MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dwohnitmok | 2025-11-27 20:00:56+00:00
What I mean is that there is no relationship in Isabelle between their cost function and their actual algorithm.

The process the book goes through for a function f is the following:

1. Define `f`

2. Create a correctness predicate (call it `Correct`) and prove `forall x, Correct(f(x))`

3. Use a script to do some code generation to generate a function `time_f`

4. Prove that `time_f` fulfills some asymptotic bound (e.g. `exists c, forall x, x > c -> time_f(x) < a * x^2`)

Nowhere is `time_f` actually ever formally related to `f`. From Isabelle's point of view they are two completely separate functions that have no relationship to one another. There is only an informal, English argument given that `time_f` corresponds to `f`.

Ideally you'd be able to define some other predicate `AsymptoticallyModelsRuntime` such that `AsymptoticallyModelsRuntime(f, time_f)` holds, with the obvious semantic meaning of that predicate also holding true. But the book doesn't do that. And I don't know how they could. Hence my original question of whether there's any system that lets you write `AsymptoticallyModelsRuntime`.
by umanwizard | 2025-11-27 20:01:48+00:00
That’s not true, at least in France. Perhaps it’s true in some other dialect, e.g. Quebec French; I don’t know.

From Wiktionary, the pronunciation of English bit is /bɪt/, and French bite is /bit/. The sounds represented in IPA by ɪ and i are not the same, which is precisely why “bit” and “beet” sound different to Americans.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-11-27 20:02:41+00:00
I am honestly just curious what people think, it is an interesting topic. I have heard off and on throughout my life this idea about being vulnerable. I was never fully certain what people meant by that. Even in this thread it seems people think of it differently, but no one really goes into details to clarify.

E.g. what are some concrete examples of what would make a man be vulnerable?
by saurik | 2025-11-27 20:02:42+00:00
The point is that you aren't guaranteed the room type you select: you'll show up at the Marriott and they'll give you a room with one king instead of the room with two queens you thought you booked; your selection is just a preference, not a lock.

https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/guarantee.m...

^ you have to have Platinum status to get the type "guaranteed"... and, even then, they might just give you $25-100 and say "sorry" (it is more of an SLA with a penalty; though, this is also true of the reservation itself... FWIW, getting a random room type is MUCH more common than getting bumped).
by Phil_Latio | 2025-11-27 20:03:10+00:00
It's just one piece of the puzzle. The cost for Co2 certificates is a more major reason. Starting 2027, hedge funds can buy these certificates which will be the nail in the coffin. It's basically Bitcoin on steroids with the difference that people buy Bitcoin out of free will, while the industry is forced to buy these certificates which get more scarce over time.
by Kinrany | 2025-11-27 20:03:20+00:00
I continue to be surprised that in these discussions correctness is treated as some optional highest possible level of quality, not the only reasonable state.

Suppose we're talking about multiplayer game networking, where the central store receives torrents of UDP packets and it is assumed that like half of them will never arrive. It doesn't make sense to view this as "we don't care about the player's actual position". We do. The system just has tolerances for how often the updates must be communicated successfully. Lost packets do not make the system incorrect.
by auggierose | 2025-11-27 20:04:06+00:00
Curry-Howard is not needed for theorem proving, it's just that type theorists like it.

See https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jrh13/papers/thesis.html for your question, John Harrison got a job with Intel based on this after their floating point disaster.

But in short: theorem proving is not about equalities, it is about inequalities. And theorems about numerical algorithms are a great example of this.
by georgehotz | 2025-11-27 20:04:57+00:00
Do people on Hacker News actually believe this? Each one of the four people named built a product I happily pay for! Then they used investment and profits to hire people to build more products and better products.

There's a lot of scammers in the world, but OpenAI, Tesla, Amazon, and Microsoft have mostly made my life better. It's not about having money, look at all the startups that have raised billions and gone kaput. Vs say Amazon who raised just $9M before their $54M IPO and is still around today bringing tons of stuff to my door.
by pstoica | 2025-11-27 20:06:34+00:00
I'm a former software engineer at Puzzle Financial (Oct 2020 - May 2023; puzzle.io). Until today, Sasha Orloff has not acknowledged me publicly, relying on silence and whistleblower retaliation via Orrick.

Last night, Thanksgiving eve, he broke that silence on Wikipedia Help Desk, referring to me as "this user Patrick Stoica," calling federal CFPB documents and lawsuits "made up" and making surgical edits to hide that LendUp's lifetime lending ban covers him personally.

https://patrickstoica.com/puzzle-statement/#wikipedia-edit-w...

I've filed 5 SEC complaints, a California State Bar complaint (Case No. 25-O-30894), and a California Board of Accountancy complaint (Case No. A-2026-1047).

LendUp is a YC12 company. Puzzle received investments from a "YC Alum Syndicate" and has an active partnership onboarding YC companies. I've given YC advanced warning of Sasha's continued fraudulent conduct. They've chosen silence and censorship.

Any actions taken regarding this post will be similarly logged. They have already been notified; documentation is already in the SEC's hands.

https://patrickstoica.com/puzzle-statement/
by tpmoney | 2025-11-27 20:07:17+00:00
If you download GPL source code and run `wc` on its files and distribute the output of that, is that a violation of copyright and the GPL? What if you do that for every GPL program on github? What if you use python and numpy and generate a list of every word or symbol used in those programs and how frequently they appear? What if you generate the same frequency data, but also add a weighting by what the previous symbol or word was? What if you did that an also added a weighting by what the next symbol or word was? How many statistical analyses of the code files do you need to bundle together before it becomes copyright infringement?
by coffeecoders | 2025-11-27 20:07:19+00:00
Interesting approach, but I mean more in the sense of a multi-agent sandbox than workflow automation. Your project feels like wrapping a bunch of LLMs into "agents" with fixed cadences, it is a neat product idea, even if it mostly ends up orchestrating API calls and cron jobs.

The thing I’m curious about is the emergent behavior, letting multiple LLMs interact freely in a simulated organization to see how coordination, bottlenecks, and miscommunication naturally arise.

Cool project regardless!
by em-bee | 2025-11-27 20:08:49+00:00
just a comment on this article, that may be unrelated to the point you want to make: gavin makes a fatal mistake in interpreting RMS intent. he claims that he only wanted control over his hardware. that is not true. he also wanted the right to share his code with others. the person who had the code for his printer was not allowed to share that code. RMS wanted to ensure that the person who has the code is also allowed to share it. source available does not do that.
by vlovich123 | 2025-11-27 20:08:54+00:00
If you’re live streaming video, you can make sure every frame is a P-frame which brings your bandwidth costs to a minimum, but then a lost packet completely permanently disables the stream. Or you periodically refresh the stream with I-frames sent over a reliable channel so that lost packets corrupt the video going forward only momentarily.

Sure, if performance characteristics were the same, people would go for strong consistency. The reason many different consistency models are defined is that there’s different tradeoffs that are preferable to a given problem domain with specific business requirements.
by vbezhenar | 2025-11-27 20:09:04+00:00
Some humans will be rich and they'll buy things. For example those humans who own AI or fabs. And those humans, who serve to them (assuming that there will be services not replaced by AI, for example prostitution), will also buy things.

If 99.99% of other humans will become poor and eventually die, it certainly will change economy a lot.
by londons_explore | 2025-11-27 20:09:39+00:00
A typical user still pays the same on average in a market.

Just they might pay more in some hours and less in others.

Some market systems have gotten bad press over huge bills (eg. Texas), but that only happens when only a small chunk of users participate in the market, whilst others are on fixed pricing and therefore don't care about usage.

When everyone participates, supply and demand make sure the price never goes super high, simply because there are enough people who will turn off stuff to save money.
by guiambros | 2025-11-27 20:10:13+00:00
Happy Thanksgiving @dang, @tomhow, and the HN community! Almost 17 years here, and it's hard to overstate how much I learned from y'all.

Through tech cycles, heated debates, and some inevitable fads, the limitless curiosity of this community remains inspiring. Thank you mods and YC for staying true to the original hacker ethos.
by vlovich123 | 2025-11-27 20:11:04+00:00
Someone else stated this implicitly, but with your reasoning no complex system is ever consistent with ongoing changes. From the perspective of one of many concurrent writers outside of the database there’s no consistency they observe. Within the database there could be pending writes in flight that haven’t been persisted yet.

That’s why these consistency models are defined from the perspective of “if you did no more writes after write X, what happens”.
by jMyles | 2025-11-27 20:11:19+00:00
> This begs the question of which side agents will achieve human-level skill at first.

I don't agree; it's perfectly possible, given chasing0entropy's... let's say 'feature request', that either side might gain that skill level first.

> It wouldn’t surprise me if doing the work itself end-to-end (to a market-ready standard) remains in the uncanny valley for quite some time, while “fuzzier” roles like management can be more readily replaced.

Agreed - and for many of us, that's exactly what seems to be happening. My agent is vaguely closer to the role that a good manager has played for me in the past than it is to the role I myself have played - it keeps better TODO lists than I can, that's for sure. :-)

> It’s like how we all once thought blue collar work would be first, but it turned out that knowledge work is much easier. Right now everyone imagines managers replacing their employees with AI, but we might have the order reversed.

Perfectly stated IMO.
by xp84 | 2025-11-27 20:11:40+00:00
This is extremely good advice. It’s frequently at odds with convenience, since things like iPhone screen mirroring, iPad as a 2nd display, etc. practically beg for you to sign into your work laptop with your personal Apple ID. All I can say is resist the urge to do such things.

I do keep a browser profile on the work machine signed into personal accounts, and do everything personal only in that browser, but even that is probably a mistake. Screen-sharing to home would be a much better compromise, unfortunately my gigabit internet comes with like 50Mbps upload so screen sharing sucks.
by epolanski | 2025-11-27 20:11:50+00:00
Catch-up in what exactly? Google isn't building hardware to sell, they aren't in the same market.

Also I feel you completely misunderstand that the problem isn't how fast is ONE gpu vs ONE tpu, what matters is the costs for the same output. If I can fill a datacenter at half the cost for the same output, does it matters I've used twice the TPUs and that a single Nvidia Blackwell was faster? No...

And hardware cost isn't even the biggest problem, operational costs, mostly power and cooling are another huge one.

So if you design a solution that fits your stack (designed for it) and optimize for your operational costs you're light years ahead of your competition using the more powerful solution, that costs 5 times more in hardware and twice in operational costs.

All I say is more or less true for inference economics, have no clue about training.
by AlexandrB | 2025-11-27 20:11:54+00:00
All law is arbitrary. Intellectual property law perhaps most of all.

Famously, the output from monkey "artists" was found to be non-copyrightable even though a monkey's brain is much more similar to ours than an LLM.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
by throw0101c | 2025-11-27 20:12:31+00:00
For dot-ca, it (used to be) historically mandated that you had to use the 'closest' geographic locale for your domain, which is how we got https://transit.toronto.on.ca (which now goes to https://transittoronto.ca).

At some point CIRA (the non-profit that now runs .ca) stopped making that a requirement.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ca

There are still rules on who gets priority on names: toronto.ca is the government but toronto.com is a news organization; ditto for canada.ca and canada.com; ontario.ca versus ontario.com; etc.

The three/four-level domains are now generally grandfathered.
by augment_me | 2025-11-27 20:13:44+00:00
NVIDIA chips are more versatile. During training, you might need to schedule things to the SFU(Special Function unit that does sin, cos, 1/sqrt(x), etc), you might need to run epilogues, save intermediary computations, save gradients, etc. When you train, you might need to collect data from various GPUs, so you need to support interconnects, remote SMEM writing, etc.

Once you have trained, you have frozen weights/feed-forward networks that consist out of frozen weights that you can just program in and run data over. These weights can be duplicated across any amount of devices and just sit there and run inference with new data.

If this turns out to be the future use-case for NNs(it is today), then Google are better set.
by DonHopkins | 2025-11-27 20:14:54+00:00
Will Google sell TPUs that can be plugged into stock hardware, or custom hardware with lots of TPUs? Our customers want all their video processing to happen on site, and don't want their video or other data to touch the cloud, so they're not happy about renting cloud TPUs or GPUs. Also it would be nice to have smart cameras with built-in TPUs.
by kragen | 2025-11-27 20:15:09+00:00
Currently "Sodium Battery Cell" is priced at US$50–70/kWh on the Shanghai Metals Market, which gives every appearance of being a real thing: https://www.metal.com/en/markets/43. They list LFP batteries currently at US$38–52/kWh: https://www.metal.com/en/markets/42

I think you may be dramatically overestimating how much container shipping costs.
by georgehotz | 2025-11-27 20:15:33+00:00
How do they own it? I see two scenarios.

1. They built the agent and it's somehow competitive. If so, they shouldn't just replace their own job with it, they should replace a lot more jobs and get a lot more rich than one salary.

2. They rent the agent. If so, why would the renting company not rent directly to their boss, maybe even at a business premium?

I see no scenario where there's an "agent to do my work while I keep getting a paycheck."
by xp84 | 2025-11-27 20:15:47+00:00
“Confuse a bit”

I highly doubt anyone is “dailying” an Amiga today for any actual work (other than retro fun), so I suspect there won’t be even a single person who expects this to be compatible with Amiga.

Likewise anyone looking for like a FPGA new Amiga hardware knows anything that says it’s got a Ryzen is not the droid they’re looking for.
by lurk2 | 2025-11-27 20:15:50+00:00
> How are businesses going to get money if there are no humans that are able to pay for goods?

By transacting with other businesses. In theory comparative advantage will always ensure that some degree of trade takes place between completely automated enterprises and comparatively inefficient human labor; in practice the utility an AI could derive from these transactions might not be worth it for either party—the AI because the utility is so minimal, and the humans because the transactions cannot sustain their needs. This gets even more fraught if we assume an AGI takes control before cheaply available space flight, because at a certain point having insufficiently productive humans living on any area of sea or land becomes less efficient than replacing the humans with automatons (particularly when you account for the risk of their behaving in unexpected ways).
by bitwize | 2025-11-27 20:15:50+00:00
Chocolate Doom attempts to replicate the original Doom experience in a modern source port, without the embellishments, bug fixes, and features offered by source ports like GZDoom. It's like the difference between building a modern clone of the Amiga 500, hewing as close to the original designs as possible, and building a "modern Amiga" with a PPC CPU, modern GPU, AmigaOS 4.x support, etc. Sure, the second is neat, but some people want to work within the exact constraints and quirks of the first.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-11-27 20:16:04+00:00
You know what's even more interesting? Putting all that stuff there was just a reaction by the USSR to the USA putting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-19_Jupiter into Turkey and Italy.

Compare the distances from there to the former borders of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Pact on a globe and see why.

https://thecubanrevolution.com/news/why-did-us-put-jupiter-m...

Tit for tat, so to speak.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-11-27 20:16:25+00:00
> Have you tried tobacco, indoor firearms and cocaine?

I don't do alcohol, drugs, et cetera, because I saw other people who did, and found them disgusting. I don't want to be like that. Though if I could easily get my hands on a weapon, I would have probably shot myself already.

> I read a lot of science, math and tech news, but am only aware of one place where the discourse around topics that interest me has the quality of HN, which is HN.

There is also lobste.rs
by Joker_vD | 2025-11-27 20:16:54+00:00
There is an amount of people who own, well, in the past we could say "means of production" but let's not. So, they own the physical capital and AI worker-robots, and this combination produces various goods for human use. So they (the people who own that stuff) trade those goods between each other since nobody owns the full range of production chains.

The people who used to be hired workers? Eh, they still own their ability to work (which is now completely useless in the market economy) and nothing much more so... well, they can go and sleep under the bridge or go extinct or do whatever else peacefully, as long as they don't try to trespass on the private property, sanctity and inviolability of which is obviously crucial for the societal harmony.

So yeah, the global population would probably shrink down to something in the hundreds millions or so in the end, and ironically, the economy may very well end up being self-sustainable and environmentally green and all that nice stuff since it won't have to support the life standards of ~10 billions, although the process of getting there could be quite tumultous.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-27 20:17:05+00:00
Again why would you think Apple the browser maker would be any more or less careful about Safari not allowing websites to access your camera, GPS, photos than Apple the operating system maker?

No one thinks that app review is what stops malicious apps from circumventing permissions. It’s the operating system itself.

And you really don’t want to compare the state of iOS updates to the state of Android updates do you?
by andsoitis | 2025-11-27 20:17:52+00:00
> There wouldn't even be such a thing as a silicon valley billionaire if the United States wasn't the most wildly successful political entity for the past 2000 years.

I don’t know that I would position the USA in this way.

Different metrics lead to different “winners”:

Longevity: Imperial China

Institutional legacy: Rome

Global reach: British Empire

Scientific/cultural transmission: Islamic Caliphates

Modern dominance: United States

Another lens:

* Rome & China = stability, governance, internal cohesion.

* Britain & the US = networks, capital markets, technology leverage.

* Caliphates = knowledge platforms, cosmopolitan integration.
by thatguysaguy | 2025-11-27 20:17:56+00:00
I'm actually not talking about whether the PR works or was tested. Let's just assume it was bug-free and worked as advertised. I would say that even in that situation, they should not accept the PR. The reason is that no one is the owner of that code. None of the maintainers will want to dedicate some of their volunteer time to owning your code/the AIs code, and the AI itself can't become the owner of the code in any meaningful way. (At least not without some very involved engineering work on building a harness, and since that's still a research-level project, it's clearly something which should be discussed at the project level, not just assumed).
by cloverich | 2025-11-27 20:18:08+00:00
Sounds loosely libertarian, but the longer terms one is new. Its long appealed to technical folks because of its simplicity and ability to address a wide swath of policy issues.

It took me a long time to break myself out of it. I think key was getting into the deep details of passing actual policies that would have enough popular support to be sustainable, to realize its ultimately just naive/simplistic thinking, thats another impractical ideology under the hood, dressed up as something more meaningful.
by vladms | 2025-11-27 20:18:12+00:00
During history, people did lots of horrible things and/or felt miserable without social networks. Yes, amplifying or rewarding does not have a positive effect, but I would like to see further analysis over the magnitude.

Think of slavery or burning of witches or genocides - those were considered perfectly normal not that long ago (on historical scale). I feel that focusing on social networks prevents some people to think "is that the root cause?". I personally think there other reasons of this generic "anger" that have a larger impact and that have different solutions than "less AI/less social networks", but that would be too off-topic.
by klipklop | 2025-11-27 20:19:07+00:00
In the Bay Area job market at 40+ you are 4/5 done with your working career at a high level of pay as a IC. It’s cruel, but post 40 and especially post 50 you are at risk of being let go and never find a similar paying job again. Especially in this job market.

Only way to prevent this is to be a director or unusually gifted as an engineer. Otherwise you are the old guy that wants too much money. I hate that the industry is like this but unless you are very high in your field your value to tech employers reaches zero unless your career has developed to a high level.
by aurelwu | 2025-11-27 20:19:11+00:00
Anyone can already buy those certificates - but as its an artificial market where rules can be changed politically it's actually way more resistant to such things than regular markets, so if those hedge funds feel like they want to lose some billions they can certainly do that. There is a large enough stockpile of certificates + leeway when to submit them that any short term market squeeze will just be dealt with politically.
by quotemstr | 2025-11-27 20:19:13+00:00
If IP law is arbitrary, we get to choose between IP law that makes LLMs propagate the GPL and law that doesn't. It's a policy switch we can toggle whenever want. Why would anyone want the propagates-GPL option when this setting would make LLMs much less useful for basically zero economic benefit? That's the legal "policy setting" you choose when you basically want to stall AI progress, and it's not going to stall China's progress.