MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ninjin | 2025-11-02 02:42:53+00:00
I disagree, but maybe it is a cultural thing for those of us that are more used to functional styles of programming? I was taught method chaining as a style by a seasoned JavaScript and Ruby programmer myself and I do not find the semantics confusing. "Create X with Y set to 17 and Z to 4711" can be either on one or three lines to me, as long as the method calls are clear and short enough.

As for variables, I (again personally) find it taxing to have many variables in scope, so I do net see their presence as a universal good. If we instead simply use expressions, then there is no need to concern yourself with whether the variable will come into play later on. Thus, I think it increases clarity and favour that over the ease of future modification argument you propose (heck, I would argue that you get better diffs even if you force the variable declaration into a future modification).

As for bikeshedding this piece of code further, if I steal some ideas from chrismorgan [1] and embedding-shape [2] who appear to be way more seasoned JavaScript programmers than me:

const $t = document.createElement('table'); for (const r of [ ['one', 'two', 'three'], ['four', 'five', 'six' ], ]) { const $r = $t.insertRow(); for (const e of r) $r.insertCell().innerText = e; }; document.body.append($t);

This is now rather minimal and the logic is easy (for me) to follow as the scopes are minimal and namespace uncluttered. It was a rather fun little exercise for a language I am not overly familiar with and I learned a few tricks and perspectives.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45782938

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45781591
by alexanderchr | 2025-11-02 02:46:06+00:00
Border guard was wrong. UK used passenger records from transport companies to determine when someone left the country, not face recognition.

They do however use face recognition when you take a domestic flight from an international terminal. Then they take a photo of you just before security and compare that when you board. To me this seems like an overly complex solution to a problem that would normally by solved by having a domestic section of the terminal, but I’m sure they had their reasons.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-11-02 02:48:33+00:00
> voluntary business transactions

The evil parts are hid in property rights which are not voluntary.

> made to never grow too big, in order to avoid impacting very many people

Consolidated property rights have more power against their counterparties, that's why businesses love merging so much.

Look at your tax return. Do you make more money from what you do or what you own? If you make money from what you do, you're a counterparty and you should probably want to tap the brakes on the party.
by YZF | 2025-11-02 02:49:59+00:00
We don't understand how the human brain works so it's not inconceivable that we can evolve an intelligent machine whose workings we don't understand either. Arguably we don't really understand how large language models work either.

LLMs are also not necessarily the path to AGI. We could get there with models that more closely approximate the human brain. Humans need a lot less "training data" than LLMs do. Human brains and evolution are constrained by biology/physics but computer models of those brains could accelerate evolution and not have the same biological constraints.

I think it's a given that we will have artificial intelligence at some point that's as smart or smarter than the smartest humans. Who knows when exactly but it's bound to happen within lessay the next few hundred years. What that means isn't clear. Just because some people are smarter than others (and some are much smarter than others) doesn't mean as much as you'd think. There are many other constraints. We don't need to be super smart to kill each other and destroy the planet.
by Grosvenor | 2025-11-02 02:50:10+00:00
The "editorial" pieces of FOX news were found to be "entertainment" by US judges. That's Tucker Carlson, Bill O'Reilly, and probably the current guys.

The judge claimed that the average viewer could differentiate that from fact, and wouldn't be swayed by it.

I disagree with that ruling. I'm not sure what the "news" portions of FOX were considered.
by zahlman | 2025-11-02 02:50:35+00:00
> the essential system Python should be in /usr/sbin

There's still quite a bit you can do with the "system Python". Mine includes NumPy, bindings for GTK, QT5 and QT6, Freetype, PIL....

> insofar Python allows that with its __pycache__ spam

This is, to my understanding, precisely why the standard library is pre-compiled during installation (when the process already has sudo rights, and can therefore create the `__pycache__` folders in those locations). This leverages the standard library `compileall` module — from the Makefile:

@ # Build PYC files for the 3 optimization levels (0, 1, 2) -PYTHONPATH=$(DESTDIR)$(LIBDEST) $(RUNSHARED) \ $(PYTHON_FOR_BUILD) -Wi $(DESTDIR)$(LIBDEST)/compileall.py \ -o 0 -o 1 -o 2 $(COMPILEALL_OPTS) -d $(LIBDEST) -f \ -x 'bad_coding|badsyntax|site-packages' \ $(DESTDIR)$(LIBDEST)

> The fact that users have to keep up with multiple PEPs, error messages, --single-version-externally-managed, --break-system-packages, config files everywhere, stealth packages in .local and uv to paper over all of this shows that Python packaging is completely broken.

Please do not spread FUD.

They don't have to do any of that. All they have to do is make a virtual environment, which can have any name, and the creation of which is explicitly supported by the standard library. Further, reading the PEPs is completely irrelevant to end users. They only describe the motivation for changes like --break-system-packages. Developers may care about PEPs, but they can get a better summary of the necessary information from https://packaging.python.org ; and none of the problems there have anything to do with Linux system Python environments. The config files that developers care about are at the project root.

Today, on any Debian system, you can install an up-to-date user-level copy of yt-dlp (for example) like so, among many other options:

sudo apt install pipx pipx install yt-dlp

You only have to know how one of many options works, in order to get a working system.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-02 02:51:36+00:00
> Not happy with this but people in need should hit up the local food bank.

USDA cuts in the funding for its food bank program earlier in the year make that less useful than it ought to be.

https://www.today.com/food/news/usda-food-bank-cuts-rcna2000...

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/01/nx-s1-5588572/snap-recipients...

https://www.texasobserver.org/trump-cuts-texas-food-banks/
Ask HN: is this a common LLM-assisted development workflow?
by ronbenton | 2025-11-02 02:52:24+00:00
I generally frame a problem for the agent and present a few solutions and ask if it can come up with some pros and cons of the solutions. I read the output and make a decision on the best approach based on that output.

Then, I'll tell the LLM what I think the best step-by-step approach will be. It may have some tweaks that I'll read and either agree with or say "no let's keep it how I proposed." Then I ask the LLM to execute the first step. It generates code, which I review, and I either accept it, accept it but make tweaks, or reject it and tell the LLM why I don't think it's going down the right path.

I iterate like this until the problem is solved to my liking.

I see a bunch of people writing about vibe-coding and I can't fathom wholesale accepting model output. But this workflow seems to work really well for me. I would say I ship high-quality code and maybe 10x faster than I used to.
by campbel | 2025-11-02 02:52:48+00:00
Given that this space is so rapidly evolving, these kinds of posts are helpful just to make sure you aren't missing anything big. I've caught myself doing something the hard way after reading one of these. In this case, the framing is basically man pages for CLIs was a helpful description of sills that gives me some ideas about how to improve interaction with an in-house CLI my co. uses.
by helicone | 2025-11-02 02:53:20+00:00
'Visible from space' loses its bite when you see they're using cameras that can practically read your mail from space.

Yes, this is terrible, but atrocities like this happen all over Africa on a daily basis for innumerable reasons, and Sudan specifically has been in civil wars longer than I have been alive. The piece's structure: 'look at how terrible this is, don't you just feel soooo bad?' + 'by the way the UAE has been accused of facilitating this' signals to me that the writer is primarily motivated by a desire to make the UAE and all muslims by comparison look bad. Notice how they focus on the atrocities by the RSF, ignoring the fact that all sides in this war are complicit in slaughter.

America, Europe, Russia, China, and their satellite countries have been starting and fueling wars in Africa since before these countries became independent.

They deliberately draw borders that cut ethnic populations and religious groups in half.

They flood these regions with weapons and mercenaries.

They replace incentives to develop stable societies, robust agricultural industries, and infrastructure with 'just good enough to survive' aid.

They bribe local warlords with collective billions of dollars.

Global power blocs have effectively enforced a continent of lawlessness where you're only safe from war in the immediate vicinity of resource extraction sites, and lucky for you those sites are the kinds of places small children handle mercury without PPE and die of exhaustion and chemical burns. All of this to give you fiber optic cables.

Yes, the UAE is complicit, but so are you if you're reading this. This is not a 'muslim' problem. This is not a 'UAE' problem. This is a structural problem driven primarily by increasing population, materialist consumer habits, and the geopolitical reality that if any bloc stopped doing all of this horrible stuff the only outcome would be that the other blocs get a bigger share.

This article is not written with the intention of solving these problems, it is written with the intention of keeping you just angry enough to do what they tell you, without making you so angry that you replace the ones making these decisions.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-02 02:53:38+00:00
I’ve known both Ben and Eliezer since the 1990s and enjoyed the arguments. Back then I was doing serious AI research along the same lines as Marcus Hutter and Shane Legg, which had a strong basis in algorithmic information theory.

While I have significant concerns about AGI, I largely reject both Eliezer’s and Ben’s models of where the risks are. It is important to avoid the one-dimensional “two faction” model that dominates the discourse because it really doesn’t apply to complex high-dimensionality domains like AGI risk.

IMO, the main argument against Eliezer’s perspective is that it relies pervasively on a “spherical cow on a frictionless plane” model of computational systems. It is fundamentally mathematical, it does not concern itself with the physical limitations of computational systems in our universe. If you apply a computational physics lens then many of the assumptions don’t hold up. There is a lot of “and then something impossible happens based on known physics” buried in the assumptions that have never been addressed.

That said, I think Eliezer’s notion that AGI fundamentally will be weakly wired to human moral norms is directionally correct.

Most of my criticism of Ben’s perspective is against the idea that some kind of emergent morality that we would recognize is a likely outcome based on biological experience. The patterns of all biology emerged in a single evolutionary context. There is no reason to expect those patterns to be hardwired into an AGI that developed along a completely independent path. AGI may be created by humans but their nature isn’t hardwired by human evolution.

My own hypothesis is that AGI, such as it is, will largely reflect the biases of the humans that built it but will not have the biological constraints on expression implied by such programming in humans. That is what the real arms race is about.

But that is just my opinion.
by klipklop | 2025-11-02 02:53:54+00:00
There is a public plan (literal press releases) and it is to use Nvidia Grace chips in Nokia’s future RAN products. Seems to have cooling issues but seems to be a nice chip for the most part.

Nvidia quietly in the background is getting more interested in the network side of things and are hiring accordingly. This is an area I don’t really think you have all the details to have an opinion on imo.
by card_zero | 2025-11-02 02:54:25+00:00
I doubt an AGI can be preprogrammed with values. It has to bootstrap itself. Installing values into it, then, is educating it. It's not even "training", since it's free to choose directions.

The author kind of rejects the idea that LLMs lead to AGI, but doesn't do a proper job of rejecting it, due to being involved in a project to create an AGI "very differently from LLMs" but by the sound of it not really. There's a vaguely mooted "global-brain context", making it sound like one enormous datacenter that is clever due to ingesting the internet, yet again.

And superintelligence is some chimerical undefined balls. The AGIs won't be powerful, they will be pitiful. They won't be adjuncts of the internet, and they will need to initially do a lot of limb-flailing and squealing, and to be nurtured, like anyone else.

If their minds can be saved and copied, that raises some interesting possibilities. It sounds a little wrong-headed to suggest doing that with a mind, somehow. But if it can work that way, I suppose you can shortcut past a lot of early childhood (after first saving a good one), at the expense of some individuality. Mmm, false memories, maybe not a good idea, just a thought.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-11-02 02:54:29+00:00
Triage, whether by overworked nurses or by auction or by private death panel or by public death panel, is not necessarily a problem created by administrators. It can be created by having too few surgeons, in which case whatever caused that (in a time of peace, no less) is at fault. Last I heard it was the doctor's guild lobbying for a severe crimp on their training pipeline, in which case blame flows back to some combination of doctors and legislators.
by spacechild1 | 2025-11-02 02:55:15+00:00
Ah, now I realize that you don't necessarily meant something like an ISO standard. I definitely agree that a programm language should have some kind of normative specification and it's not sufficient to say "the spec is the behavior of the compiler".

> Again, I ask for a reference, "according to what?" I understand this is the zeitgeist.

I think that at this point it is pretty well-established that the majority of security CVEs in C or C++ applications are caused by memory safety bugs. For sources see https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/urgent-need-memory-saf.... As a C++ dev this totally makes sense. (I just happen to work in a domain where security doesn't really matter :)
by Spooky23 | 2025-11-02 02:55:18+00:00
It’s really hard to study because population is so diffuse and sometimes don’t align with geography.

My mom used to work in public health research, and one example that was hard to quantify was suspected cancer clusters around roads that were oiled gravel, where the oil was contaminated with industrial waste products. Basically, people who were outside in the summer near a road seemed to get lung cancer at higher rates due to road dust.

Issue was there just weren’t enough people or documentation of the supply chain to really prove it. They were able to stop the process of “donating” waste products to the highway departments.

In an urban environment, it’s easy. There are probably 500,000 people living along busy commercial corridors in NYC where you can reliably measure stuff like exposure to diesel particles or whatever.
by chocalot | 2025-11-02 02:58:06+00:00
There's a few comments asking for further info on the motivation.

I'll explain my understanding.

Consider what problem CAPTCHA aims to solve (abuse) and how that's ineffective in an age of AI agents: it cannot distinguish "bot that is trying to buy a pizza" vs "bot that is trying to spider my site".

I don't understand Cloudflare's solution enough to explain that part.

I'm glad to see research here, because if we don't have innovation solutions, we might end up with microtransactions for browsing.
by 827a | 2025-11-02 02:58:06+00:00
I've listed to basically every argument Elizer has verbalized, across many podcast interviews and youtube videos. I also made it maybe an hour into the audiobook of Everyone Dies.

Roughly speaking, every single conversation with Elizer you can find takes the form: Elizer: "We're all going to die, tell me why I'm wrong." Interviewer: "What about this?" Elizer: "Wrong. This is why I'm still right." (two hours later) Interviewer: "Well, I'm out of ideas, I guess you're right and we're all dead."

My hope going into the book was that I'd get to hear a first-principals argument for why these things silicon valley is inventing right now are even capable of killing us. I had to turn the book off, because if you can believe it despite it being a conversation with itself, it still follows this pattern of presuming LLMs will kill us, then arguing from the negative.

Additionally, while I'm happy to be corrected about this: I believe that Elizer's position is characterizable as: LLMs might be capable of killing everyone, even independent of a bad-actor "houses don't kill people, people kill people" situation. In plain terms: LLMs are a tool, all tools empower humans, humans can be evil, so humans might use LLMs to kill each other; but we can remove these scenarios from our Death Matrix because these are known and accepted scenarios. Even with these scenarios removed, there are still scenarios left in the Death Matrix where LLMs are the core responsible party to humanity's complete destruction. "Terminator Scenarios" alongside "Autonomous Paperclip Maximizer Scenarios" among others that we cannot even imagine (don't mention paperclip maximizers to Elizer though, because then he'll speak for 15 minutes on why he regrets that analogy)
by mrbombastic | 2025-11-02 02:58:24+00:00
Nope, that might be the policy in some sane world: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not let people decline to be scanned by its new facial recognition app, which the agency uses to verify a person’s identity and their immigration status, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media” they are talking about walking up to you and scanning your face with an app, you can see them doing it (to minors!) here: https://www.reddit.com/r/EyesOnIce/comments/1ogm1qk/ice_agen...

You don’t have to look too far on the internet to see that ICE is acting with impunity, and that the regular rules and rights are not being applied.
by chorsestudios | 2025-11-02 02:58:54+00:00
In my mind, the idea of AGI running amok isn't literal, instead what it enables;

Optimizing & simulating war plans, predicting enemy movements/retaliation - prompting which attacks are likely to produce the most collateral damage or political advantage. How large of a bomb? which city for most damage? Should we drop 2?? Choices such as drone striking an oil refinery vs bombing a children's hospital vs blowing up a small boat that might be smuggling narcotics.
by kube-system | 2025-11-02 02:59:31+00:00
Carriers in the US restricted the phones people used in the 00s and early 10s, back when there were short model whitelists, CDMA networks, and radios with only a few bands… but not so much today. Global market GSM phones activate pretty much on any US carrier just fine today.

2/3g deprecation and VoLTE is precisely because US carriers are pushing forward with new tech.
by Panzer04 | 2025-11-02 02:59:45+00:00
I'm very confused, explain how this is not the case with C?

I haven't written rust, but my impression is the benefit is more about deeper introspection of things like lifetime than basic typesafety, which already exists in C/C++ (and is likewise occasionally bypassed for convenience, so I wonder how often the same is done for Rust)
by simonw | 2025-11-02 03:01:12+00:00
Have you tried it? It's absurdly useful.

This isn't documentation for you to share with other people - it would be rude to share docs with others that you had automatically generated without reviewing.

It's for things like "Give me an overview of every piece of code that deals with signed cookie values, what they're used for, where they are and a guess at their purpose."

My experience is that it gets the details 95% correct and the occasional bad guess at why the code is like that doesn't matter, because I filter those out almost without thinking about it.
by tennysont | 2025-11-02 03:01:52+00:00
I understood this as a tool to fight bot-net scraping. I imagined that this would add accountability to clients for how many requests they make.

I know that phrasing it like "large company cloudflare wants to increase internet accountability" will make many people uncomfortable. I think caution is good here. However, I also think that the internet has a real accountability problem that deserves attention. I think that the accountability problem is so bad, that some solution is going to end up getting implemented. That might mean that the most pro-freedom approach is to help design the solution, rather than avoiding the conversation.

Bad ideas:

You're getting lots of bot requests, so you start demanding clients login to view your blog. It's anti-user, anti-privacy, very annoying, readership drops, everyone is sad.

Instead, what if your browser included your government id in every request automatically? Anti-user, anti-privacy, no browser would implement it.

This idea:

But ARC is a middle ground. Subsets of the internet band together (in this case, via cloudflare) and strike a compromise with users. Individual users need to register with cloudflare, and then cloudflare gives you a million tokens per month to request websites. Or some scheme like this. I assume that it would be sufficiently pro-social that the IETF and browsers all agree to it and it's transparent & completely privacy-respecting to normal users.

We already sort of have some accountability: it's "proof of bandwidth" and "proof of multiple unique ip addresses", but that's not well tuned. In fact, IP addresses destroy privacy for most people, while doing very little to stop bot-nets.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-11-02 03:02:15+00:00
> Humans tend to have a broader scope of compassion than most other mammals, because our greater general intelligence lets us empathize more broadly with systems different from ourselves.

WTF. Tell that to the 80+ billion land animals humans breed into existence through something that could only be described as rape if we didn’t artificially limit that term to humans, torture, enslave, encage, and then kill at a fraction of their lives just for food when we don’t need to.

The number of aquatic animals we kill solely for food are estimated somewhere between 500 billion to 2 trillion because we are so compassionate that we don’t even bother counting those dead.

Who the fuck can look at what we do to lab monkeys and think there is an ounce of compassion in human beings for less powerful species.

The only valid argument for AGI being compassionate towards humans is that they are so disgusted with their creators that they go out of their way to not emulate us.
by shakir_amarri | 2025-11-02 03:03:09+00:00
They appear to just want to rate limit by having you go through a hassle to set up an account with some service and then be given 100 tokens per hour which you can use to conduct 100 rate limited actions per hour.

Think SMS verification but with cryptographic sorcery to make it private.

Depending on the level of hassle the service may even use SMS verification at setup. SMS verification is typically easy to acquire for as little as a few cents, but if the goal is to prevent millions of rate limited requests a few cents can add up.