MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by llm_nerd | 2025-10-17 19:22:58+00:00
>The author is an anthropologist, I think she knows the original meaning of "cargo cult".

I am perplexed how you thought this refuted or offered any value to what I said. Or are you under delusions that her being an anthropologist also makes her an expert on AI and the tech industry, ergo ipso facto her metaphor isn't incredibly dumb and ill-suited?

I never questioned if they knew the "original meaning". Yes, we've all read the meaning countless, countless times, in a million trope-filled blog entries. And indeed, the whole basis of her tosser "article" is some random blog entry that, as millions before have, decided to make everything about Cargo Cults.

Protip: If you are busy writing a blog entry and you decide to describe some island tribe (it does not actually matter where said tribe is) that had bamboo headsets, delete the entire thing and go do something actually useful.

It is a profoundly boring story at this point. And in this case, like with many, the metaphor is incredibly stupid and ill-suited. If these businesses were building "data centres" out of mud and drawings of GPUs it would be pertinent, but instead it's describing a gold rush where a lot of players are doing precisely the right thing to try to land grab o an obviously massive and important space (and in a very useful to them sense, see enormous capitalization gains in doing so), then trying to ham-fist some cliche "story" in.

Like, if that tribe built functional runways with ATC towers, and then a fleet of cargo planes -- being well funded in the process by outsiders who see how lucrative the cargo business is -- but then it turns out that the cargo business is a bit saturated so it's going to be tough for them to make it profitable on their EBIDTA statements, boy, fire up the typewriter you got a winner!

>The 'cult' behaviour described in the article is that of building big data centres without knowing how they will make money

Utterly nonsensical.
by WorldMaker | 2025-10-17 19:23:04+00:00
I think "chooses to" is doing a lot of work there in your understanding. Spectre exploits were found in the wild even in JS code submitted to ad networks. I suppose a user could choose to uBlock all ad JS and never visit webpages they don't trust. Those are choices, sort of.

But also that's a bit victim blaming isn't it? Do you want to explain to your grandfather or partner or child "Oh sorry, you had a password stolen because you chose to visit Google.com on a day where Google let an ad buyer attach Spectre exploit malware"? (Google could also chose to not let ads attach JS at all, but that's a very different problem.)

Computers have millions of places they get code from to run. Is "your CPU has a data leaking bug in it" the user's problem or the OS's problem? When there's a mitigation the OS can manage? When security-in-depth is an option?

I installed Bazzite on my own old Desktop not supported by Windows 11. One of the first things the Linux kernel spits out on boot if I have the boot console up is about running with Spectre mitigations. The Linux kernel also thinks it is important to mitigate (as Windows 10 did, but Windows 11 doesn't include and so doesn't support this old Desktop).
by sysguest | 2025-10-17 19:23:24+00:00
idk "it will be really useful" is a bit too fuzzy and vague -- how do I infer about numbers related to return-in-investment?

of course, it's better than "this is so crap no one would buy it" -- but for investors, they want to know: "if I put X dollars now, would I get 10*X dollars or 1/10 X dollars?"

it's weird that all these comments on "usefulness" doesn't even attempt to explain whether the numbers add up ok or not
by mattskr | 2025-10-17 19:23:36+00:00
Spare me the rehash of marketing hype rhetoric. It's either a white collar tool to avoid doing boring work or great to identify targets on a battlefield. That's it and both are still questionable. This techno-fetishism of "New technology good, ugga-ooga-booga." 99% of the blind evangelists just spew that same slop just because of fomo of making a few extra shekels by proving "I'm a true believer, and so should you by buying my AI course."

Someone who doesn't have access to clean water and stable food will not benefit from this, nor will powers at be that "make it available" will actually improve their lives. It's already apparent, the tech nerds of the late 90s and early 2000s were NOT the good guys. Being good at computers does not make you a good person. The business model for AI makes zero sense when you have real world experience. Without massive, complete social and economic absolute changes, it won't work out. And for those championing that change, what makes you think you'll be the special comrade brought up the ranks to benefit as the truest of believers?

Sorry, but this shit is really starting to rub me the wrong way, especially with the massive bubble investment that's growing around all of it. This wont be good. The housing collapsed sucked. The same pattern is emerging and I'm getting a bad, bad feeling this will make the housing collapse look like nothing due to long term ramifications.
by verdverm | 2025-10-17 19:24:00+00:00
There's more to charging than peak kW, notably sustained throughput

The amount of range you can put into the EV, per unit of time, is a better metric.

https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-charging.html

Hyundai has been on the 800V arch for a while with their E-GMP platform, Tesla's first entry is the 25th spot.
by zahlman | 2025-10-17 19:24:13+00:00
> making your politics known and then being like "but you're not allowed to have an opinion on it"

As far as I can tell, this doesn't fairly reflect what actually happened. Ruby users were free to keep their own political views to their own blogs, just as DHH does. Reading world dot hey dot com slash dhh is not in any way required in order to use Ruby, participate in the development of Ruby or anything else along those lines.

There are a lot of prominent developers in the Python community whose politics I strongly disagree with. I got banned from the main discussion forum as a result of objecting to hidden Code of Conduct enforcement principles which (in my view) attempted to bring (many of) those politics in through the back door. (And in the process of getting into that meta argument, and doing research, I encountered several previous unpleasant incidents on the forum and on the mailing list that preceded it.)

But I would never start arguments with people in that space over things they wrote on their blogs. I would not go onto, say, the CPython issue tracker to complain about how certain people needed to be removed from the project because of things they said in their own spaces (like we saw with, for example, Opalgate). If I wanted to talk about someone else's politics — or my own — I would and could use my own blog for that.

The mere fact of people knowing DHH's politics emphatically does not politicize Ruby, Rails or any related project. To the extent that Python development has become politicized, that's a consequence of actual enacted policy, not the political beliefs of steering committee members, PSF board members etc. DHH putting this content on his blog was part of the effort to have it not in the workplace. And, in point of fact, that does keep it out of 37Signals board rooms.
by stronglikedan | 2025-10-17 19:24:19+00:00
As someone who made the mistake of switching to EV recently, I can see why, battery issues aside. They have a higher cost of ownership, and provide zero benefits beyond smoother acceleration. They are such a pain in the ass to keep charged, and I have to borrow a car for road trips unless I want to make it a very long road trip for no good reason.

Most people just don't want another after their first one. So there is not much demand. Dealerships are practically giving them away right now, which is how they snagged me.

Luckily, I can get out of this lease in a couple of years. Unluckily, I will have to spend more on a very quick ICE car now that I've experienced EV acceleration. Luckily, it'll still probably be cheaper than an EV.
by ggreer | 2025-10-17 19:24:46+00:00
If you put 170k miles on a gas car, wouldn't you have paid for $10-12k in maintenance over that time? At that point you've done 20 oil changes, replaced the spark plugs & air filter 5 times, replaced the timing belt and transmission fluid twice, replaced the brake pads 3-4 times, replaced the brake rotors, water pump, alternator, and maybe even a head gasket, starter motor, and fuel pump.

Assuming you averaged 30mpg, you also put $20k in gas through it. At the current US average retail electricity price of 17 cents per kWh and EV efficiency of 250Wh/mile, recharging would be $7,200 for that same distance. The fuel savings alone are more than the cost of replacing the battery.
by chmod775 | 2025-10-17 19:25:06+00:00
For France to be legally able to give a shit Ofcom would need to go to court in the UK, pierce the corporate veil, and receive a final judgment against the owner of 4chan. Only then would they have some routes to petition French authorities for assistance.

There's no agreement between the UK and France that would require or even permit French authorities to enforce fines by a some random UK entity willy-nilly.
by superconduct123 | 2025-10-17 19:25:07+00:00
I always get a weird feeling when AI researchers and CS people start talking about comparisons between human brains and AI/computers

Why is there a presumption that we (as people who have only studied CS) know enough about biology/neuroscience/evolution to make these comparisons/parallels/analogies?

I enjoy the discussions but I always get the thought in the back of my head "...remember you're listening to 2 CS majors talk about neuroscience"
by EA-3167 | 2025-10-17 19:25:33+00:00
It's an excellent time-frame that sounds imminent enough to draw interest (and funding), but is distant enough that you can delay the promised arrival a few times in the span of a career before retiring.

Fusion research lives and dies on this premise, ignoring the hard problems that require fundamental breakthroughs in areas such as materials science, in favor of touting arbitrary benchmarks that don't indicate real progress towards fusion as a source of power on the grid.

"Full self driving" is another example; your car won't be doing this, but companies will brag about limited roll-outs of niche cases in dry, flat, places that are easy to navigate.
by chaps | 2025-10-17 19:25:48+00:00
Friend, I think your cynicism's clouding how you're interpreting my words. What you're interpreting as blind trust is me just saying that people are people and people gonna people, yanno? And lol, nah. The amount of bullshit I've seen from my peer group is laughable and I've had a tendency to be very aggressive in pushing back on bad reporting. Like the Chicago Tribune -- they weren't including all of the facts in their reporting on something and wouldn't share any public records that they received through FOIA. So I FOIA'd for a full year of the Tribune's FOIAs and published them without any expectation of anything in return. That journalist no longer speaks to me and doing that burned bridges with the Tribune forever. I did it again the next year because fuck bad journalists who get in the way of public awareness. We should push them to be better. Lol.

I'm not sure that it's even actually possible to have "unbiased" reporting. You want something unattainable and it's understandable why it'd be frustrating that no such thing exists. We live in a fucked up world, m8.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-10-17 19:26:35+00:00
> A $25,000 used EV with 80,000 miles is not a good deal if you're going to have to spend $20,000 to replace the battery.

What makes you think that you would have to do that?

1) that car would still be under warranty until it is older than eight years or drives more than 100K miles. So if it needs a replacement at 80K miles, you might get it for free because it's not supposed to fail.

2) There's a lot of data that suggests batteries last a lot longer than their warranty period both in miles and years. There are plenty of EVs with 150K or more miles on them that are still fine. And define fine, is it such a bad deal when the battery has 75% of its original capacity instead of 85%?

3) It's hard to get numbers on when they actually do fail on average for the simple reason that the overwhelmingly large majority of EVs ever made are still driving around with the original battery they left the factory with. They've only been on the market for about 15 years. And the majority of them is much younger than the eight years of battery warranty they left the factory with. Most of the EVs on the road have been sold in the last few years only.
by iamnothere | 2025-10-17 19:27:18+00:00
If you want modification to the rules for experimental purposes, there are processes for that. Obviously spectrum uses change over time, and it’s good to have some trial and error to see what is feasible without breaking essential things. But given the finite spectrum and the sensitivity of some uses, it’s good to have a formal process for it. This is what the various radio spectrum organizations do, they coordinate uses and standards so people don’t flagrantly abuse the spectrum and then just say “oops, just testing” when they are caught.

If you want a vision of what unregulated long-range spectrum looks like, just look up “Mud Duck” on CB. It’s good that we have a few limited ranges where these people can shit all over the place without causing serious harm.
by manmal | 2025-10-17 19:27:21+00:00
> Basically an LLM translating across languages will "light up" (to use a rough fMRI equivalent) for the same concepts (e.g. bigness) across languages

I thought that’s the basic premise of how transformers work - they encode concepts into high dimensional space, and similar concepts will be clustered together. I don’t think it models the world, but just the texts it ingested. It’s observation and regurgitation, not understanding.

I do use agents a lot (soon on my second codex subscription), so I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But I’m firmly in the “they are useful tools” camp.
by re | 2025-10-17 19:27:34+00:00
> They removed other maintainers access to their AWS account, and one of them had allegedly taken a screenshot of the root password from a password manager

Inaccurate:

> Ruby Central also had not removed me as an “owner” of the Ruby Central GitHub Organization. They also had not rotated any of the credentials shared across the operational team using the RubyGems 1Password account.

> I believe Ruby Central confused themselves into thinking the “Ruby Central” 1Password account was used by operators, and they did revoke my access there. However, that 1Password account was not used by the open source team of RubyGems.org service operators. Instead, we used the “RubyGems” 1Password account, which was full of operational credentials. Ruby Central did not remove me from the “RubyGems” 1Password account, even as of today. https://andre.arko.net/2025/10/09/the-rubygems-security-inci...

Ruby Central didn't realize that they hadn't actually revoked any access to the previous maintainers (and that they didn't have the updated root AWS credentials) until two weeks later when André notified them.
by sysguest | 2025-10-17 19:27:48+00:00
idk even that "usefulness" won't help on the core question:

"does the numbers add up?"

this article is about NUMBERS regarding return-on-investment / etc

"useful" is so vague so it's too 'useless' to the discussion here... I'm not sure why everyone here is parrotting that like gpt hallucination
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-17 19:27:59+00:00
And let's not forget governments all over the world will call in fake bomb threats to force planes to land to arrest passengers.

And with a bit of effort, the UK could call on friendly countries for extradition (such as Canada). They'll have to convince the judge that the crime is bad enough for extradition, but I'm sure they can come up with something.

It all depends on how much the UK really cares. In practice, this is probably just a big act by Ofcom so they can say "we've tried everything, we'll have to go for a full ISP-level block as a last resort".
by aljgz | 2025-10-17 19:28:08+00:00
I like the possibility of QC in brain. However, explaining why brain is much more efficient that computers does not need QC. Computers and Brain evolved in two completely different ways. For the brain, simple cognitive functions emerge first, supporting more complex life behaviours, starting with very simple multi celular life forms. Logical reasoning emerges much later, and is pretty expensive. Then we made computers to do logical computation and they are incredibly efficient at it: a modern low power processor is much more efficient than human brain in this kind of workload, by orders of magnitude.

Now we are trying to implement what the mind is naturally good at with systems designed to do logic well. This is the main reason it's so inefficient. Emulation is costly. It is costly when brain does logic, and is costly when computers do AI.

In theory, we should be able to build computing devices designed for AI workloads, and they can be as efficient as brain or even much better.
by dathinab | 2025-10-17 19:28:14+00:00
but it isn't absolute anywhere

It's not absolute in the US because the US constitution only protects from the governmental limiting it, which means there is a lot of potential to effectively and fully legally limit free speech. And even the government gave itself a lot of limitations where through excuses and loopholes it can limit free speech (e.g. from teachers in public schools).

Then there is the question of what even is "speech", in the us spending money can be an act of speech but wouldn't that make bribing an act of free speech even though it clearly shouldn't be legal?

Should systematically harassing/mobbing people with the intent to drive them into suicide be protected by free speech? It's speech, but you would need to be a very cold hearted person to think that this shouldn't be a crime.

Is leaking trade secrets free speech when you do it vocally? It would be strange if that where no crime but technically you do so by speech.

What if you systematically rail up people with deep fakes and all kind of misinformation? Is that free speech? Before WW2 many intellectual would probably have argued that people aren't that easy to mass rail up and as such it should be free speech. But after Hitler gained power in exactly that way the position is more one of "if people systematic rail up the population and spreed misinformation en mass with the intend to overthrow the government" then letting them do that is pretty dump thing to do.

So no "speech" not only is free speech not absolute, it's a pretty bad idea create absolute free speech protection. And both in small and large cases this has been proven again and again through history.

This doesn't mean that censorship is right either.

Like with everything in live "extremes" are close to never a good thing to peruse.

Anyway you know what is even more embarrassing then being a hall way monitor, it's to never question your believes and insisting they are right even when its repeatedly shown to you that there seems to be some problem with them. But seriously, why edit you response to add an insult against anyone who doesn't share your opinion??
by zahlman | 2025-10-17 19:28:39+00:00
> I more or less agree with the "no politics at work" stance

> but you've omitted

I'm not that poster, but it was objectively correct to omit that, because it was as an objective matter of fact not "at work".

It does. Not. Matter. In this context what his beliefs are, or how they look to you through your lens.

In exactly the same way that, for example, the political views of GNOME and Xorg developers are not relevant to the development of those projects, and only become relevant when they get discussed in development spaces. (Or, you know, when they become the motivation for explicit interference in XLibre development.)
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-10-17 19:28:52+00:00
When you have a &str (like "Blue October") and pass it to something that wants a String, you can do .into() instead of .to_string()

It’s shorter to write and takes up a little less space on screen to. I almost always use .into() when like in your example I initialize String field members of a struct in Rust.
by aaroninsf | 2025-10-17 19:28:53+00:00
I'm pretty content to say this may be true, but may well prove quite wrong.

Why? Because humans—including the smartest of us—are continuously prone to cognitive errors, and reasoning about the non-linear behavior of complex systems is a domain we are predictably and durably terrible at, even when we try to compensate.

Personally I consider the case of self-driving cars illustrative and a go-to reminder for me of my own very human failure in this case. I was quite sure that we could not have autonomous vehicles in dynamic messy urban areas without true AGI; and that FSD would in the fashion of the failed Tesla offering, emerge first in the much more constrained space of the highway system. Which would also benefit from federal regulation and coordination.

No Waymos have eaten SF, and their driving is increasingly nuanced; and last night a friend and very early adopter relayed a series of anecdotes about some of the strikingly nuanced interactions he'd been party to recently, including being in a car that was attacked late at night, and, how one did exactly the right thing when approached head-on in a narrow neighborhood street that required backing out. Etc.

That's just one example, and IMO we are only beginning to experience the benefits of "network effects" so popular in tails of singularity take-off.

Ten years is a very, very, very long time under current conditions. I have done neural networks since the mid-90s (academically: published, presented, etc.) and I have proven terrible in anticipating how quickly "things" will improve. I have now multiple times witnessed my predictions that X or Y would take "5-8" or "8-10" years or "too far out to tell," instead arrive within 3 years.

Karpathy is smart of course but he's no smarter in this domain than any of the rest of us.

Are scaled tuned transformers with tack-ons going to give us AGI in 18 months? "No" is a safe bet. Is no approach going to give us AGI inside of 5 years? That is absolutely a bet I would never make. Not even close.
by rootusrootus | 2025-10-17 19:29:01+00:00
I suspect that is true for many difficult physical goals.

My dad told me that the first time you climb a mountain, there will likely be a moment not too distant from the top when you would be willing to just sit down and never move again, even at the risk to your own life. Even as you can see the goal not far away.

He also said that it was a dangerous enough situation that as a climb leader he'd start kicking you if he had to, if you sat down like that and refused to keep climbing. I'm not a climber myself, though, so this is hearsay, and my dad is long dead and unable to remind me of what details I've forgotten.
by rednafi | 2025-10-17 19:29:08+00:00
MCP gives me early days gRPC vibes - when the protocol felt heavy and the toolings had many sharp edges. Even today, after many rounds of improvements, people often eschew gRPC and Protobuf.

Similarly, my experience writing and working with MCPs has been quite underwhelming. It takes too long to write them and the workflow is kludgy. I hope Skills get adopted by other model vendors, as it feels like a much lighter way to save and checkout my prompts.
by xutopia | 2025-10-17 19:29:13+00:00
You're seriously the exception. Everyone I have spoken to who switched to EV don't want to go back to ICE.

ICE cars have way more things that break down and less reliable for the most part. As for always having to charge... most people driving an EV recharge every night at home and rarely require a charging station. Road trips are a different story but most people don't have regular road trips.