MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by texuf | 2025-10-14 05:20:37+00:00
Yeah no. The reason we don't write code in config files is that, if we did, in order to know what you are deploying you have to run the code in your head. Not just this code, the code that Steve wrote six months ago before people noticed he was grossly incompetent and fired. Also worth mentioning, I can run this code in my head. The author can run this code in their head, but not everyone can. And finally, if the author thinks copy pasting yaml files cause bugs, wait till the llms start copy pasting the for loops.
by pfbtgom | 2025-10-14 05:24:09+00:00
> Any potential engineer watches this as part of their assignments in Intro to Engineering. Lecture 12 iirc.

As someone who trained in chemical engineering in the 2000's, we never really discussed the fact that reactor waste streams were pollution, just another effluent to put somewhere. I'm pointing this out since I don't think that the relative performance profiles of petrochemical plants is going to be common knowledge.

> Specifically, I'm referencing the untenable and ever growing sprawl of ad-hoc legislation that is driving the last two refinery's (Chevron) out of California, as well as the bans on any use of certain chemicals like natural gas.

There are more than two remaining refineries in California. According to this there are 15 active in the state (with some certainly slated to close). https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

I don't disagree that the regulation in California is burdensome, but these refineries seem to have a really poor track record. I live in the bay area and it's a repeating story about excessive flaring or a gas leak from the east bay refineries and that communities should shelter in place. There was even a big fire at Chevron El Segundo this month that took several of their units offline. In the last 5 years that facility has had 46 air quality violations, and in the last 10 years 17 OSHA violations. https://calmatters.org/environment/2025/10/refinery-explosio...

Then let's not forget the Aliso Canyon gas leak in LA in 2015.

> It was widely reported to have been the worst single natural gas leak in U.S. history in terms of its environmental impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliso_Canyon_gas_leak

I don't see a reason why we should linger on petrochemical technology if we don't have to. This isn't stuff you want in your backyard.
by rock_artist | 2025-10-14 05:24:41+00:00
This will shape the future of computing with how Apple being treated as the reference for the whole industry. (I know this is Google here. But our reference devices are iDevices that was unfortunately always locked in the Apple provisioned codesign)

Our “pocket” computers are locked in. The next computing platform will be more wearable such as AR glasses. We’re expected to have 3 players in the upcoming iteration - Apple, Google. Meta due to vivid services needed for valuable glasses services. Meta already shows how you don’t really own the device by what’s running on it. It’ll be very sad if next generations most used form of computing will be able to run only border-controlled software.
by nofriend | 2025-10-14 05:24:44+00:00
It has to do with the lindy effect. If you have $X, statistically you will quit trying to accumulate money when you have $2X. Hence you are safe to entrust some reasonable fraction of $X in without fear of you running away with it. Someone with substantially less than $X will see that as the most money they will ever see in their lifetime and immediately being trying to cash out.
by travisjungroth | 2025-10-14 05:25:25+00:00
I think open source software took off because it’s more standalone than the other things you listed and this makes the rewards much higher.

If I write some code, it needs a computer and environment to run. If I’m writing for what’s popular, that’s pretty much a given. In short, for code the design is the product.

If I design a pharmaceutical, someone still has to make it. Same for car parts. This effort is actually greater than the effort of design. If you include regulation, it’s way higher.

So, this great feedback loop of creation-impact-collaboration never forms. The loop would be too big and involve too much other stuff.

The closest thing isn’t actually manufacturing, it’s more like writing and music. People have been reusing each other’s stuff forever in those spaces.
by coppsilgold | 2025-10-14 05:26:04+00:00
When you launch a container (either through docker you manually through namespaces) you are effectively representing yourself to the kernel as a separate thing. This allows you to construct a completely separate environment when interacting with the kernel where none of your concerns are going to leak out and nothing you don't care for is going to leak in.

When people say that static executables would solve the problem they are wrong, a static executable just means that you can eschew constructing a separate file-system inside your container - and you will probably need to populate some locations anyway.

Properly configured containers are actually supposed to be secure sandboxes, such that any violation is a kernel exploit. However the Linux kernel attack surface is very large so no one serious who offers multi-tenant hosting can afford to rely on containers for isolation. They have to assume that a container escape 0day can be sourced. It may be more accurate to say that a general kernel 0day can be sourced since the entire kernel surface area is open for anyone to poke. seccomp can mitigate the surface area but also narrow down the usefulness.
by khafra | 2025-10-14 05:26:43+00:00
> Then fund science. Just because the government has done it previously doesn't mean it always has to be like that forever.

I do. I'm not one of these wealthy startup founders, just a guy earning a salary--but I've donated to foundations doing basic research many times; and even to individual researchers when they lost a grant but were doing work that I wanted to see the results of.

However, funding science in general this way is likely to miss a lot of value. Not everyone makes basic research a priority in their charitable giving. More importantly, not everyone has my impeccable research taste: not to sound elitist, but if the average American's priorities determined the directions for basic research, we'd have thousands of studies on why vaccines cause autism, an nothing on weird stuff like the medical potential of gila monster saliva.
by littlestymaar | 2025-10-14 05:28:27+00:00
> This is a bad model to pick to exemplify physics envy given it’s based on thermodynamic dispersion.

Using a model derived from physics is not having physics envy.

> The term “physics envy” broadly applies to all social sciences lacking a mathematical basis

No, physics envy is about thinking you can have the same prediction power as physics using simple mathematical tools just because some branch of physics do (while not understanding physics at the same time, because all of physics definitely doesn't work like that).

> It’s a criticism of using math where it doesn’t belong. That hasn’t really fit (until very recently) with economics

Well, if you consider Ricardo to be recent, maybe…
by magundu | 2025-10-14 05:29:22+00:00
I’m building an open-source tool called kafy, which is a kubectl-style cli for Kafka. It’s meant to handle all Kafka use cases and some basic AWK-like operations for inspecting topics, brokers, and consumer groups.

The tool is free and open-source, so anyone can use it for their own Kafka clusters. It’s very much a “crappy but functional” project at this stage — nothing fancy, just a practical CLI for certain tasks.

You can find it here: https://github.com/KLogicHQ/kafy
by Bjorkbat | 2025-10-14 05:30:05+00:00
One of my most frustrating things regarding the potential of an AI bubble was some very smart and intelligent researcher being incredibly bullish on AI on Twitter because if you extrapolate graphs measuring AI's ability to complete long-duration tasks (https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...) or other benchmarks then by 2026 or 2027 then you've basically invented AGI.

I'm going to take his statements at face value and assume that he really does have faith in his own predictions and isn't trying to fleece us.

My gripe with this statement is that this prediction is based on proxies for capability that aren't particularly reliable. To elaborate, the latest frontier models score something like 65% on SWE-bench, but I don't think they're as capable as a human that also scored 65%. That isn't to say that they're incapable, but just that they aren't as capable as an equivalent human. I think there's a very real chance that a model absolutely crushes the SWE-bench benchmark but still isn't quite ready to function as an independent software engineering agent.

So a lot of this bullishness basically hinges on the idea that if you extrapolate some line on a graph into the future, then by next year or the year after all white-collar work can be automated. Terrifying as that is, this all hinges on the idea that these graphs, these benchmarks, are good proxies.

And if they aren't, oh wow.
by pols45 | 2025-10-14 05:30:43+00:00
They can do whatever they want. It's a dead end.

End of the day, a chimp with a 3 inch brain has to digest the info tsunami of flagged content. That's why even the Israelis didn't see Oct 7th coming.

Once upon a time I worked on a project for banks to flag complaints about Fraud in customer calls. Guess what happened? The system registered a zillion calls where people talked about fraud world wide, the manager in charge was assigned 20 people to deal with it, and after naturally getting overwhelmed and scapegoated for all kinds of shit, he puts in a request for few hundred more, saying he really needed thousands of people. Corporate wonderland gives him another 20 and writes a para in their annual report about how they are at the forefront of combatting fraud etc etc.

This is how the world works. The chimp troupe hallucinates across the board, at the top and at the bottom about what is really going on. Why?

Because that 3 inch chimp brain has hard limits to how much info, complexity and unpredictability it can handle.

Anything beyond that, the reaction is similar to ants running around pretending they are doing something useful anytime the universe pokes the ant hill.

Herbert Simon won a nobel prize for telling us we don't have to run around like ants and bite everything anytime we are faced with things we can't control.
by orbital-decay | 2025-10-14 05:33:04+00:00
Tokenizers are typically optimized for efficiency, not morpheme separation. Even in the examples above it's not morphemes - proper morpheme separation would be un-believ-ably and дост-о-при-меч-а-тельн-ость.

Regardless of this, Gemini is still one of the best models when it comes for Slavic word formation and manipulation, it can express novel (non-existent) words pretty well and doesn't seem to be confused by wrong separation. This seems to be the result of extensive multilingual training, because e.g. GPT other than the discontinued 4.5-preview and many Chinese models have issues with basic coherency in languages that heavily rely on word formation, despite using similar tokenizers.
by erxam | 2025-10-14 05:33:06+00:00
> The opposing viewpoint is that smartphones do fill a need of the modern world, and that is that most people have been separated from their families due to the logistics of finding paying work.

I agree. Tech-minimalists seem to forget that not everybody lives in some heavenly small mountain-side commune.

The article says a lot of things about being 'present', 'mindful', 'nurturing relationships' and 'enjoying the world'.

I don't want to be present. In fact, I want the complete opposite. I want to be literally anywhere else 99.99% of the time.

If I look at my phone and get to look at nice things, talk to incredible people and imagine lots of wish-fulfillment scenarios, I can pretend for a while that not everything is absolute dogshit 24/7.

What am I supposed to enjoy, exactly?
by devjab | 2025-10-14 05:33:22+00:00
Who do you imagine will get fired? The CISO who's been recommending various security imporvements and been trying to get them implemented, but been unable to do so due to a lack of C level interest in IT. Or the C level's who lack interest in IT security until it bites them in the investor?

At least here in the EU we're moving toward personal responsibility for C level's who don't take IT and OT security serious in critical sectors, but in my anecdotal experience that is the first time anything regarding security has actually made decision makers take it serious. A lot of it is still just bureaucracy though. We have a DORA and NIS2 compliant piece of OT that is technically completely insecure but is compliant because we've written a detailed plan on how to make it secure.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-14 05:34:12+00:00
I can't stand this myopic thinking.

Do you want to learn "oh, LLMs are capable of scheming, resisting shutdown, seizing control, self-exfiltrating" when it actually happens in a real world deployment, with an LLM capable of actually pulling it off?

If "no", then cherish Anthropic and the work they do.
by tombert | 2025-10-14 05:35:00+00:00
> Drivers for virtual devices are simple, we don't need Linux's vast driver support for cloud VMs. We essentially need a virtual ethernet device driver for SEL4, a network stack that runs on SEL4, and a simple init process that loads the network stack with capabilities for the network device, and loads the application with a capability to the network stack. Make building an image for that as easy as compiling a binary, and you could eliminate maybe 10s of millions of lines of complexity from the deployment of most server applications. No Linux, no docker.

Wasn't this what unikernels were attempting a decade ago? I always thought they were neat but they never really took off.

I would totally be onboard with moving to seL4 for most cloud applications. I think Linux would be nearly impossible to get into a formally-verified state like seL4, and as you said most cloud stuff doesn't need most of the features of Linux.

Also seL4 is just cool.
by maplethorpe | 2025-10-14 05:35:55+00:00
I read the page you linked, but I'm still not understanding why hallucination isn't an inevitability of LLMs. The explanation OpenAI gives doesn't feel like a complete answer to me.

OpenAI claims that hallucination isn't an inevitability because you can train a model to "abstain" rather than "guess" when giving an "answer". But what does that look like in practice?

My understanding is that an LLM's purpose is to predict the next token in a list of tokens. To prevent hallucination, does that mean it is assigning a certainty rating to the very next token it's predicting? How can a model know if its final answer will be correct if it doesn't know what the tokens that come after the current one are going to be?

Or is the idea to have the LLM generate its entire output, assign a certainty score to that, and then generate a new output saying "I don't know" if the certainty score isn't high enough?
by LarsDu88 | 2025-10-14 05:36:00+00:00
Machines passed the Turing test 3 years ago. They now produce art, music, and poetry indistinguishable from what humans once created. In 10-20 years time, it is likely they will take over virtually all forms of human labor.

This constant negative sentiment on the internet... the brushing off of what has happened. I can only explain it as a form of fear. The fear of the end of human work, human relationships, human interactions...

But I think within that fear is a lack of appreciation of the magnitude of what is happening now.
by saxenaabhi | 2025-10-14 05:36:45+00:00
That's not my experience. Over christmas I re wrote a restaurant POS application from laravel to vue/wrangler using bolt + chatgpt. My exact steps:

1) I took my db schema and got chatGPT to convert it to typescript types and stub data.

2) Uploaded these types to bolt and asked it one by one to create vue components to display this data(Catalog screen, Payment Dialogs, Tables page etc) and to use fetcher functions that return stub data.

3) Finally I asked it replace stub data with supabase.rpc calls, and create postgres functions to serve this data.

While I had most of the app done in a few days, testing, styling and adding bug fixing took a month.

Some minor stuff was done manually by me: Receipt printer integration integration because bolt wasn't good at epson xml or related libraries that time.

Finally we released early feb and we received extremely good feedback from our customers.

However now I'm using claude and even higher percentage of code is generated by it now. Our feature velocity is also great. After launch we have added following features in 6m

1) Split Table Payments 2) Payment Terminal Integration 3) Visual Floor plan viewer 4) Mobile POS for waiters without tablet 5) Reports, Dashboard, Import/Export 6) Loyalty programs with many different types of programs 7) Self-service Webshop with realtime group ordering 8) Improved tax handling 9) Multicourse orders("La'suite") 10) Many other smaller features

This would be very hard to achieve without AI for most one-person engineering teams. Although tbf not impossible.

> The new way: The entire premise of AI coding tools is to automate the thinking, not just the typing. You're supposed to describe a problem and get a solution without understanding the details. That's the labor-saving promise.

I think here the OP introduces a strawman since as many people have pointed out, the labour saving happens in automating menial tasks and no one sane should give up "understanding the details".

> >I was thinking of all the classic exploratory learning blog posts. Things that sounded fun. Writing a toy database to understand how they work, implementing a small Redis clone. Now that feels stupid. Like I'd be wasting time on details the AI is supposed to handle.

On the contrary. Reading ToyDB[1] source code helped me understand MVCC and Isolation levels. That's knowledge that's valuable for a systems architect since at the end LLMs are just fancy word generators.

[1] https://github.com/erikgrinaker/toydb
by JCharante | 2025-10-14 05:36:51+00:00
> how is one going to use this data to cause a loss the data owner?

1 email to my sister going "I have hacked into your computer and know xyz I'll spill your secrets unless you pay" was enough to make her freak out. It's all stuff that can be obtained from these leaks.

Vietnam is particularly bad with breaches. For like 25 cents you can send a telegram bot a phone number and it will immediately reply with DOB, ID number, Home Address, Facebook profiles, Instagram profiles. I know this because everyone gets a freebie and I tested it out.
by rester324 | 2025-10-14 05:37:11+00:00
What pisses me off the most about this, is that CEOs still preach about how life-long learning is a must. Stop that fucking bullshit, will ya? If you as a CEO don't give a flying fuck to invest in knowledge, than you have no right to preach from that high horse of yours to do that myself.

edit: to clarify I am arguing against putting in the effort on my own expense which benefits the company because I need to foot the bill which the company should have, so I am not arguing against such self-improvement which obviously benefits me
by devjab | 2025-10-14 05:39:30+00:00
On the other hand you can't sue a company for losing your data in many EU companies. You can report them to whatever data protection agency your country has, and after an investigation they can fine, and/or, in more serious cases turn the matter over to the police for a criminal investigation.

The disadvantage of this is that the local data protection agencies haven't been handing out very big fines. Sometimes that's due to company law. In my country you'd fine the owning company, which in many cases will be a holding company. Since fine sizes are linked to revenue and a holding company typically has no revenue, this means fines are often ridicilously small.
by JCharante | 2025-10-14 05:40:12+00:00
Vietnam is particularly bad with breaches. For about 25 cents you can send a telegram bot a phone number and it will immediately reply with DOB, ID number, Home Address, Facebook profiles, Instagram profiles. I know this because everyone gets a freebie and I tested it out. For most twenty-somethings people's home address in the leaks are their parents home in the countryside. It's a security nightmare for any girl, especially when they leave parcels containing name & phone number in the mailrooms of condo towers.
by bitwize | 2025-10-14 05:41:14+00:00
I can't confirm this yet but with Google refusing to provide device trees for new Pixels things definitely look headed that way; they're at least starting to make installing an alternate OS difficult. The Graphene devs are trying to set things up with a handset manufacturer to ship a GrapheneOS phone, but good luck connecting that thing to a US carrier (who allowlist handsets and often limit the allowlist to models they sell directly).
by omnimus | 2025-10-14 05:41:34+00:00
I live in non english european country. One of our problems is that huge number of our politicians (including foreign affairs ministry etc.) can't speak english. Education is not bad here. You have to have pretty high level english to pass any university. I mean many bars wont give you a job without passing english interview.

But if you want to do international politics its fine because politicians don't have any formal requirements.

So next time you see EU parlament footage where people have speeches in their native language… it's not out of national pride or respect. It's simply because many of them couldn't do it otherwise.
by magicalhippo | 2025-10-14 05:42:25+00:00
True, however this seems like such basic stuff. Download arbitrary text and inject it into your prompt?

Why on earth would you not consider that as a very dangerous operation that needs to be carefully managed? It's like parking your bike downtown hoping it wont be stolen. Like, at least use a zip tie or something.

That said, I agree with your post that this won't catch everything. So something else, like a quarantined LLM like you suggest is likely needed.

However I just didn't expect such blatant attacks to pass.
by mindslight | 2025-10-14 05:43:01+00:00
The gall to bemoan the "rule of men" when we've got masked paramilitary gangs ransacking apartment buildings in the middle of the night.

The problem isn't that immigration law is being enforced. The problem is the manner in which it is being enforced. Someone breaking the law is not a justification for whatever you want to be done to them. Someone breaking the law is not an excuse to violate other people's constitutional/natural rights by association. And the law not being enforced for a long time is not an excuse to eliminate what little accountability there was for people tasked with enforcing the laws. I hope some day you will realize these things.
by hamburglar | 2025-10-14 05:44:38+00:00
The excellent thing I learned about 5 whys is that not only is it not really just 5, as you allude to with “5+”, but it’s also a *tree* instead of a linear list. Often a why will lead to more than one answer, and you really have to follow all branches to completion. The leaf nodes are where the changes are necessary. Rather than identifying one single thing that could have prevented the incident, you often identify many things that make the system more robust, any one of which would have prevented the incident in question.
by eimrine | 2025-10-14 05:44:52+00:00
Well well well, suppose I have noticed that X is a pseudoscience, but most of Xists actively promotes it as a science. So if you ask LLM "is X a science" it tells you "X is a science developed by... using by..." because it just repeats any nonsence.

Then I add "is X a dogma considering..." and the miracle happens! And I never claimed it requires thinking, downvoters.