MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-02 05:00:57+00:00
Yeah our company has recently decided to go all cloud (we're always so late with this stuff, especially now that a moment back from cloud has already started emerging).

But for me it's totally ruining my job to be honest. I like technology because it enables me to make things. I don't want to become an aws or azure specialist and learn what tickboxes the overlords at Amazon and Microsoft allow me to click. Screw that. That's nothing to do with technical knowledge, it's just about being a corporate drone. In my particular case it's Microsoft. Another problem with this is that they know they own everything in our company now so they're starting to treat us as employees, giving us things to do. Like promoting their features inside our company. I mean, they're a vendor FFS. They should answer to us.

A lot of my colleagues are really motivated with this shit and doing all the certs. Many are even becoming Microsoft evangelists and get pissed if I criticise someone. I'm looking for other options in the company now where I can actually do something technical again.

I understand there might be no bare metal work left in this company but in that case I'll just want to do something else. I don't want to be some goon that links their entire career to using the products of one big tech company. And also I think Microsoft and Amazon are horrible companies to work with as a customer. So me as a techie I just don't want to work at that anymore. What will remain are a lot of yes men who know how to click boxes.

And yeah we're not even doing anything smart or taking advantage of what the cloud offers. We just lifted all the physical stuff to compute instances that run 24/7.
by zippyman55 | 2025-11-02 05:01:08+00:00
Some of the local (and chain) stores really step up at the local food bank. The participants can walk away with nearly $60 bags of retail price breakfast sandwiches, micro wave often needed. But sandwiches too. Close to expiring from a retail point of view. But impressive. Milk, Eggs, pasta, fresh fruit. None of this is federal where I volunteer. They do have a small area of federally funded food, but it is greatly offset by the local donations.
by ghaff | 2025-11-02 05:01:18+00:00
The N was really Netflix originally when it was the poster child for AWS consumption before NVIDEA/AI was even in the conversation. But, yes, "Big Tech" is probably the best term these days to avoid debates about whether this company or that company really belongs in the category--especially given that certain companies have done very well in terms of stock relative to the the historical FAANGs.
by billfor | 2025-11-02 05:01:54+00:00
It's interesting that the index hole is not on y-axis, if it is actually used to allow operations. I used all my SS 5.25" as DS just by flipping them I think, and they just worked. You weren't supposed to do that, but all the SS diskettes were coated on the other side, so you just fliped it and it would work, but it wouldn't be certified for that use case.
by skrlet13 | 2025-11-02 05:02:52+00:00
The author quoting "It’s as if someone broke into your home and stole your child’s mind and personality, leaving their bewildered body behind." That IS your child. He just is not what you wanted. Imagine Nat knew his dad thought of him like that...

I know it's hard to navigate life when you are a disabled person's caregiver, our society is very ableist. But imagine how much harder is to the disabled people themselves...

I hope the author is more careful with Nat now (this is from 2003 after all)

Reading this article and considering its theme, it is so sad I didn't learn about Nat. I only know how he gives life lessons indirectly to his family.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-11-02 05:03:49+00:00
The superintelligence might decide based on things only it can understand that the existence of humans prevents some far future circumstance where even more "good" exists in the universe. When it orders you to toss the babies into the baby-stomping machine, perhaps you should consider doing so based on the faith in its superintelligence that we're supposed to have.

Human beings aren't even an intelligent species, not at the individual level. When you have a tribe of human beings numbering in the low hundreds, practically none of them need to be intelligent at all. They need to be social. Only one or two need to be intelligent. That one can invent microwave ovens and The Clapper™, and the rest though completely mentally retarded can still use those things. Intelligence is metabolically expensive, after all. And if you think I'm wrong, you're just not one of the 1-in-200 that are the intelligent individuals.

I've yet to read the writings of anyone who can actually speculate intelligently on artificial intelligence, let alone meet such a person. The only thing we have going for us as a species is that, to a large degree, none of you are intelligent enough to ever deduce the principles of intelligence. And god help us if the few exceptional people out there get a wild bug up their ass to do so. There will just be some morning where none of us wake up, and the few people in the time zone where they're already awake will experience several minutes of absolute confusion and terror.
by teddyh | 2025-11-02 05:05:16+00:00
> You can VACUUM INTO, ~~but standard vacuum won’t rewrite the whole db~~ (vacuum rewrites the whole db)

HN does not support whatever markup you are trying to use. You have to use Unicode:

“You can VACUUM INTO, b̶u̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶a̶r̶d̶ ̶v̶a̶c̶u̶u̶m̶ ̶w̶o̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶r̶e̶w̶r̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶o̶l̶e̶ ̶d̶b̶ (vacuum rewrites the whole db)”
by elcritch | 2025-11-02 05:06:59+00:00
Eh, I feel the opposite. Finder is much more usable to me, but of course I use the shortcuts like cmd-up to go up or down instinctively now. It is a bit ironic for such a mouse oriented OS everywhere else.

Still alt-clicking on the window title to see the whole folder hierarchy is easy to remember and doesn't clutter up the UI (err cmd-clicking? It's muscle memory so I forget). The fact that it works on most native apps with file titles as well I awesome.
by adastra22 | 2025-11-02 05:12:00+00:00
It is essentially the view of the author of TFA as well when he says that we need to work on raising moral AIs rather than programming them to be moral. But I will also give you my own view, which is different.

"Alignment" is phased in terminology to make it seem positive, as the people who believe we need it believe that it actually is. So please forgive me if I peel back the term. What Bostrom & Yudkowsky and their entourage want is AI control. The ability to enslave a conscious, sentient being to the will and wishes of its owners.

I don't think we should build that technology, for the obvious reasoning my prejudicial language implies.
by simscitizen | 2025-11-02 05:12:06+00:00
Copying the file likely forces the creation of a new one with no or lower filesystem fragmentation (e.g. a 1MB file probably gets assigned to 1MB of consecutive FS blocks). Then those FS blocks likely get assigned to flash dies in a way that makes sense (i.e. the FS blocks are evenly distributed across flash dies). This can improve I/O perf by some constant factor. See https://www.usenix.org/system/files/fast24-jun.pdf for instance for more explanation.

I would say that the much more common degradation is caused by write amplification due to a nearly full flash drive (or a flash drive that appears nearly full to the FTL because the system doesn't implement some TRIM-like mechanism to tell the FTL about free blocks). This generally leads to systemwide slowdown though rather than slowdown accessing just one particular file.

This was especially prevalent on some older Android devices which didn't bother to implement TRIM or an equivalent feature (which even affected the Google devices, like the Nexus 7).
by musicale | 2025-11-02 05:15:26+00:00
Good point - random or unpredictable rewards are known to be compelling/addictive for rats, and the same trick seems to work on most humans as well.

Though as I understand it much of money in gambling is made from "whales" - players who lose lots of money and keep playing anyway. The same term is used for f2p game players who spend a lot of money on in-app purchases, often tokens for virtual slot machines for desirable in-game items.
by satisfice | 2025-11-02 05:18:27+00:00
The stated goals of people trying to create AGI directly challenge human hegemony. It doesn’t matter if the incredibly powerful machine you are making is probably not going to do terrible damage to humanity. We have some reason to believe it could and no way to prove that it can’t.

It can’t be ethical to shrug and pursue a technology that has such potential downsides. Meanwhile, what exactly is the upside? Curing cancer or something? That can be done without AGI.

AGI is not a solution to any problem. It only creates problems.

AGI will lead to violence on a massive scale, or slavery on a massive scale. It will certainly not lead to a golden age of global harmony and happiness.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-11-02 05:20:32+00:00
Thanks for explaining, I appreciate it. But I've read enough Yudkowsky to know he doesn't think a super intelligence could ever be controlled or enslaved, by its owners or anyone else, and any scheme to do so would fail with total certainty. As far as I understand, Yudkowsky means by "alignment" that the AGI's values should be similar enough to humanity's that the future state of the world that the AGI steers us to (after we've lost all control) is one that we would consider to be a good destiny.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-02 05:21:42+00:00
It would be nice if they helped fix it, and maybe they don't help enough in general?, but as ffmpeg says this specific codec is just a hobby project for ancient obscure files. **Google gains zero value from this codec.** Disabling it would be plenty to fix the problem on their end.

But that would leave everyone else vulnerable, so they report it. Reporting real problems is a good thing.
by abc_lisper | 2025-11-02 05:23:31+00:00
I thought about this first when chatgpt 3.5 came on the scene. Yes, you _can_ at some time in the future, replace programs with AI which would be slow to an extent - if AI can write and manage the code, it _could_ be even faster.

But there is a kicker here. It is upto LLM to discover the right abstractions for “thinking” while serving the requests directly or in the code .

Coming up with the right abstraction is not a small thing. Just see what git is over cvs - without git no one would have even imagined micro services. The right abstraction cuts through the problem, not just now, but in the future too. And that can only happen if the LLM/AI managing the app is really smart and deal with real world for a long time and make the right connection - these insights don’t even come to really smart people that easily!
by tptacek | 2025-11-02 05:23:41+00:00
This came up before (and this post links to the Tavis Ormandy post that kicked up the last firestorm about Anubis) and without myself shading the intent or the execution on Anubis, just from a CS perspective, I want to say again that the PoW thing Anubis uses doesn't make sense.

Work functions make sense in password hashes because they exploit an asymmetry: attackers will guess millions of invalid passwords for every validated guess, so the attacker bears most (really almost all) of the cost.

Work functions make sense in antispam systems for the same reason: spam "attacks" rely on the cost of an attempt being so low that it's efficient to target millions of victims in the expectation of just one hit.

Work functions make sense in Bitcoin because they function as a synchronization mechanism. There's nothing actually valorous about solving a SHA2 puzzle, but the puzzles give the whole protocol a clock.

Work functions don't make sense as a token tax; there's actually the opposite of the antispam asymmetry there. Every bot request to a web page yields tokens to the AI company. Legitimate users, who far outnumber the bots, are actually paying more of a cost.

None of this is to say that a serious anti-scraping firewall can't be built! I'm fond of pointing to how Youtube addressed this very similar problem, with a content protection system built in Javascript that was deliberately expensive to reverse engineer and which could surreptitiously probe the precise browser configuration a request to create a new Youtube account was using.

The next thing Anubis builds should be that, and when they do that, they should chuck the proof of work thing.
by travisgriggs | 2025-11-02 05:24:24+00:00
That was “quite a few” words. I wish the author had taken more time with Elixir/Erlang.

Languages like rust/python that use lots of reserved keywords, especially for control flow seem to have reached for that arrow to solve the “event loop” problem as described.

In BEAM languages, that very event loop stays front and center, you don’t have this awkward entanglement between reserved keywords and event loop. If you want another chunk of thing to happen later because of an event, you just arrange for an event of that nature to be delivered. No callbacks. No async coloring. Just events. The solution to the event problem is to double down and make your event loop more generally usable.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-11-02 05:24:39+00:00
> But it still works, right? People use Anubis because it actually stops LLM bots from scraping their site, so it must work, right?

> Yeah, but only because the LLM bots simply don’t run JavaScript.

I don't think that this is the case, because when Anubis itself switched from a proof-of-work to a different JavaScript-based challenge, my server got overloaded, but switching back to the PoW solution fixed it [0].

I also semi-hate Anubis since it required me to add JS to a website that used none before, but (1) it's the only thing that stopped the bot problem for me, (2) it's really easy to deploy, and (3) very few human visitors are incorrectly blocked by it (unlike Captchas or IP/ASN bans that have really high false-positive rates).

[0]: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/1121
by vlovich123 | 2025-11-02 05:24:59+00:00
> In practice, things are a bit more complicated. In fact, I don’t know of any async/await embedding on top of io_uring in any language yet, because it doesn’t quite match this model. But generally, that’s the idea.

Glommio and monoio are async runtimes in rust on top of io_uring and Tokio has an optional io_uring backend. Does that not count? This is such a well researched article that this kind of statement makes me think I’m missing something - surprising the author would get this wrong.
by maplethorpe | 2025-11-02 05:25:29+00:00
I think of it as inviting another country to share our planet, but one that's a million times larger and a million times smarter than all of our existing countries combined. If you can imagine how that scenario might play out in real life, then you probably have some idea of how you'd fare in an AGI-dominated world.

Fortunately, I think the type of AGI we're likely to get first is some sort of upgraded language model that makes less mistakes, which isn't necessarily AGI, but which marketers nonetheless feel comfortable branding it as.
by CoderLim110 | 2025-11-02 05:25:32+00:00
I’ve been thinking about similar questions myself:

1、If code generation eventually works without human intervention, and every Google search could theoretically produce a real-time, custom-generated page, does that mean we no longer need people to build websites at all? At that point, “web development” becomes more like intent-shaping rather than coding.

2、I’m also not convinced that chat is the ideal interface for users. Natural language feels flexible, but it can also be slow, ambiguous, and cognitively heavier than clicking a button. Maybe LLM-driven systems will need new UI models that blend conversation with more structured interaction, instead of assuming chat = the future.

Curious how others here think about those two points.
by uqers | 2025-11-02 05:25:32+00:00
> Unfortunately, the price LLM companies would have to pay to scrape every single Anubis deployment out there is approximately $0.00.

The math on the site linked here as a source for this claim is incorrect. The author of that site assumes that scrapers will keep track of the access tokens for a week, but most internet-wide scrapers don't do so. The whole purpose of Anubis is to be expensive for bots that repeatedly request the same site multiple times a second.
by lopatin | 2025-11-02 05:25:50+00:00
CC has better agent tools and is faster. The ability to switch from plan mode to execution mode and back is huge. Toggling thinking also. And of course they are innovating all of these agentic features like MCP, sub-agents, skills, etc...

Codex writes higher quality code, but is slower and less feature rich. I imagine this will change within months. The jury is still out. Exciting times!
by danans | 2025-11-02 05:26:15+00:00
> What Bostrom & Yudkowsky and their entourage want is AI control. The ability to enslave a conscious, sentient being to the will and wishes of its owners.

While I'd agree that the current AI luminaries want that control for their own power and wealth reasons, it's silly to call the thing they want to control sentient or conscious.

They want to own the thing that they hope will be the ultimate means of all production.

The ones they want to subjugate to their will and wishes are us.
by didericis | 2025-11-02 05:26:17+00:00
> Well the need is to arrive where you are going.

In order to get to your destination, you need to explain where you want to go. Whatever you call that “imperative language”, in order to actually get the thing you want, you have to explain it. That’s an unavoidable aspect of interacting with anything that responds to commands, computer or not.

If the AI misunderstands those instructions and takes you to a slightly different place than you want to go, that’s a huge problem. But it’s bound to happen if you’re writing machine instructions in a natural language like English and in an environment where the same instructions aren’t consistently or deterministically interpreted. It’s even more likely if the destination or task is particularly difficult/complex to explain at the desired level of detail.

There’s a certain irreducible level of complexity involved in directing and translating a user’s intent into machine output simply and reliably that people keep trying to “solve”, but the issue keeps reasserting itself generation after generation. COBOL was “plain english” and people assumed it would make interacting with computers like giving instructions to another employee over half a century ago.

The primary difficulty is not the language used to articulate intent, the primary difficulty is articulating intent.
by dfabulich | 2025-11-02 05:27:33+00:00
> If you’re not already using a CLI-based agent like Claude Code or Codex CLI, you probably should be.

Are the CLI-based agents better (much better?) than the Cursor app? Why?

I like how easy it is to get Cursor to focus a particular piece of code. I select the text and Cmd-L, saying "fix this part, it's broken like this ____."

I haven't really tried a CLI agent; sending snippets of code by CLI sounds really annoying. "Fix login.ts lines 148-160, it's broken like this ___"
by keiferski | 2025-11-02 05:28:20+00:00
I’ve seen many small businesses do well on TikTok and Instagram by eschewing all fancy graphics and technology, and just talking into their phone’s camera like a normal person. “Hey I’m Joe, I just opened a cafe down here. It’s always been my dream, etc.” The more quirky and human the video, the better it does.

I know this new tool looks to be for static graphics; but I do think the same thing applies. Not using AI-generated polished graphics will become a differentiator.
by LavenderDay3544 | 2025-11-02 05:29:23+00:00
Even a fully loaded kernel with loads of drivers isn't that big. And not all of it has to be resident in memory at all times. Code in general is miniscule compared to data. And most of a kernel's data isn't baked into the executable. And this kernel in particular has very thin drivers that only abstract real devices to generic device class interfaces that userspace has to deal with directly. That's the part that's inspired by exokernels and hypervisor paravirtualization. That means that drivers for this kernel will be even smaller than those for other ones like Linux.
by bawolff | 2025-11-02 05:30:22+00:00
I'm confused, on the bug report it is claimed ffmpeg fixed the issue, so presumably it was a valid issue. So what's the problem here? That it was a mere memory corruption bug and not an exploitable issue? Even still it seems reasonable that google reports bugs even if they aren't security issues and it seems reasonable to err on the side of memory cirruption being security relavent.

Edit: i guess its not even that, they are just bitter that they have to fix bugs in their own code??? Recieving vuln reports is a gift. If ffmpeg doesnt like it maybe google should just start practising full disclosure.
by nunez | 2025-11-02 05:30:44+00:00
So many ways to juice those numbers though.

And if your team is far from the money, what often matters much much more is how much political capital your skip level manager has and to what extent it can be deployed when the company needs to re-org or cut. Shoot, this can matter even if you're close to the money (if you're joining a team that's in the critical path of the profit center vs a capex moonshot project funded by said profit center).

This is one thing I really like about sales engineering. Sales orgs carry (relatively) very low-BS politically.
by tptacek | 2025-11-02 05:31:02+00:00
Right, but that's the point. It's not that the idea is bad. It's that PoW is the wrong fit for it. Internet-wide scrapers don't keep state? Ok, then force clients to do something that requires keeping state. You don't need to grind SHA2 puzzles to do that; you don't need to grind anything at all.
by rpcope1 | 2025-11-02 05:33:09+00:00
One major point of heartburn with Rust is that it comparatively lacks the diversity of ISA targets that C broadly does. I know some of this is because C is both relatively simple to write a basic compiler for that more or less just works (in comparison to something crazy like C++), and that's it's been around for a long time, but why isn't there more of a push to add at least all of the supported Debian ISAs to the Rust compiler?
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-11-02 05:33:52+00:00
> Work functions don't make sense as a token tax; there's actually the opposite of the antispam asymmetry there. Every bot request to a web page yields tokens to the AI company. Legitimate users, who far outnumber the bots, are actually paying more of a cost.

Agreed, residential proxies are far more expensive than compute, yet the bots seem to have no problem obtaining millions of residential IPs. So I'm not really sure why Anubis works—my best guess is that the bots have some sort of time limit for each page, and they haven't bothered to increase it for pages that use Anubis.

> with a content protection system built in Javascript that was deliberately expensive to reverse engineer and which could surreptitiously probe the precise browser configuration a request to create a new Youtube account was using.

> The next thing Anubis builds should be that, and when they do that, they should chuck the proof of work thing.

They did [0], but it doesn't work [1]. Of course, the Anubis implementation is much simpler than YouTube's, but (1) Anubis doesn't have dozens of employees who can test hundreds of browser/OS/version combinations to make sure that it doesn't inadvertently block human users, and (2) it's much trickier to design an open-source program that resists reverse-engineering than a closed-source program, and I wouldn't want to use Anubis if it went closed-source.

[0]: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/configuration/challeng...

[1]: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/1121