MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mlyle | 2025-11-05 03:17:29+00:00
> > I think "being able to do as well as a 50th percentile human who's had a little practice," on a wide range of tasks, is a pretty decent measure.

> That seems like a personal definition for super intelligence.

I was giving a definition for artificial general intelligence as distinguished from super-intelligence, since the poster above said that most definitions of AGI were indistinguishable from super-intelligence.

To me, a computer doing as well as a practiced human at a wide swath of things is AGI. It's artificial; it's intelligence, and it's at least somewhat general.
by octaane | 2025-11-05 03:17:40+00:00
To avoid mass casualties at the end of the runway - on the road, or the buildings that the runway points to. Check the layout on google maps.

More specifically, V1 is the max speed at which you're about to take off, but you can still abort from. They hit that max speed and realized there was a major problem that hypothetically, they could have slowed down from, but realistically was not possible. They had no choice.
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-05 03:17:56+00:00
This is a legitimate question and you shouldn't be getting voted down.

There's a"phase diagram" that can be used to model and estimate the "newsworthiness" of deaths.

Roughly speaking:

The sum of the value[1] of the individuals dying at one time[2] determines how newsworthy the incident[3] is.

[1] You can estimate the value of a person by summing the expected income for their remaining life. This may need some "tweaking" in some circumstances. For example, soldiers are an expense to governments, not a tax revenue stream. Alternatively, pretend their annual salary is interest payments on some asset. At, say, 5% this means multiplying their salary by 20x to estimate their "worth". This is why Israel exchanges hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for dozens of their citizens. This why you've never even heard of most civil wars in Africa, even though they often kill far more than, say, the war in Gaza or Ukraine.

[2] "At the same instant" is more newsworthy than a "statistic". One overturned bus killing a bunch of kids makes headlines, the greater number of traffic accidents nation-wide on the same day... not so much.

[3] A cause, especially an intelligent one such as murder, war, terrorisms, etc... is more newsworthy than air pollution, traffic, old age, bad diets, etc... People like to tell stories, they want to attribute things to an agent. Non-agentic things feel inevitable, even if they're actually easily fixed.
by defrost | 2025-11-05 03:17:58+00:00
> Sure, but why even make that argument?

To accurately model a physical system humanity depends upon.

> Nobody cares about this nerd stuff.

Clearly false.

Many do. Military types care about ocean tempretures as it facilitates submarine tracking, for example.

> Maybe the only argument should be that "if we burn it all, then we will all die."

Many would suggest burning 90% of it then. That's 10% shy of we all die so that's got to be ok, okay?

> That should be the title of every climate study going forward, shouldn't it?

This is what you want to hang your stance upon? Uniformly stupid titling?
by nomel | 2025-11-05 03:18:03+00:00
No, they are correct, and it's disingenuous to claim otherwise. They have a DNA sample of everyone. Those samples haven't been sequenced. As you've pointed out, they are sequenced when the state needs them to be.

It would be like scanning your drivers license and putting it in a sealed envelope and claiming "I don't have your home address!", when I'm known to get the home address from other peoples envelopes when asked for it.
by michaelbarton | 2025-11-05 03:19:39+00:00
I hope this win signals (to both parties) that voters are receptive and will get engaged when a clear message is presented about cost of living and quality of life issues. Some of which are taken for granted in most other western countries.

I’m no political wonk, and I’m curious what others with more insight might say about his ability to fund and implement his polices.

I’m reminided of Obama and his hopeful message but he was mostly stymied on policy goals. Specifically Obamacare as an example ended up being watered down
by tptacek | 2025-11-05 03:20:17+00:00
He was treated comparably to other people prosecuted for computer felonies post-CFAA. Non-remunerative crime, first-time offense, super unclear intent, damaged a research network. Felony conviction. What more do you want? The next wave of people who were sentenced, to like 1 year, were owning up phone switches.
by kazinator | 2025-11-05 03:20:20+00:00
It's perfectly fine to have mutable strings in a hash table; just document that the behavior becomes unspecified if keys are mutated while they are in the table.

Make sure the behavior is safe: it won't crash or be exploitable by a remote attacker.

It works especially well in a language that doesn't emphasize mutation; i.e. you don't reach for string mutation as your go-to tool for manipulation.

Explicit "freeze" stuff is an awful thing to foist onto the programmer.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-11-05 03:20:29+00:00
Empirically? Observationally? Yes.

Until we have empirical evidence to the contrary we need to preserve our species.

If we discover other smarter species or never do, either way I don't care, it's immaterial to the precautionary principle.

We are fucking awesome and rare, and any other species with our amount of meaning generation or even capability for meaning generation is also fucking awesome.

I would 100% grant that ceatacenas and octopuses have human or higher level intelligence, I don't care, I don't need to put other species capabilities down to highlight my species accomplishment, the simple fact is that we have written more facts about the universe, discovered more, done more, gone further than any species we have empirically observed.

I mean it's incontrovertibly true, maybe dolphins have crazy libraries I'm not aware of, but until we verify that fact we need to preserve ourselves (and afterwards too), and we should preserve them too.

Even with other species, aliens, etc, they all need to be preserved because we can't ex ante predict which entities within a species will be part of the causal chain that solves entropy (if it's even possible.)
by mattmanser | 2025-11-05 03:23:40+00:00
I've never had a server go down. Most companies don't need a hot server because it's never going to be needed.

AWS + Azure have both gone down with major outages indivudually more over the last 10 years than any of the servers in companies I worked with in the 10 years before that.

And in comparable periods, not a single server failed or disk failed or whatever.

So I get SOME companies need hot standby servers, almost no company, no SaaS, no startup, actually does.

Because if it's that mission critical, then they would have already had to move off the cloud due to how frequently AWs/Azure/etc. have gone down over the last 10 years, often for 1/2 day or so,
by ankit219 | 2025-11-05 03:24:06+00:00
I think its more to do with obfuscation than simple agent buying stuff. Perplexity disguises its agents as chrome browser, and that messes up things at Amazon's end. Not saying its good or bad, but think of ad relevance, then recommendations effectiveness, placements etc. because by default an agent is going to click more and more randomly than a user.

Then, when the agent buys stuff, my guess is that returns are a higher %age (because naturally agents have no preference model so end users might not like what they purchased eventually and returned). I don't know if enough people returned for it to matter, but as a user, if an agent is making a purchase and i know its super easy to return, i won't check everything agent did, just buy and then return if I dont like it.

I don't think it's always a price comparison or margin thing at this point. Given their margins and volume, the agent purchases woudl need to be an order of magnitude more to matter on that front.
by natertux | 2025-11-05 03:26:45+00:00
After a few months of experimenting on AWS, I got scared seeing how fast small side projects could turn into expensive monthly bills.

I built my own DIY cloud, a minimal self-hosted setup that lets me deploy apps, databases, and backups on cheap VPS or bare-metal servers. At first I just wanted to save money, but I realized that managing it can easily become a full-time SRE job.

Still, for small, experimental, or hobby projects, this setup works perfectly. It keeps costs predictable and gives full control without needing large-scale infrastructure.

https://diy-cloud.remikeat.com

Would love to hear from others who tried leaving managed clouds behind.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-11-05 03:26:53+00:00
But we don’t die, well we do but that’s unavoidable. Our grand kids or great grand kids are the ones that will really suffer from this, but maybe by then we will have created a successor species based on AI or something so humans would have been obsolete anyways. The 2020s will be known as the decade that made humanity’s continued existence infeasible and unnecessary?
by tomhow | 2025-11-05 03:27:47+00:00
Previously:

Complete Whole Earth Catalogs Archive Available Online and Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38068370 - Oct 2023 (7 comments)

The whole of the Whole Earth Catalog is now online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37872774 - Oct 2023 (81 comments)
by bdangubic | 2025-11-05 03:28:10+00:00
Obamacare being what it was is 1,000,000% Obama’s failure - he’ll tell you this same thing over coffee too. Just outmost disaster through and through how it was implemented.

Zohran can easily fund which is why every single GOP Senator and Congresman went publicly against him. Can’t have people get any crazy ideas that they could actually have nice things. WTF does Congresman from a some shithole county in Alabama give a fuck about who Mayor of NYC is? but GOP is a well-oiled machine so it was all-hands-on-deck to prevent these ideas from infecting the nation…

even though this seems like a victory, starting in about 10 minutes the entire GOP message for 2026 is going to be “Zohran is Democratic Party now” and it just might work
by hashmash | 2025-11-05 03:28:19+00:00
The Java runtime isn't any more inherently insecure than the JavaScript runtime, and JavaScript seems to work just fine for the web.

The key reason why applet security failed was because it gave you the entire JDK by default, and so every method in the JDK needed to have explicit security checking code in place to restrict access. The model was backwards -- full control by default with selective disabling meant that every new feature in the JDK is a new vulnerability.
by hansvm | 2025-11-05 03:28:21+00:00
Part of it is that more concentrated events are easier to do something about.

By some way of contrast, fixing the diffuse deaths from car accidents requires re-licensing the entire population with stricter training, a metric f*$#-ton of road re-design, etc. Even if you could muster the political will to make it happen it'd be a colossally expensive endeavor. Plus, the fact that people are willing to to voluntarily engage with the roads as-is on a daily basis suggests that people are comfortable with that level of risk.

I personally think it's worth making our roads safer, but my opinions don't keep that from being a hard problem, and most of that hardness comes from its diffuse nature.

Contrast that with plane accidents. In some sense, we're lucky this was a cargo plane. This could have just as easily been 3 days worth of car accident deaths, and the only reason air travel is anywhere near as safe as the status quo is because of intense scrutiny of events like this, making the entire system safer over time.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-05 03:28:34+00:00
I mean, if you call "running uncontested" going up against the current mayor, former governor, the editorial board of the NYT and WAPO, billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the Speaker of the House, the Senate and House leadership of the Democratic party, not to mention the entire rightwing media apparatus, and the President of the United States himself, yeah he ran uncontested.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-05 03:28:35+00:00
First mistake:

> quit my job working for one of the states in the US earlier this year because they were not treating software development as a first class citizen. It's hard to get work done when you can't get any testing, can't get any infra or PM support, have to do everything yourself in a vaccum. Have to run apps on a server in the closet.

You don’t quit a job until you have another one lined up. You do your work the best you can for 40 hours a week and leave. If you don’t get all of your work done and they fire you, at least you kept getting a paycheck longer. Don’t let your pride or frustrating keep you from exchanging labor for money to support your addiction to food and shelter.

> Surviving: Every job has its flaws, what have you done to maintain your ability to earn an income despite issues that had made previous jobs difficult / unpleasant / untenable.

You saw that last response I had? I care about doing the best job I can given circumstances outside of my “circle of influence” for 40 hours a week and then I go home. Every pay period money get deposited in my account and depending on the job RSUs get deposited in my brokerage account every vesting period.

As soon as I get off work, I don’t think about it until the next day.

> First time in my life I "chose myself" and quit a job instead of staying in something that was very negatively affecting my mental health. It's been hard to find a way to get back into employment without addressing fears of hostile, toxic work environments.

What you described is neither hostile or toxic.

But now to your question, I’ve been working a lot longer. But I changed jobs in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2023, and lasted year.

1. External recruiters who reach out to me.

2. Reaching out to recruiters who I have kept in touch with for well over a decade.

3. Reaching out to companies where I had a specialized skillset - no “full stack development” or web development is not specialized

4. My network that I always keep warm.
by TylerE | 2025-11-05 03:28:38+00:00
Security/debris fencing yes, but that's like, orders of magnitude short of what would stop the amount of energy we're talking about here.

You also don't particularly want it to be catastrophically effective as there are real world cases where planes have clipped the fence and then NOT gone on to crash, or at least to crash in a fairly controlled manner with the majority onboard surviving. Hitting a brick wall at 180mph is going to have a 0% survival rate.
by 29athrowaway | 2025-11-05 03:29:24+00:00
The tokenization being talked about is minting digital tokens in a public blockchain to represent traditional assets.

Unlike decentralized cryptocurrencies, this blockchain is not decentralized and participating requires creating a wallet and having it whitelisted by a centralized controlling entity.

Some form of identification, KYC/AML process has always been required to be an investor or non-trivial financial transactions.

The benefits of tokenization over the traditional approach are fractional ownership, faster settlements and transfers, 24/7 market, etc.
by Jtsummers | 2025-11-05 03:30:13+00:00
I don't know what the MD-11 would have had, again I didn't work on it. But the systems used for other aircraft would have reported an alarm based on what I saw in the video, at least they were designed to do that. The LRU receiving the sensor inputs wouldn't typically be in the wing and would be able to continue reporting the alarm condition even if the sensors fail. In fact, the lack of current from the sensor (for the systems I worked on) would have been enough to trigger the alarm if the sensor were completely eliminated.
by ameliaquining | 2025-11-05 03:30:24+00:00
In C, C++, and Rust, the question of "are strings in this language mutable or immutable?" isn't applicable, because those languages have transitive mutability qualifiers. So they only need a single string type, and whether you can mutate it or not depends on context. (C++ and Rust have multiple string types, but the differences among them aren't about mutability.) In languages without this feature, a given value is either always mutable or never mutable, and so it's necessary to pick one or the other for string literals.
by jasonpbecker | 2025-11-05 03:30:31+00:00
It's unusual that Cuomo ran as an independent trying to "spoil"-- but NYC has such a large number of Democrats (like many US cities) that the more competitive and important election is typically the primary election (which determines who is running for each party). NYC has had a history of sometimes going other directions (as Cuomo's relatively high vote shows; having elected Michael Bloomberg many times, for example).

Mamdani won the primary for the democrats over Cuomo, but Cuomo decided to try and do an independent run to further challenge him.
by quantified | 2025-11-05 03:30:44+00:00
Following the thought experiment about adding ever-larger numbers of AI "workers" to the economy of ever-increasing "quality":

Who owns these "workers"? what do they do (apart from consuming electricity)? Currently it'd be knowledge work mostly. If safety can be handled, a large number of machines could be automated, but there are only so many excavators, dump trucks, taxis, vacuum cleaners and coffee machines out there. Each of those represents some displaced jobs. And as knowledge work gets shifted from humans to machines, we still don't have any replacement industries or jobs appearing. So the economics seem to miss some critical elements. It's entirely possible that the finance side of the economy is all in the plutonomy, but keeping the enormous number of living people occupied and not unhappy has no apparent solution.
by motohagiography | 2025-11-05 03:32:03+00:00
the contrarian optimist case against this dystopia of CBDCs and digital identity is that institutions themselves are too corrupt to adopt them. i met some people involved in a project to turn a government budget into a ledger and the resistance was that it would remove all the discretion from the system, and even technocrats forget that the discretion is its own reward in those places.

their entire plan is predicated on there being no alternative, and these world domination plans make some noise but they do not prevail.
by throwaway201606 | 2025-11-05 03:33:24+00:00
Answers here

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-frame...

TL;DR version - its about money and business balance sheets, not about technology.

For businesses past a certain size, going to cloud is a decision ALWAYS made by business, not by technology.

From a business perspective, having a "relatively fixed" ongoing cost (which is an operational expense ie OpEx ) even if it is significantly higher than what it would cost to do things with internal buy and build out (which is a capital expense cost ie CapEx), make financial planning, taxes and managing EBITDA much easier.

Note that no one on the business really cares what the tech implications are as long at "tech still sorta runs mostly OK".

It also, via financial wizardry, makes tech cost "much less" on a quarter over quarter and year over year basis.
by voidhorse | 2025-11-05 03:33:45+00:00
To a reasonable person, yes, this should have been the case, but politics in America is far from reasonable.

The entire establishment marshaled what forces it could to stop mamdani's momentum. Couple this with the fact that there are (unfortunately) many people out there who would rather elect accused sex offenders than risk the chance that somebody marginally aligned with a word and ideology they don't actually understand (socialism) would be elected, or more likely, and worse, people are just racist and/or islamophobic and would sooner elect a man who would grope their daughter than a man who, god forbid, has a different religion than them.
by culi | 2025-11-05 03:35:35+00:00
This is not the case. His main opponent was Cuomo who was the Democrat "establishment" candidate. Zohran narrowly defeated Cuomo in the primary. Typically that's it but Cuomo took the unconventional strategy of running independently in the general with the backing of establishment Democrats.

Typically, the Republican candidate would have no chance in a city like NYC. This was the case here as well, but Cuomo calculated that with the backing of establishment Democrats AND the backing of Republicans/conservatives, he'd be able to defeat Mamdani. The Republican candidate did not agree to drop out, however. In the end it didn't matter though because Zohran Mamdani won by a larger margin than Cuomo and the Republican combined

In a typical election, the main election is the primary (which happened back in June). The Democrat nominee is pretty much guaranteed to win so the general is almost a formality. This general election was actually more contested than is typical

tl;dr: his main opponent was establishment democrats
by dietr1ch | 2025-11-05 03:35:37+00:00
I was going to joke about 8k@120Hz needing like 4 video cables, but it seems we are not too far from it.

[8k@120Hz Gaming on HDMI 2.1 with compression](https://wccftech.com/8k-120hz-gaming-world-first-powered-by-...)

> With the HDMI 2.2 spec announced at CES 2025 and its official release scheduled for later this year, 8K displays will likely become more common thanks to the doubled (96 Gbps) bandwidth.
by danaris | 2025-11-05 03:36:25+00:00
It seems like you're trying to disprove my point by stating something that's only tangentially related.

Yes, there are situations where a business can refuse to do business with me and there's nothing I can do about it.

There are also situations where a business might refuse to do business with me and I can take them to court and force them to do so—if the reason they refused to transact with me was because I fall into a protected class.

Because of this, it is also true that, if they chose to, legislatures could write new laws that require businesses to do business with everyone with a "g" in their name, or everyone with hazel eyes.

Or they could require businesses in certain classes to allow absolutely anyone to transact.

This is especially true with monopolies and other types of market-dominant companies, which very frequently have to operate under more restrictive conditions than other businesses.

Google isn't an all-powerful entity that no laws can touch, as much as they might like to be. Any time you start thinking "nobody can force a business to" something-or-other, remember that laws and regulations exist, and do very much force businesses to do things they otherwise would not choose to do.
by 6SixTy | 2025-11-05 03:36:34+00:00
My take is that it could help tie up fragmentation. RISC-V has different profiles defining what instructions come with for different use cases like a general purpose OS, and enshrining them as an ISO standard would give the entire industry a rallying point.

Without these profiles, we are stuck with memorizing a word soup of RV64GCBV_Zicntr_Zihpm_etc all means
by KPGv2 | 2025-11-05 03:37:40+00:00
This is an overly simplistic view of what "free market" means in practice. The most obvious issue is that, in a free market economy, government protects private property, ensuring that any capitalistic definition of "free market" does, in fact, require government intervention into the expression of supply and demand.

And now that we've established that capitalism necessitates government intervention, capitalism is incompatible with such a simple definition of "free market." We can begin negotiating just how much government interference in the market is allowed before it's no longer a free market, but it's categorically impossible for a capitalistic free market to be pure expression of supply and demand.