MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-22 18:06:20+00:00
> The fine appears to be the largest issued over AI fabrications by a California court

This is a bit like all the stats like "this is appears to be an unprecedented majority in the last 10 years in a Vermont county starting with G for elections held on the 4th when no candidate is from Oklahoma".

Lots of things are historic but that doesn't necessarily mean they're impressive overall. More interesting is how many of these cases have already been tried such that this isn't "historic" for being the first one decided.
by observationist | 2025-09-22 18:06:45+00:00
People who think like this cannot be convinced; they're unaware of the acceleration of the rate of progress, and it won't change until they clash with reality. Don't waste your time and energy trying to convince them.

They don't understand how to calibrate their model of the world with the shape of future changes.

The gap between people who've been paying attention and those who haven't is going to increase, and the difficulty in explaining what's coming is going to keep rising, because humans don't do well with nonlinearities.

The robots are here. The AI is here. The future is now, it's just not evenly distributed, and by the time you've finished arguing or explaining to someone what's coming, it'll have already passed, and something even weirder will be hurtling towards us even faster than whatever they just integrated.

Sometime in the near future, there won't be much for people to do but stand by in befuddled amazement and hope the people who set this all in motion knew what they were doing (because if we're not doing that, we're all toast anyway.)
by kentonv | 2025-09-22 18:06:58+00:00
The input to the map function (when it is called in "record" mode on the client) is an RpcPromise for the eventual value. That means you can't actually inspect the value, you can only queue pipelined calls on it. Since you can't inspect the value, you can't do any computation or branching on it. So any computation and branching you do perform must necessarily have the same result every time the function runs, and so can simply be recorded and replayed.

The only catch is your function needs to have no side effects (other than calling RPC methods). There are a lot of systems out there that have similar restrictions.
by jlokier | 2025-09-22 18:07:19+00:00
onlyrealcuzzo wrote:

> Google is pretty useful. It uses 15 TWh per year.

15TWh per year is about 1.7GW.

Assuming the above figures, that means OpenAI and Nvidia new plan will consume about 5.8 Googles worth of power, by itself.

At that scale, there's a huge opportunity for ultra-low-power AI compute chips (compared with current GPUs), and right now there are several very promising technology pathways to it.
by wongarsu | 2025-09-22 18:07:38+00:00
And there is great cost saving potential in vertical integration. Distribution and transmission are huge costs. If you can build a data center right next to a power plant and just take all their power you get much better prices. Not trivial to do with the kinds of bursty loads that seem typical of AI data centers, but if you can engineer your way to a steady load (or at least steady enough that traditional grid smoothing techniques work) you can get a substantial advantage
by ghurtado | 2025-09-22 18:07:57+00:00
> I don't have your nuanced understanding of the issue.

Let me help unconfuse you, then:

- government swiftly, immediately and directly cancelling a show from a private company because someone said something that's not good for "the party": attack on free speech.

- murder of Charlie Kirk: politically motivated murder by a deranged psycho, which is immediately exploited to AMPLIFY right wing views and cancel left wing ones.

So tell me again, based on what one is currently allowed to say about this very topic: what ideas is the right no longer able to express openly and loudly as a result of this murder?

Don't say "Charlie Kirk": I've heard more of his ideas in recent weeks than I would have if he hadn't been shot.
by ayaros | 2025-09-22 18:08:00+00:00
"Gee Rick, uh, I d-d-don't know if this tutorial is for real, I mean there's a bunch of random nonsense words and other stuff. I mean, is 'backside Snarfus stagnator' even a real thing?"

"Shut up Morty, you just don't unders-*buuurp*-tand what it takes to be a software engineer."

"Are you sure? What's a 'hoob-tunnel' and how does it get clogged with 'gramelions?' That just sounds like an improvised line from that sci-fi cartoon show..."
by ActionHank | 2025-09-22 18:08:01+00:00
> The technology isn't there yet. Yes

> All signs point to it rapidly progressing towards this inflection. Not really

> Current agents are insanely good, every decent programmer using them knows this. Also not really

If you find them "insanely good" you were likely doing work that was already very repetitive or broadly implemented by others.

They have their uses, but it isn't as pervasive as people believe.
by oisdk | 2025-09-22 18:08:12+00:00
> I'd assume "algebraic effects" are to talk about performing algebra on the effects. That is, you are specifically going to talk about how different things combine effects

This is a misconception. The "algebra" does not refer to an algebra of effects, or combining effects in any way.

It's more like it's the other way around: "algebraic effects" are effects generated from algebras. These algebras are precisely-defined mathematical objects (like groups, monoids, etc.), so you have an "effect" that corresponds to monoids, an "effect" that corresponds to groups, and so on.

> My point is simply that there is no value in the program that says an effect has or has not completed. This is why I compare it to stepping through the program. The "line of code" that is active in executing code is not a first class value in your program.

I know: I'm trying to say that the "algebra" of "algebraic effects" do refer to first-class values. The + and * from other algebraic operations are the algebraic operations you might use for an algebraic effect.
by Archelaos | 2025-09-22 18:08:23+00:00
Geothermal energy is constantly available. Offshore wind parks can provide a stable basic supply. Energy storage and grids that connect distant places can mitigate local variability a lot.

I would not advocate against having some fossil emergency backups. I think the planet can cope with a few percent of that. If this were our only concern, then we would have basically solved the problem.
by stetrain | 2025-09-22 18:08:29+00:00
> Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. Most of that amount, $59.4 billion, was paid to the federal government while the remaining $37.3 billion was paid to state and local governments.

https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes-2024/
by vessenes | 2025-09-22 18:09:17+00:00
They account internally for each model separately; Dario said they even think of each model as a separate company on Dwarkesh some time ago.

Inference services are wildly profitable. Currently companies believe it’s economically sensible to plow that money into R&D / Investment in new models through training.

For reference, oAI’s monthly revs are reportedly between $1b and $2b right now. Monthly. I think if you do a little napkin math you’ll see that they could be cashflow positive any time they wanted to.
by mothballed | 2025-09-22 18:09:32+00:00
It might be interesting to have some kind of "shoplifter insurance" card paired with facial recognition you have to show to enter, rather than a store-specific membership. If you steal it is an "at-fault incident" that raises your rates, but no need to deal with the legal system for the store to get the money back.

People that steal a lot would have high insurance rates and would eventually have to order all their food from one of those stores with the prison bars in front.

People that don't steal would have minimal to no insurance rates and would not be paying shrinkage for those that do.
by pkulak | 2025-09-22 18:09:38+00:00
I've actually been watching all the Ladybird update videos (because I'm absolutely giddy at the prospect of a new, open-source browser engine), and they compare their test passing numbers to other browsers, including Servo. And from their own slides, Servo is behind them, but not by much, and making progress at about the same rate.

Maybe that says it all, considering how much of a head start Servo had, but Servo also took a very long... break, as you said.
by stickfigure | 2025-09-22 18:09:45+00:00
I get that you listen to fact-free news. But violent crime statistics don't lie and they show that you're much more likely to be victimized in a red state.

I live in California and no, it is not "well understood" that police do not care about thefts. I watched police catch shoplifters right in the middle of SF. As always, cities full of people aren't perfect, but don't imagine for a second that red states have it better.

Tell me, where do you live? I'd like to know what your direct experience of California is.
by freeplay | 2025-09-22 18:10:16+00:00
If you have worked with HCL in any serious capacity, you'll be happy they didn't go that route.

Here's some fun examples to see why HCL sucks:

- Create an if/elseif/else statement

- Do anything remotely complex with a for loop (tip: you're probably going to have to use `flatten` a lot)
by robwwilliams | 2025-09-22 18:10:35+00:00
Hilarious, and so close to Claude default mode (well yes, parody lol thereof). Try this pre-prompt:

Please respond in mode of Ernest Hemingway

“You’re right. When someone explains why they’re explaining something, it goes in circles. Like a dog chasing its tail.

We do this because we can’t tell anymore when people mean what they say. Everything sounds fake. Even when it’s real.

There are three ways this happens. But naming them won’t fix anything.

You want more words about it? I can give you lists and fancy talk. Make it sound important. But it won’t change what it is.

[That is Claude Sonnet 4 channeling EH]
by lupusreal | 2025-09-22 18:10:38+00:00
Assuming bad faith in the case of Cloudflare specifically? Know first that the CIA once ran a front company for decades that was meant to be a trusted source for cryptographic hardware for use by embassies and the like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

If the CIA wanted to MITM all web traffic, and why wouldn't they, a company like Cloudflare is probably exactly how they'd do it.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-09-22 18:10:57+00:00
I remember being in a raid guild. The guild leader was this random 18 year old kid. I remember noting that this kid was expertly herding cats, many of whom were much older professionals, with absolutely zero direct authority, across multiple timezones, and getting them to not only agreeably distribute valuable loot, but also coordinate them through intricate boss dances and more intricate event scheduling. I thought it was a real shame that this wasn't direct evidence that he should be hired into a people management role immediately.
by izzylan | 2025-09-22 18:11:33+00:00
I was trying to port Cap'n Proto to modern C# as a side project when I was unemployed, since the current implementation years old and new C# features have been released that would make it much nicer to use.

I love the no-copy serialization and object capabilities, but wow, the RPC protocol is incredibly complex, it took me a while to wrap my head around it, and I often had to refer to the C++ implementation to really get it.
by gehsty | 2025-09-22 18:11:37+00:00
I don’t think that’s possible with large scale power infrastructure, and specifically grid infrastructure is so tightly regulated. Closest that I’m aware of was TSMC buying the output of an entire offshore windfarm for 25yrs (largest power purchase contract ever - TSMC / Ørsted)… maybe Microsoft re starting nuclear power plants, or Google reporting offshore wind sites come out of contract (but nothing at the 10GW scale).
by jerf | 2025-09-22 18:11:46+00:00
Do lawyers and judges not by now have software that turns all these citations into hyperlinks into some relevant database? Software that would also flag a citation as not having a referent? Surely this exists and is expensive but in wide usage...?

It's not a large step after that to verify that a quote actually exists in the cited document, though I can see how perhaps that was not something that was necessary up to this point.

I have to think the window on this being even slightly viable is going to close quickly. When you ship something to a judge and their copy ends up festooned with "NO REFERENT" symbols it's not going to go well for you.
by rdtsc | 2025-09-22 18:12:58+00:00
I wonder what's going on in the minds of these people.

I would just be terribly embarrassed and not be able to look at myself in the mirror if I did shit like this.

> batuhanilgarr posted a comment (6 days ago) Thanks for the quick review. You’re right ...

On one hand, it's sort of surprising that they double down, copy and paste the response to the llm prompt, paste back that response and hope for the best. But, of course it shouldn't be surprising. This is not just a mistake, it's deliberate lying and manipulating.
by Sammi | 2025-09-22 18:13:01+00:00
Did you watch all the videos where he says all the hateful things? Why wouldn't you link to all those videos? Cause for being such a supposedly kind man he sure did say a lot of hateful stuff. We have 10 years of backlog to go though.

Like how he dehumanized women by saying they should submit to their husbands. Or when he said Joe Biden should be killed. Or all the times he used slurs for lgbt. Or the time he joked that it would be funny if the Pelosi attacker would be let loose. Or all the many times he called women and black people dumb. He can't help himself, he goes on and on with his explicit hate and racism. I've had they misfortune of watching the full length videos of these clips, and they just make it clear that he really means these things. He just keeps speaking his hateful heart.

He wished death on his political opponents. That alone should make him someone you wouldn't want to associate with for fear of how it reflects on you.
by perlgeek | 2025-09-22 18:13:10+00:00
It's like going to the doctor and getting a runny nose diagnosis because you've got a runny nose.

In the end, a diagnosis only helps the patient if it enables a treatment, hopefully an effective one. If you have a cluster of symptoms with two possible causes, and there is no difference in the care for the patient, what's the point of further differential diagnosis?
by decasia | 2025-09-22 18:13:30+00:00
Agreeing with most of the other comments here that this discussion needs more context which we don't have...

If the request for additional access controls/access cleanup came from one of the Ruby Central funders, could we not know who that was and what exactly their ask consisted of? I am interested in knowing their side of the story, and what the motivation was. (But in general, cutting off long-time maintainers' access seems like a bad choice - as presumably they have long since proven their good will toward the ruby community as shepherds of these projects.)
by ninalanyon | 2025-09-22 18:13:53+00:00
> If this study was reproducible (it is not) someone would have started using it

That supposes that there is an army of researchers dedicated to repeating expensive experiments. As far as I can tell this is doesn't exist. Especially in cases like this when it's obvious that the experimental protocol lacked controls and hence would cost more to repeat than the original study.

There are plenty of things that are not reproducible yet they make their way into text books and general practice.

I don't know if the claims in this article are correct but it is suggestive nonetheless:

"The analysis, which is published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, included 154 Cochrane systematic reviews published between 2015 and 2019. Only 15 (9.9 percent) had high-quality evidence according to the gold-standard method for determining whether they provide high or low-quality evidence, called GRADE (grading of recommendations, assessment, development and evaluation).

Among these, only two had statistically significant results – meaning that the results were unlikely to have arisen due to random error – and were believed by the review authors to be useful in clinical practice.

Using the same system, 37 percent had moderate, 31 percent had low, and 22 percent had very low-quality evidence."

https://www.sciencealert.com/around-90-percent-of-your-medic...
by madcaptenor | 2025-09-22 18:14:35+00:00
Fulton County is a weird shape for historical reasons - it absorbed the counties to its north and south during the Depression - and historically the northern part of Fulton County (everything north of the Chattahoochee River) was Milton County. If Milton County still existed it would probably end up in Woodard's "Greater Appalachia" over "Deep South".

We can ignore current settlement patterns because Woodard does. In a recent paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00330...) he does explain the methodology, although I don't have access - but from the snippets I can see it appears that he's essentially trying to work out who the first European settlers in each area were. So it doesn't matter that north Fulton County is full of carpetbaggers from up North and immigrants. (I write this as I sit in an office in north Fulton County; I am a carpetbagger from up North and many of my co-workers are immigrants.)

It makes sense for the split to be along county lines just because a lot of data will be available at the county level, but it occasionally produces absurd results. I occasionally have mocked these splits as "I drive to Appalachia for ramen", because I used to live in DeKalb County about a mile from the DeKalb-Gwinnett county line - according to Woodard's map, DeKalb is "Deep South" and Gwinnett is "Appalachia" - and I liked a ramen place just over the county line. (Since then both I and the ramen place have moved.)
by vessenes | 2025-09-22 18:15:06+00:00
The article is basically worthless. Wealth follows a power law; saying 90x% of millionaires didn’t move is noise. The very wealthy are in fact moving; they don’t want to be subject to a tax jurisdiction that claims reach on global income. Now, they weren’t paying tax on that income before, so it’s not like it will make a huge impact on UK revenues, but I know that those folks tend to hire local professional services, bankers, etc; we’ll see if they keep doing business with the UK or look elsewhere, like the US. Smart money would be on the US + Dubai right now I think.
by stale2002 | 2025-09-22 18:15:06+00:00
Does anyone in the finance business know how legal this all it? I am hearing terms like "round tripping" being thrown around. A practice where a company sells and buys back its own product to artificially inflate revenue.

I'm asking because its not just OpenAI that they are apparently doing this with, instead its with multiple other major GPU providers, like Coreweave.

And its just being done all out in the open? How?
by n_u | 2025-09-22 18:15:20+00:00
Hi, thank you for your work on this and being willing to answer questions on it.

"We guarantee durability via replication". I've starting noticing this pattern more where distributed systems provide durability by replicating data rather than writing it to disk and achieving the best of both worlds. I'm curious

1. Is there a name for this technique?

2. How do you calculate your availability? This blog post[1] has some rough details but I'd love to see the math.

3. I'm guessing a key part of this is putting the replicas in different AZs and assuming failures aren't correlated so you can multiply the probabilities directly. How do you validate that failures across AZs are statistically independent?

Thanks!

[1] https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-metal-theres-no-rep...
by nightpool | 2025-09-22 18:15:33+00:00
"These randos" are our friends and fellow contributors. Probably everybody in the Ruby community has worked with theme in one capacity or another. The article provides no reason why they should have had their contribution permissions revoked. Just because you think of Ruby as a "niche DSL" and the people maintaining its core infrastructure as "randos" doesn't mean the rest of us do.
by dummydummy1234 | 2025-09-22 18:15:35+00:00
My thought is think of all the really cheap compute that will be available to researchers. Sure, it will crash but at the end of the day there will be a huge glut of gpus that datacenters will be trying to rent out near cost.

I (as a uninformed rando) think that there are a lot of research ideas that have not been fully explored because doing a small training run takes 100k. If that drops to 1000, then there is a lot more opportunities to try new techniques.
by Scalestein | 2025-09-22 18:16:10+00:00
There are three knots I use that have covered all my needs as a casual camper:

Taut-line hitch

Sliding knot for fastening loads or setting guy-lines https://www.netknots.com/rope_knots/tautline-hitch

Bowline

Essential general knot for tying a loop. https://www.netknots.com/rope_knots/bowline

Square Knot

Used for joining ropes or just an easy to unite knot. For joining ropes you could do a sheet bend which is stronger https://www.netknots.com/rope_knots/square-knot

https://www.netknots.com/rope_knots/sheet-bend

There are a billion options so I recommend just picking a few and practicing until you can tie them quickly without references. You'll start to understand hope knots in general work and be able to pick up other knots much easier.
by reenorap | 2025-09-22 18:16:18+00:00
The only reason why Ruby and other open source projects survive is because large companies can trust them to do the right thing. Given the critical nature of the supply chain attacks, what the board did was 100% right. Like he said, some people's egos got hurt but if no one can trust the maintainers, then Ruby has no future in the industry and it will die quickly.

This is basically like fixing technical debt. It's painful and it's political but sometimes you have to do the right thing for the community as opposed to trying to assuage individuals' egos.