MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-11-28 02:57:35+00:00
Branches, commits and merges are the means how people manually resolve conflicts so that a single repository can be used to see a state where revision steps forward in perfect lockstep.

In many branching strategies this consistent state is called "main". There are alternative branching stragies as well. For example the consistent state could be a release branch.

Obviously that does not guarantee ordering across repos, hence the popularity of "monorepo".

Different situations require different solutions.
by N_Lens | 2025-11-28 02:58:32+00:00
Async RL seems to be the main difference in how this model was trained. Impressively they're open sourcing the training framework and weights.

However key information missing from the article:

- Benchmark comparisons against SOTA models of similar size

- Compute efficiency: No discussion of cost, power consumption, or efficiency metrics compared to other training approaches

- Training stability - They mention "rewards and evaluations continue to rise, and training remains stable" but don't discuss any instability challenges common in RL training. Would be interesting to see differences with their async approach
by wowamit | 2025-11-28 02:58:34+00:00
Agreed. Setting up structures for people to provide regular feedback is a must -- I believe this goes without saying. The only downside is that this cannot be done 1:1 with each person. Hence, enabling even the motivated few is a good trade-off. But sure, necessary but not sufficient.

At the same time, accepting and acting on feedback is a skill in its own right.
by gjm11 | 2025-11-28 02:58:37+00:00
The "obvious" thing to try, which presumably some people are trying pretty hard right now[1], is to (1) use a mathematically-tuned LLM like this one to propose informal Next Things To Try, (2) use an LLM (possibly the same LLM) to convert those into proof assistant formalism, (3) use the proof assistant to check whether what the LLM has suggested is valid, and (4) hook the whole thing together to make a proof-finding-and-verifying machine that never falsely claims to have proved something (because everything goes through that proof assistant) and therefore can tolerate confabulations from LLM #1 and errors from LLM #2 because all those do is waste some work.

[1] IIRC, AlphaProof is a bit like this. But I bet that either there's a whole lot of effort on this sort of thing in the major AI labs, or else there's some good reason to expect it not to work that I haven't thought of. (Maybe just the "bitter lesson", I guess.)

It would doubtless be challenging to get such a system to find large difficult proofs, because it's not so easy to tell what's making progress and what isn't. Maybe you need LLM #3, which again might or might not be the same as the other two LLMs, to assess what parts of the attempt so far seem like they're useful, and scrub the rest from the context or at least stash it somewhere less visible.

It is, of course, also challenging for human mathematicians to find large difficult proofs, and one of the reasons for them is that it's not so easy to tell what's making progress and what isn't. Another major reason, though, is that sometimes you need a genuinely new idea, and so far LLMs aren't particularly good at coming up with those. But a lot of new-enough-ideas[2] are things like "try a version of this technique that worked well in an apparently unrelated field", which is the kind of thing LLMs aren't so bad at.

[2] Also a lot of the new-enough-ideas that mathematicians get really happy about. One of the cool things about mathematics is the way that superficially-unrelated things can turn out to share some of their structure. If LLMs get good at finding that sort of thing but never manage any deeper creativity than that, it could still be enough to produce things that human mathematicians find beautiful.
by linguae | 2025-11-28 02:58:46+00:00
You may have a vision for creating a product or service that you believe requires starting a company, and you believe you have a compelling business model that will sustain the company. Failure may happen, but the drive for getting that product or service out there may overcome fears of failure.

The world may be a different place had Steve Wozniak decided to remain an engineer at Hewlett Packard's calculator division instead of creating a company to sell the computer he worked on as a side project, though it did take a lot of convincing from Steve Jobs.
by energy123 | 2025-11-28 02:59:14+00:00
The thing that stands out is fine-tuning a verifier with human labels specifically so that it isn't sycophantic in either direction. If you've ever tried to do a verifier in a multi-agent system you'll recognize the annoyance of the verifier swinging wildly from "this is brilliant" to "this is trash" based on nothing more than fudging a few suggestive words in the candidate answer it's tasked with reviewing. Making the verifier invariant to those fudge words and forcing it to actually reason (... as per Anthropic's interpretability work) would be quite nice.
by sfink | 2025-11-28 02:59:53+00:00
> Specific facts and procedures are explicitly NOT protected by copyright.

No argument there, and I'm grateful for the limits of copyright. That part was only for describing what LLM weights store -- just because the literal text is not explicitly encoded doesn't mean that facts and procedures aren't.

> Copyright protects a specific fixed expression of a creative idea, not the idea itself.

Right. Which is why it's weird to talk about the weights being derivative works. Weird but perhaps not wrong: if you look at the most clear-cut situation where the LLM is able to reproduce a big chunk of input bit-for-bit, then the fact that its basis of representation is completely different doesn't feel like it matters much. An image that is lossily compressed, converted to a bitstream, and encoded in DNA is very very different than the input, but if an image can be recovered that is indistinguishable or barely distinguishable from the original, I'd still call that copying and each intermediate step a significant but irrelevant transformation.

> This starts to get a lot fuzzier. De-compilation is legal.

I'm less interested in what the legal system is currently capable of concluding. I personally don't think the laws have caught up to the present reality, so present-day legality isn't the crucial determinant in figuring out how things "ought" to work.

If an LLM is completely incapable of reproducing input text verbatim, yet could become so through targeted ablation (that does not itself incorporate the text in question!), then does it store that text or not?

I'm not sure why I'm even debating this, other than for intellectual curiosity. My opinion isn't actually relevant to anyone. Namely: I think the general shape of how this ought to work is pretty straightforward and obvious, but (1) it does not match current legal reality, and more importantly, (2) it is highly inconvenient for many stakeholders (very much including LLM users). Not to mention that (3) although the general shape is pretty clear in my head, it involves many many judgement calls such as the ones we've been discussing here, and the general shape of how it ought to work isn't going to help make those calls.
by kragen | 2025-11-28 03:00:24+00:00
No, it wasn't because the surrounding weather was slightly different. The surrounding weather was exactly the same. The air currents were slightly different because a warm rock in Karnataka thermally emitted a photon 13 years earlier that it didn't emit on our timeline. (This happens, as far as we know, completely at random, without any cause; cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_indeterminacy.) That was enough to cause the global atmospheric system to diverge enough that the mosquito stung someone else.

The findings of chaos theory are counterintuitive, but they are absolutely fundamental to how our universe works.
by xwolfi | 2025-11-28 03:01:55+00:00
They used styrofoam cardboards to cover windows to avoid damange, all the way across the building. This was the accelerant. Many resident were complaining in the weeks before of cigarettes left behind by workers all across the scaffold, probably the trigger. The bamboo might have acted as fuel once the temperature reached high enough, and the whole green netting might not have been up to code either.

The whole thing is typical in HK: everyone tries to save a dollar on everything, and you end up with mess like that. They spent years haggling over this renovation and its cost, and probably tried to save money on everything. Now they lost their flats, their lives and their pride.

They will resort to blame "the mainland" for it for sure, but it's just stinginess: the choice of the cheapest contractor, the squeeze on any attempt to pay the fair cost of a work like that, the government mandating mandatory renovations everywhere all the time, the lack of skilled labor in construction because nobody wants to do it or import and train foreigners because that'd spoil their precious island, whatever.

And now we're going through the whole charity theatrics with everyone congratulating each other for bringing biscuits to people who'll spend 10 years in insurance litigation to get 20% of their assets back. What really hurts me the most is we lost a young firefighter, this is heartbreaking more than the rest to me for some reason.

You can follow in English a bit here:

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/33...

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3334435/...
by wavemode | 2025-11-28 03:02:21+00:00
> So I get confused when I read things like "feedback doesn't scale". Because what am I, if not a self-organizing collective of a trillion cells.

Well, yeah, that feedback scales perfectly because your cells don't have free will.

I think there are plenty of real-world examples of large-scale projects where feedback scaled well, for similar reasons... though I doubt we want to use those as a guide.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-11-28 03:02:30+00:00
> Which anarchist likes cruel mafias?

Those anarchists who aren't dumb must like cruel mafias, this is a conclusion I reach by implication, not by their admission.

Anarchist's believes exclude or at least severely limit the state as a force that can prevent warlords, gangs and mob rule which inevitably arise in any power vacuum.

Ergo, those anarchists who aren't dumb, understand the above and by virtue of continuing to promote anarchy they prove that they like the inevitable result of their political program.
by hattmall | 2025-11-28 03:02:37+00:00
Yeah, but the report citing that number doesn't make clear how they calculate that. But maybe that's just a failure of my comprehension though I know some people like to spin words. So is 700 million unique users each week? Or is 700 million unique users that were active in A week, but not necessarily the same week, as in a creative way of saying weekly instead of monthly? The report simply states "in September of 2025", but September isn't a week. Or is it not even unique but simply distinct users in a week. Would the same person on Monday and Tuesday be 2? Or even Monday morning and night? Or any different session. The report citing the 700 million specifically seems to leave out word unique which is pretty key to any meaningful statement on visitor usage.

They go a bit more detailed in the end to say 2.5 billion messages a day.
by c420 | 2025-11-28 03:02:51+00:00
"Snoopy Come Home" wrecked me as a kid, just absolutely flattened me. Looking back on it now, it’s wild to consider this level of depression was aimed at children. I’m not knocking it; honestly, I kind of treasure how hard I cried over it.

And that’s before you even touch the whole anti-segregation angle running through the story.
by maxbond | 2025-11-28 03:03:21+00:00
I can't speak for OP, they may have been advocating for giving up farming animals (or fowl) altogether, but personally I see a huge inflection point between traditional and factory farming methods with regards to the level of risk. When you are compromising the immunity of your livestock, you beg trouble.

I understand the temptation to zoom out to a several hundred year timespan, that can be clarifying. But when (as in this case) there are substantive differences in recent history, it muddies the waters. I totally buy that endemic diseases are largely zoonotic diseases plus time. But that doesn't clarify how much risk exists in our current methods of farming. Factory farming is not equivalent to traditional farming in this respect. History is not featureless and when we flatten it we lose important details.
by TheDong | 2025-11-28 03:04:55+00:00
Apple is a non-sequitur. Tuuxedo is giving up on Qualcomm in favor of AMD and Intel.

Do AMD and Intel require Tuuxedo to pay for premium support in order to get working Linux drivers? No, of course not.

Qualcomm's support for Linux is embarrassing when you compare it to pretty much any processor manufacturer except Apple.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-11-28 03:04:57+00:00
I get the sense smart anarchists don’t want no organization, but organization with borderline zero coercion, and they’ve got complicated ways they imagine that might be possible. I also think many consider an absence of coercion the aim, but don’t feel it can be reached; rather, we should approach it asymptotically. I’ve heard some say in response to the warlord point that an “anarchist society” (if such a thing could exist) would police the warlord, but through the spontaneous action of its participants, not with a centralized hierarchy+bureaucracy. Can you point to any specific anarchists as counterexamples?
Tell HN: Gemini 3 found a stack smash in a hex dump that I missed
by leo_e | 2025-11-28 03:05:21+00:00
I spent the morning chasing a crash in our distributed engine. The stack trace pointed to a segfault deep inside folly::FiberManager.

gdb showed that a critical pointer was garbage: 0x676974736e6f5373.

Usually, I’d suspect a race condition or a use-after-free. I stared at the hex for a while, checking for alignment issues or bit-flips, but it just looked like random entropy.

Out of frustration, I pasted the info locals dump into Gemini 3. I didn't ask it to fix the code, I just asked: "What do you see?"

It didn't try to analyze the C++ logic. Instead, it treated the address as data. It pointed out that on an x86-64 (Little Endian) system, 0x676974736e6f5373 decodes perfectly to the ASCII string: "sSonstig".

It clicked immediately. "Sonstig" is German for "Miscellaneous".

It turns out a legacy localization function was writing the category name "Sonstiges" into a stack buffer that was too small. It overflowed and perfectly overwrote the FiberManager pointer with the bytes of the word.

I think we often focus too much on LLMs for "Code Generation" (writing boilerplate). For me, the real killer feature is Pattern Recognition in raw data. I would have stared at that hex for hours seeing only noise; the model recognized the semantic meaning in milliseconds.

Has anyone else found LLMs useful specifically for decoding raw dumps or logs like this?
by epolanski | 2025-11-28 03:06:43+00:00
They aren't, in fact the very true happens, that we are bombarded non stop with information that everything is the fault of actors from these companies even when it isn't.

We should fight this kind of behavior (and our privacy) regardless of whose involved, yet our governments in the west have nurtured this narrative of always pointing at big tech and foreign actors as scape goats for anything privacy or hacking related.

Also, any cyber attack tracker will show you this is a global issue, if you think there aren't millions of attacks carried out from our own countries, you're not looking enough.
by jorl17 | 2025-11-28 03:06:55+00:00
I disagree with your view on creativity, and indeed find LLMs to be remarkably creative. Or perhaps, to sidestep the anthropomorphization issue, I find that LLMs can be used as tools to produce creative works, greatly amplifying one's creativity to the point that a "near 0 creativity" subject (whatever that is) can create works that others will view as profoundly creative.

In truth, I don't think there's likely to be a correct definition for what "creativity" is. We're all just moving each other's goal posts and looking at different subject aspects of our experience.

What I do know is that I have talked to dozens of people, and have friends who have talked to hundreds. When shown what LLMs and generative models can do, there's a significant portion of them who label this work as creative. Rather than deem these people ignorant, I would rather consider that maybe if enough people see creativity somewhere, perhaps there is something to it. LLMs creating poems, stories, connecting concepts which you wouldn't otherwise see connected, birthing ideas in images that video which had never existed before.

Of course, I'm aware that by this logic many things fall apart (for example, one might be tempted to believe in god because of it). Nonetheless, on this issue, I am deeply on the creativity camp. And while I am there, the things I get LLMs to create, and people I know do so as well, will continue to induce deep emotion and connection among ourselves.

If that's not creativity to some, well, that's life, full of creative ways to define creativity or eschew it from the world.
by jorl17 | 2025-11-28 03:08:04+00:00
Utilitarianism is a bitch, huh?

(I make this remark merely as a gag. I think you pinpoint an issue which has been unresolved for ages and is knee-deep into ethics. One could argue that many of our disagreements about AI and progress (in a broader sense) stem from different positions on ethics, including utilitarianism).
by c0balt | 2025-11-28 03:08:46+00:00
SBOMs exist. You can get them generated for most software via package managers in standard forms like cyclonedx.

It's just not that effective when the SBOM becomes unmanageable. For example, our JS project at $work has 2.3k dependencies just from npm. I can give you that SBOM (and even include the system deps with nix) but that won't really help you.

They are only really effective when the size is reasonable.
by anonym29 | 2025-11-28 03:09:24+00:00
I have never understood why, in these discussions, nobody brings up other specialized silicon providers like Groq, SambaNova, or my personal favorite, Cerebras.

Cerebras CS-3 specs:

• 4 trillion transistors

• 900,000 AI cores

• 125 petaflops of peak AI performance

• 44GB on-chip SRAM

• 5nm TSMC process

• External memory: 1.5TB, 12TB, or 1.2PB

• Trains AI models up to 24 trillion parameters

• Cluster size of up to 2048 CS-3 systems

• Memory B/W of 21 PB/s

• Fabric B/W of 214 Pb/s (~26.75 PB/s)

Comparing GPU to TPU is helpful for showcasing the advantages of the TPU in the same way that comparing CPU to Radeon GPU is helpful for showcasing the advantages of GPU, but everyone knows Radeon GPU's competition isn't CPU, it's Nvidia GPU!

TPU vs GPU is new paradigm vs old paradigm. GPUs aren't going away even after they "lose" the AI inference wars, but the winner isn't necessarily guaranteed to be the new paradigm chip from the most famous company.

Cerebras inference remains the fastest on the market to this day to my knowledge due to the use of massive on-chip SRAM rather than DRAM, and to my knowledge, they remain the only company focused on specialized inference hardware that has enough positive operating revenue to justify the costs from a financial perspective.

I get how valuable and important Google's OCS interconnects are, not just for TPUs or inference, but really as a demonstrated PoC for computing in general. Skipping the E-O-E translation in general is huge and the entire computing hardware industry would stand to benefit from taking notes here, but that alone doesn't automatically crown Google the victor here, does it?
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-11-28 03:10:57+00:00
It’s even cheaper to just eat the potatoes, corn, wheat, soy directly like humans have at least for 1000s of years. It would also be healthier and less damaging to the planet as well as local environments, and save tens if not hundreds of billions of animals lives.

The processing is simply unnecessary and the output isn’t food but essentially drugs that people get addicted to. That’s completely different from the actual food that we grow.
by adzm | 2025-11-28 03:10:57+00:00
I love NT's IO completion ports. I think kqueue is very similar, right? Honestly I've been able to get by using boost asio for cross platform needs but I've always wanted to see if there are better solutions. I think libuv is similar, since it is what node is based on, but I'm not entirely sure what the underlying tech is for non-Windows
by lmm | 2025-11-28 03:12:11+00:00
> you regulate a market by setting up market rules, not by chasing individual companies

Which is exactly what Europe is doing. They have interoperability rules and they're applying them consistently. Nothing here is targeting Apple specifically, they're getting hit by the rules because they're a big monopoly abuser.

> There are a lot of companies from Spotify to ASML who are enjoying monopolistic powers in their own market, squandering innovation by not letting their competitors use their platform or implement standards created by other foreign companies.

What standards would those be, concretely? Have any of them bothered to pursue the EU standard designation process?
by CiaoTool | 2025-11-28 03:12:36+00:00
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by jmye | 2025-11-28 03:12:50+00:00
> A Principal Engineer should be just as valued and well-treated as a CTO. Most companies fail to do this, so everyone wants to be the CTO. Establish a career track, where technical people aspire to technical positions.

100%. I’ve had to fight to build a real IC track at my last three companies - I don’t care if HR wants to call everyone a manager, or differentiate with “staff”/“principal” or whatever else, but there has to be a viable promotion track for everyone, and it has to be equitable.
by antonok | 2025-11-28 03:13:11+00:00
I opened an issue based on the discussion here and it didn't take much time or effort.

(It was one of those form-based issue templates that requires you to explicitly list out Steps to Reproduce, Expected behavior, Actual behavior, OS version, etc. which IMO causes slightly more friction for anyone who knows how to put together a good bug report, but I've also seen enough poorly-specified issues to know that it's necessary sometimes)
by dontdoxxme | 2025-11-28 03:17:08+00:00
> And netns is for single-host isolation. This is a router forwarding LAN→WAN. Different problem

Not at all. Put the LAN interface in a network namespace that is different to the host (ip link set ... netns ...).

This gives you your "kill switch" without even needing firewall rules, it happens on a lower level.