MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _jab | 2025-10-28 13:40:36+00:00
Many questioning why Microsoft would agree to this, but to me the concessions they made strike me as minor.

> OpenAI remains Microsoft’s frontier model partner and Microsoft continues to have exclusive IP rights and Azure API exclusivity

This should be the headline - Microsoft maintains its financial and intellectual stranglehold on OpenAI.

And meanwhile, while vaguer, a few of the bullet points are potentially very favorable to Microsoft:

> Microsoft can now independently pursue AGI alone or in partnership with third parties.

> The revenue share agreement remains until the expert panel verifies AGI, though payments will be made over a longer period of time.

Hard to say what a "longer period of time" means, but I presume it is substantial enough to make this a major concession from OpenAI.
by jen20 | 2025-10-28 13:40:40+00:00
To be any use staging environments should be scientific tests. They should prove that a given change, if it goes to production, will work.

You cannot do this if you're changing more than that one thing. The only way to make this work really is either dynamic environments that completely mirror everything, which tends to be time consuming or expensive or continuous delivery to a production-like environment via feature flags and so forth.

Having a staging server that is a mirror of production[1] improves things a bit over doing nothing. You need the entire environment, including all your dependencies, to have a real test of anything, and that includes things that corporate IT departments typically hate.

[1]: Why is it so common to see "PROD" written as if it were an acronym?
by bluGill | 2025-10-28 13:41:00+00:00
I have privacy concerns, but an AI that worked as a servant would be a great help. I can't afford servants (or slaves), but I want something that listens in and takes action when I want something. Interrupt me when I'm planning vacation to remind me that there is some other event at home when I'd be gone. When I run low on baking powder ensure I get more.

Again, the privacy concerns need to be addressed. However there is a lot of potential for an AI in my house if it works.
by codethief | 2025-10-28 13:41:05+00:00
First off, I know next to nothing about the C64, so please bear with me. :)

That being said, did you try zig64[0]? AFAIU this is the Zig equivalent/rewrite of the emulator you mentioned:

> I was looking for this https://github.com/M64GitHub/6510-emulator-c […] but it doesn't run 100% fast.

[0]: https://github.com/M64GitHub/zig64
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-10-28 13:41:08+00:00
For MILP there isn't one single standard, but multiple competing solutions.

Nearly every solver supports the MPS format, but that's a really old format straight from the era of punchcards, it sucks.

Many solvers support the nl format, which is a low level format spat out by the AMPL tool (commercial software for mathematical modeling).

Many solvers support the CPLEX lp format, which is a nice human readable and writable format.

Google OR-Tools includes an API for mathematical modeling that supports the relevant open source MIP solvers plus Gurobi I think and its own CP solver. There are Python and Julia packages that try to do the same (rather than calling the solver APIs directly they usually spit out a problem in nl format though).

MiniZinc supports various open source MILP solvers plus various CP solvers. Very nice language, very high level.

For MINLP the only standard I know of is OSiL but support for it is spotty, mostly supported by open source tools I think.
by zug_zug | 2025-10-28 13:41:27+00:00
Current and long-time loudoun county resident here.

We mostly don't like them, we mostly do feel disenfranchised, and people are trying to mobilize more political awareness of which politicians are cozying up to data-centers.

One of the biggest complaints isn't the data-centers themselves, but that they use so much electricity that these heinously ugly power-lines have to get put up in what is one of the most beautiful nature areas of the country (i.e. "blue ridge mountains / Shennandoah river / country roads").

> Also, those same people have the most ability to live wherever they want, and can leave.

That's a ludicrous suggestion. The tax alone on selling your house is at a minimum 10%, aside from every other cost, that's basically a 6 figure loss plus all your close family and friends.

> This is wealthy DC lobbyists being a little annoyed about a hum.

No. It's mostly the residents who predate the datacenters who are the most opposed. Western Loudoun was actually mostly farmland one generation ago, and actually had a bit of hippie / homeschooler energy.

---

Instead datacenters should be required by law to build underground with noise limits, and required by law to not increase electricity prices and not drain the grid around them. If they can't be profitable without negative externalities then they aren't worth having.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-10-28 13:41:37+00:00
I've been skeptical about LLMs being able to replace humans in their current state (which has gotten marginally better in the last 18 months), but let us not forget that GPT-3.5 (the first truly useful LLM) was only 3 years ago. We aren't even 10 years out from the initial papers about GPTs.
by ossner | 2025-10-28 13:42:28+00:00
> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel.

What were they really expecting as an alternative? Anyone can "declare AGI" especially since it's an inherently ill-defined (and agruably undefinable) concept, it's strange that this is the first bullet point like this was the fruit of intensive deliberation.

I don't fully understand what is going on in this market as a whole, I really doubt anyone does, but I do believe we will look back on this period and wonder what the hell we were thinking believing and lapping up everything these corporations were putting out.
by 0xCE0 | 2025-10-28 13:42:31+00:00
If one is "experienced software developer", I'd say one then can guide oneself to right direction for learning by starting asking the most basic/obvious/childish questions, e.g. what libraries/languages/datasets/data formats/concepts is needed to understand and map/chart the territory (yes, that is what OP is basically doing now, asking but not just barreling into messy action) with a goal to create a minimal prototype.

True experienced developers have learned how to solve any programming problem. This related reading was actually yesterday mentioned at HN: https://beej.us/guide/bglcs/
by chownie | 2025-10-28 13:42:32+00:00
Does it become ok if we redefine wronging you so it's no longer a crime? This is what the people looking for reparations are arguing, no wrongs were ever righted because the responsible at no point considered it their duty to do so.

This means they have been generationally disadvantaged compared to you. It means they have had worse social mobility. By the time Obama rolled around there had only been four black US senators in its history.

The US's historic (and ongoing!) poor treatment of its people based on skin colour is so obvious from the outside that I struggle to understand how you don't see it. The government can snap into action for Florida but cannot find its energy for New Orleans, and many other such interesting coincedences.

> done by their ancestors long enough ago that most have no real life recollection of it anymore.

The last US school to desegregated did it in the 1990s, it very much is within memory.
by lisbbb | 2025-10-28 13:42:47+00:00
It's as matter of practice. The major problem is that business folks don't even know how to produce a testable spec, they just give you some vague idea about what it is they want and you're supposed to produce a PoC and show it to them so they can refine their idea. If you go and produce a bunch of tests based on what they asked for, but no working code, you're getting fired. The whole process is on its head because we don't have solid engineering minds in most roles, we have people with liberal arts degrees faking it until they make it.

There were a few places I worked that TDD actually succeeded because the project was fairly well baked and the requirements that came it could be understood. That was the exception, not the rule.
by dpoloncsak | 2025-10-28 13:42:51+00:00
The whole argument is "A written response to an answer is no longer a valid form of testing for knowledge"

We don't need better detection. We need better ways to measure one's grasp of a concept. When calculators were integrated into education, the focus shifted from working the problem out, to using the correct formulas and using the calculator effectively. Sure, elementary classes will force you to 'show your work', but that's to build the foundation to build on, I believe.

We don't need to detect plagiarism if we're asking students verbal answers, for example
by nihzm | 2025-10-28 13:43:33+00:00
Since as you say this utilitarian view is rather common, perhaps it would good to show _why_ this is problematic by presenting a counterargument.

The basic premise under GP's statements is that although not perfect, we should use the technology in such a way that it maximizes the well being of the largest number of people, even if comes at the expense of a few.

But therein lies a problem: we cannot really measure well being (or utility). This becomes obvious if you look at individuals instead of the aggregate: imagine LLM therapy becomes widespread and a famous high profile person and your (not famous) daughter end up in "the few" for which LLM therapy goes terribly wrong and commit suicide. The loss of the famous person will cause thousands (perhaps millions) people to be a bit sad, and the loss of your daughter will cause you unimaginable pain. Which one is greater? Can they even be be compared? And how many people with a successful LLM therapy are enough to compensate for either one?

Unmeasurable well-being then makes these moral calculations at best inexact and at worst completely meaningless. And if they are truly meaningless, how can they inform your LLM therapy policy decisions?

Suppose for the sake of the argument we accept the above, and there is a way to measure well being. Then would it be just? Justice is a fuzzy concept, but imagine we reverse the example above: many people lose their lives because of bad LLM therapy, but one very famous person in the entertainment industry is saved by LLM therapy. Let's suppose then that this famous persons' well being plus the millions of spectators' improved well-being (through their entertainment) is worth enough to compensate the people who died.

This means saving a famous funny person justifies the death of many. This does not feel just, does it?

There is a vast amount of literature on this topic (criticisms of utilitarianism).
by taeric | 2025-10-28 13:43:34+00:00
I'd go a little further, though? Transactions have to be able to fail at the very last step. That could just be the "commit" stage. Everything up to that point could have been perfectly fine, but at commit it fails. More, the time of execution of that commit could be fairly far removed from the time of starting the transaction.

To that end, any style that tries to move those two time periods closer together in code is almost doomed to have some either hard to reason about code, or some tough edge cases that are hard to specify.

(Granted, I'll note that most transactions that people are dealing with on a regular basis probably do open and close rather close to each other.)
by 9rx | 2025-10-28 13:43:51+00:00
I'm not sure that's true. In essence, property tests are a method for defining types where a language lacks natural expression. In a vacuum, nearly all code could benefit from (more advanced) types. But:

1. Tradeoffs, as always. The more advanced typing you head towards, the much more time consuming it becomes to reason about the program. There is good reason for why even the most staunch type advocates rarely push for anything more advanced than monads. A handful of assertive tests is usually good enough, while requiring significantly less effort.

2. Not just time consuming, but often beyond comprehension. Most developers just don't know how to think in terms of formal proofs. Throw a language with an advanced type system, like Coq or Idris, in from of them and they wouldn't have a clue what to do with it (even ignoring the unfamiliar syntax). And with property tests, now you're asking them to not only think in advanced types, but to also effectively define the types themselves from scratch. Despite #1, I fully expect we would still see more property testing if it weren't for this huge impediment.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-28 13:44:07+00:00
"getting paid" is the operative word. Employees get paid, that is their compensation. If you want to be an owner, you need to either invest, or have that clearly included in your employment agreement.

Owners don't get paid as such. They have risk of loss, and only if the company is successful do they get a positive return on their investment.

Employees do have risk of losing their jobs, but don't really risk not getting paid for work performed.
by cogman10 | 2025-10-28 13:44:57+00:00
And because it's become apparent that LLMs aren't converging on what's traditionally been understood as AGI.

The promise of AGI is that you could prompt the LLM "Prove that the Riemann Hypothesis is either true or false" and the LLM would generate a valid mathematical proof. However, if you throw it into ChatGPT what you actually get is "Nobody else has solved this proof yet and I can't either."

And that's the issue. These LLMs aren't capable of reason, only regurgitation. And they aren't moving towards reason.
by mrob | 2025-10-28 13:45:01+00:00
It's not. The LLM itself only calculates the probabilities of the next token. Assuming no race conditions in the implementation, this is completely deterministic. The popular LLM inference engine llama.cpp is deterministic. It's the job of the sampler to actually select a token using those probabilities. It can introduce pseudo-randomness if configured to, and in most cases it is configured that way, but there's no requirement to do so, e.g. it could instead always pick the most probable token.
by duxup | 2025-10-28 13:45:38+00:00
I suppose the administration fears that universities endowments and such represent their ability to put up a fight, so effectively de-funding them bit bit bet would make them more compliant.

---

>But the draft agreement specifically disavows some intrusive actions. “No provision of this Agreement, individually or taken together, shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, University hiring, admission decisions, or the content of academic speech,” it dictates.

>That includes hiring someone to oversee its compliance with the agreement, which includes changing internal UCLA regulations and gathering all sorts of statistics on hiring and admissions to hand over to the government. It would also have to pay for a resolution monitor if any disagreements between the two parties crop up. Then pay for an arbitrator if those can’t be resolved via negotiations.

It sounds like this monitor and resolution monitor would have the same powers that the feds claim they won't have ...
by Temporary_31337 | 2025-10-28 13:46:03+00:00
I dunno, I got used to the weekly beatings. You could arque that if you understand what brings the most business value and deliver that repeatedly, you're pretty safe from being fired and arguably you'd know how to run your own business if needed.

If someone, say did a great job of updating API documentation that can be fully automated now, that's not good enough nowadays. I realise that's not exactly fair because the capitalists / shareholders 'only' have to have to have money in order to receive compensation, and you as a labourer face increasing demands. If you don't like the balance of power you find a niche / leverage as a laborer or you switch to being a capitalist eventually.
by tonyarkles | 2025-10-28 13:46:17+00:00
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying :). In fact, I've run servers where I didn't even physically know where it was located. It wouldn't have been hard to find out given some digging with traceroute, but it didn't matter. It was something I could SSH into and do everything I needed to without caring where it was.

Everyone else down-thread has clarified the why of it. Keep all of your globally distributed assets all running on a common clock (UTC) so that you can readily correlate things that have happened between them (and the rest of the world) without having to do a bunch of timezone math all the time.
by javier123454321 | 2025-10-28 13:46:19+00:00
I was extremely skeptical at the beginning, and therefore critical of what was possible as my default stance. Despite all that, the latest iterations of cli agents which attach to LSPs and scan codebase context have been surprising me in a positive direction. I've given them tasks that require understanding the project structure and they've been able to do so. Therefore, for me my trajectory has been from skeptic to big proponent of the use, of course with all the caveats that at the end of the day, it is my code which will be pushed to prod. So I never went through the trough of disillusionment, but am arriving at productivity and find it great.
by Toby1VC | 2025-10-28 13:46:20+00:00
>There’s nothing wrong with judgment. Judging someone’s character based on whether they use generative “AI” is a valid practice. You may not like being judged, but that’s another matter entirely.

You and I know that using AI is a metric to consider when judging ability and quality.

The difference is that it's not judgment but a broadcast, announcement.

In this case a snotty one from Discourse.

I mention that it lingers because I think that is a real psychological effect that happens.

Small announcements like this carry over into the future and flood any evaluation of yourself which can be described as torture and sabotage since it has an effect on decisions you make sometimes destroying things.
by bulatb | 2025-10-28 13:46:22+00:00
You would have an API that makes the query shape, the query instance with specific values, and the execution of the query three different things. My examples here are SQLAlchemy in Python, but LINQ in C# and a bunch of others use the same idea.

The query shape would be:

active_users = Query(User).filter(active=True)

That gives you an expression object which only encodes an intent. Then you have the option to make basic templates you can build from:

def active_users_except(exclude): return active_users.filter(User.id.not_in(exclude)

...where `exclude` is any set-valued expression.

Then at execution time, the objects representing query expressions are rendered into queries and sent to the database:

exclude_criterion = rude_users() # A subquery expression polite_active_users = load_records( active_users_except(exclude_criterion) )

With SQLAlchemy, I'll usually make simple dataclasses for the query shapes because "get_something" or "select_something" names are confusing when they're not really for actions.

@dataclass class ActiveUsers(QueryTemplate): active_if: Expression = User.active == true() @classmethod excluding(cls, bad_set): return cls( and_( User.active == true(), User.id.not_in(bad_set) ) ) @property def query(self): return Query(User).filter(self.active_if) load_records( ActiveUsers.excluding(select_alice | select_bob).query )
by jcgrillo | 2025-10-28 13:47:14+00:00
I guess the main question I'm left with after reading this is "what good is a prototype, then?" In a few of the companies I've worked at there was a quarterly or biannual ritual called "hack week" or "innovation week" or "hackathon" where engineers form small teams and try to bang out a pet project super fast. Sometimes these projects get management's attention, and get "promoted" to a product or feature. Having worked on a few of these "promoted" projects, to the last they were unmitigated disasters. See, "innovation" doesn't come from a single junior engineer's 2AM beer and pizza fueled fever dream. And when you make the mistake of believing otherwise, what seemed like some bright spark's clever little dream turns into a nightmare right quick. The best thing you can do with a prototype is delete it.
by lisbbb | 2025-10-28 13:48:29+00:00
I don't want to insult you, but I had to re-program myself in order to accept TDD and newer processes and there are a lot of systems out there that weren't written with testability in mind and are very difficult to deal with as a result. You are describing a prototype-until-you-reach-done type of approach, which is how we ended up with so much untestable code. My take is that you do a PoC, then throw it out and write the real application. "Build one to throw away" as Brooks said back in 1975.

I get where you're coming from, because I'm about a decade behind you, but resisting change is not a good look. I feel the same way about all this vibe coding and junk--don't really think it's a good idea, but there it is. Get used to being wrong about everything.
by udev4096 | 2025-10-28 13:48:38+00:00
EU is the same. Maybe slightly better but with the amount of data breaches increasing exponentially, I don't think any amount of "regulations" is going to stop data leaks. The worst thing is, companies are facing lesser and lesser consequences. Look at the recent discord breach, nothing happened after millions of IDs were exposed. They are just blaming it on customer support, who are blaming it back on discord. The only thing we can do is promote E2EE and homophoric encryption
by easton | 2025-10-28 13:48:58+00:00
They also say "Non-API products may be served on any cloud provider.". I wonder what products they are thinking about. If I sell you a EC2 image with GPT-5 on it, is that a API?

My assumption is that they mean PaaS model hosting (so azure's ai service, bedrock, vertex), but I don't know what other product OpenAI is thinking about selling via a cloud provider unless it's training tooling or something.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-28 13:48:58+00:00
You could do it. You could allocate something as garbage-collectible or not at allocation time. You probably would want them to be different types, though, so that the type system keeps track of whether you need to manually deallocate this particular thing, or whether the garbage collector will do so.

It could be done... but I'm not sure what it would gain you. It seems to me that knowing that it will do one or the other is better than having to think about which it will do in each instance.
by andy99 | 2025-10-28 13:49:19+00:00
This is a problem everywhere now, and not just in code. It now takes zero effort to produce something, whether code or a work plan or “deep research” and then lob it over the fence, expecting people to review and act upon it.

It’s an extension of the asymmetric bullshit principle IMO, and I think now all workplaces / projects need norms about this.
by gethly | 2025-10-28 13:49:22+00:00
It is a bit confusing that JSON is being mention so much when in reality this has nothing to do with it - except to showcase that JSON is not suitable for streaming whereas this format is.

Secondly, I fail to see advantages here as the claim is that it allows streaming for partial processing compared to JSON that has to be fully loaded in order to be parseable. Mainly, because the values must be streamed first, before their location/pointers in order for the structure to make sense and be usable for processing, but that also means we need all the parent pointes as well in order to know where to place the children in the root. So all in all, I just do not see why this is advantageous format above JSON(as that is its main complaint here), since you can stream JSON just as easily because you can detect { and } and { and ] and " and , delimiters and know when your token is complete to then process it, without having to wait for the whole structure to finish being streamed or wait for the SICK pointers to arrive in full so you can build the structure.

Or, I am just not getting it at all...