaleups and strongly related with oldish companies and consulting firms, which in turn translates to far worse working conditions (not remote friendly, overtime, dress code, etc).

Mind that it might just be a local culture thing, your mileage may vary.
by al_borland | 2025-09-24 09:47:27+00:00
I think you underestimate the resilience of the human race. We have a space station where people live outside of earth. We have people living in Antarctica. On small scales, we can completely control environments to make them hospitable.

The idea that all the humans will die off in the lifetime of anyone who is alive today, from something slow moving like climate change, is pretty far fetched.
by Alifatisk | 2025-09-24 09:47:38+00:00
Yeah I was a bit surprised by that part

> I regret to say I am unable to support an organization which seems unable to publicly disavow a man [...] who is now apparently cheering on death via starvation in third world countries.

I do not understand how such conclusion could be drawn, I even started asking myself how any of this was related to the current issue with RubyCentral and RubyGems?
by spoiler | 2025-09-24 09:48:39+00:00
I worked with large React and large Angular (1 and 2+) codebases. I even migrated projects between them.

I genuinely don't understand how Angular is considered simpler than React.

Both have a build step. React hasn't needed a "generator" for years now (if you mean stuff like CRA). With tools like Vite or RSBuild, it's like 2 lines. Yeah, the JSX needs to be compiled, but so do templates, custom CSS dialect, and TS's old/non-standard decorators in Angular.

Angular has way more quirks and reactivity foot guns than React. I think major React adoption painpoint is hooks, but while they are clunky, they're way "easier to hold" than most Angular tools.

Same when it comes to state management libraries in angular, but I digress.
by seanhunter | 2025-09-24 09:49:10+00:00
Firstly the crux of that hypothesis seems completely undecidable. Secondly it seems to me that applying something like Turing equivalence to things which are not computer programs is a category error which leads to him talking very obvious total nonsense.

1. Complexity != computation. How does a weather system compute anything at all for example? By any standard definition of these words it doesn’t. Since Wolfram never defines his terms rigourously, this statement is prima facie meaningless.

2. Computational complexity != equivalence. He’s talked about implementing the universe in 4 lines of mathematica code when clearly mathematica itself is in the universe and takes more than 4 lines of code to implement. What he (actually his staff) has implemented in 4 lines is a cellular automaton that is Turing equivalent. That’s cool but it’s not the universe. If you’re not drinking the kool-ade it’s just nonsense.

3. How does any of that make life indistinguishable from computation? All life that I’ve observed seems to be very easily distinguishable from computation, and I would suggest that anyone who finds this confusing should probably get out more.
by mijoharas | 2025-09-24 09:49:17+00:00
Yeah, I don't really think it's addressed much in this article, but it's fairly clear from his posts. There is a thread here discussing it[0].

Essentially, he is posting articles[1] saying he wants fewer non-white people in London.[2].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303111

[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303305
by klaussilveira | 2025-09-24 09:50:21+00:00
Well, in the age of 3440x1440 displays and retina, you are forced to render high-quality fonts, not just bitmaps. In order to do that well, and fast enough, you need the GPU.

Font rendering is hard:

https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/

https://behdad.org/text2024/

So much that Slug is a thing:

https://sluglibrary.com/