MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-11-06 05:45:05+00:00
Looks like an experiment to me. Which is fine. Why not play around? A NN based computer is something people have been contemplating for awhile. Though it seems more like a solution looking for a problem to me ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯[0]

> what personal computing could be when designed from first principles.

Actually this bugs me more. I really dislike how frequently people claim "first principles". First principles are those that cannot be reduced. It's often used not in this way and all that accomplishes is people tricking themselves (or worse, tries to convince others) that these are the simplest components. We use first principles in subjects like math and physics but honestly 99.9% of what we work with in those domains are not through first principles. Maybe if you start with axioms in set theory or if you're in physics trying to derive a ToE (what those first principles are) then you're not down there.

It bugs me because deriving first principles is an extremely complicated task. Its also a very beneficial exercise, especially when trying to build things from the ground up. Constantly asking yourself how this can be broken down even more. First principles are not where you start. Having them should demonstrate a large amount of work having already been done and deep thought into what you're doing.

When clicking on that section I see nothing that looks like first principles. I see really a manifesto and much of which is actually difficult to distinguish from current computing.

It's a nice manifesto, but also seems too vague and naïve. Though the latter is generally a feature of manifestos, not exactly a fault

[0] to me, AI being built in should look more like AI being used like physics informed networks. Which are more using the NN for optimization. You could definitely abstract out more and this would be cool and interesting to see. But from the sound of it, it seems more like they're just putting LLMs in
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-11-06 05:45:43+00:00
As for the lack of libraries. Technically they are possible, but are not used that often. Maybe they are not that necessary. XML's idea is a federation of notations. Each notations is semantic, that is it makes only specific distinctions. XSLT transforms between two such notations. Since each combination is unique, there is little to reuse. Where other tools use libraries XSLT uses separate stylesheets and just rearranges them differently.
by kelseydh | 2025-11-06 05:49:09+00:00
It's a reverse of what you're describing, but a similar mechanism like this in Canada is their notwithstanding clause.

If the Supreme Court of Canada rules a law unconstitutional, the government in power can overrule their ruling by using the notwithstanding clause. However, the notwithstanding clause override to keep the law in effect only lasts for five years. Subsequent legislatures have to keep renewing the override or the Supreme Court's ruling of unconstitutionality takes effect again.
by Stranger43 | 2025-11-06 05:49:16+00:00
I think a fundamental lack of understanding/humility is the core of this conflict along with Mozilla's long and storied history of creating controversies/problems out of thin air.

The Mozilla leadership seems to have a unfortunate tendency to emulate the behaviors of the tech companies that their core Firefox project is often seen as an alternative too.

Firefox is a good browser but is prevented from capitalizing on the skepticism the consumers feel toward the tech sector by Mozilla using the exact same language and dark UI pattern to promote things like pocket that the user-base never asked for, and jump on to the lets enforce the use of AI everywhere that's driving discontent within the proprietary ecosystems, and this is yet another example of this class of behavior from the Mozilla leadership.
by strken | 2025-11-06 05:49:18+00:00
You could go read the pgmq docs, look at the fifty or so lines of code that make up the thin wrapper around it, and understand it just as well as you understand BullMQ. Or you could use one of the extensive set of pgmq libraries if you aren't comfortable calling Postgres functions (for some reason).

I'm not suggesting that BullMQ and Redis are trivial and that you should rewrite them yourself, I'm telling you that Postgres has multiple existing implementations of a message queue already.

And frankly, the fact that something is non-trivial does not automatically mean you can't or shouldn't rewrite it, only that you need a good reason. Even if there was no existing Postgres message queue (there are many), atomicity is a good enough reason on its own. Imagine if you could avoid idempotency issues when calling third party APIs until you had more than ten engineering teams! Well, you can! Just don't add more than one method of storing online data to your architecture.
by josefx | 2025-11-06 05:50:36+00:00
> Generally speaking, orgs aren't trying to replace high-quality human translations with lower-quality machine translations.

How would you handle updates to an article? Would you blindly replace all existing translations or would you notify the maintainers and wait for them to get around to it?

I wouldn't be surprised if orgs blindly opted for the first, which also means that a single spelling correction would be enough to overwrite days of work.
by eru | 2025-11-06 05:50:42+00:00
I agree with you. However the grand-parent comment has a point that it's not easy to extract testable properties from code that's already written.

It's much easier to proceed explicitly like you suggest: have some properties in mind, co-develop property tests and code.

Often when I try to solve a problem, I start with a few simple properties and let them guide my way to the solution. Like your deletion example. Or, I already know that the order of inputs shouldn't matter, or that adding more constraints to an optimiser shouldn't increase the maximum, etc.

And I can write down some of these properties before I have any clue about how to solve the problem in question.

---

However, writing properties even after the fact is a learnable skill. You just need to practice, similarly to any other skill.
by raspasov | 2025-11-06 05:51:44+00:00
Just some ideas:

- Drone-bombing an embassy in downtown London does not look good on social media

- He's too famous and has many supporters in the Western world to be publicly assassinated, regardless of location (example: Lady Gaga visited him while he was stuck in the embassy)

- He's more useful as a deterrent, i.e., "see what might happen to you", to the people who might decide to go a similar route. Some will go that route regardless, but chances are at least a few have been persuaded otherwise.

For all the ridicule of the government, the Intelligence Community seems to be doing a fairly intelligent job most of the time to satisfy its objectives.
by goku12 | 2025-11-06 05:51:58+00:00
You basically preempted nearly every single option, including an incumbent one. I don't believe it's fair to judge Rust based on its compatibility with Qt alone - something written in C++. Nothing against C++, but it's harder to get C++ and Rust to work together. You haven't addressed Iced yet, though going by your requirements, you're unlikely to be satisfied by it as well. Iced is not there yet, but it is the native GUI toolkit of the Cosmic desktop.
by rmunn | 2025-11-06 05:52:13+00:00
Are you saying that being ordered by a judge to perform work, without pay, and which you would not have done absent those orders, does not fit the definition of involuntary servitude?

Because while the precise definitions of servitude do vary from dictionary to dictionary, and some define it more harshly than others, in general it fits. One definition I found online (with no reference to which dictionary it came from) defines servitude as "A condition in which an individual is bound to work for another person or organization, typically without pay." Another one (Cambridge dictionary) says it's "the state of being under the control of someone else and of having no freedom". I couldn't check the Oxford English Dictionary as it requires a subscription to look up even one word. Merriam-Webster lists two meanings, one of which applies to land. the one that applies to people is "a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one's course of action or way of life".

Now, being sentenced to community service is only a temporary condition of servitude, which ends as soon as a given number of hours have been served. And it might not fit the strict definition if the person being sentenced is allowed to choose the form their community service will take; I lack knowledge of what kinds of community-servitude sentences are commonly handed out. But if the person being sentenced does not get to choose the form his community service will take, but instead is told "Your community service will be served in the city clerk's office. Show up at 9:00 AM on Monday ready to make photocopies and run errands," then that counts as being under the control of another and lacking freedom during the period of community service. It's not a permanent state of servitude, but even a temporary state of servitude is forbidden by the 13th amendment (other than as a sentence for a crime), because otherwise people at the time would have argued "Oh, fifty years of involuntary servitude still counts as 'temporary', so I'm allowed to carry on with imposing debt peonage on my debtors."

(I should also mention that I am not a lawyer, so perhaps US lawyers have already reached broad consensus on whether community service counts as involuntary servitude under US law; if someone knows whether that's true, I welcome being corrected on my point).
by ifh-hn | 2025-11-06 05:52:33+00:00
I've been using Firefox profiles for years, never had an issue with them, the UI, or how to access the functionality. Sure it wasn't immediately easy to find and use but I never really got a lot of the criticism. Coloured themes (which them seem to be integrating) was an easy way to differentiate the profile I was using, especially when I had multiple open at once.

Glad it's getting an update, hope it doesn't ruin a decent feature.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-06 05:52:39+00:00
> The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed.

There might be an element of personality there. I was texting with a real estate agent (for apartment rental, not purchase) in China once, when he decided that as long as we were talking he might as well call me. He didn't bother mentioning this to me beforehand.

Of course, all I could do was hang up on him. It's not like I could understand what he said. And I don't think that was especially difficult to foresee.

So he wasted some time and seriously annoyed me in the most predictable way possible. Why? Not for any reason specific to the situation. Maybe there's emphatic training somewhere that says "always call". Or maybe the type of people who become salesmen have a deep, deep instinct to call.
by arjie | 2025-11-06 05:52:53+00:00
I understand the matter in theory, but I don't understand the matter in practice. Clicking through on the user, I couldn't identify any machine-translated overwrites of his work. What is an example of this? And if the community that manages the site objects, why not apply a batch temporary revert, and then re-run once/if everything is solved.

This is a trivial operation for me to do on MediaWiki with a bot, so it must be straightforward to do here too. I think "Ask forgiveness, not permission" is fine in order to move things forward, but you do have "ask forgiveness".
by xp84 | 2025-11-06 05:52:58+00:00
I know it’s hard to accept, but it’s got to be weighed against the real-world alternative:

You get about 5-8 minutes of face time with an actual doctor, but have to wait up to weeks to actually get in to see a doctor, except maybe at an urgent care or ER.

Or people used to just play around on WebMD which was even worse since it wasn’t in any way tailored to what the patient’s stated situation is.

There’s the rest of the Internet too. You can also blame AI for this part, but today the Internet in general is even more awash in slop that is just AI-generated static BS. Like it or not, the garbage is there and it will be most of what people find on Google if they couldn’t use a real ChatGPT or similar this way.

Against this backdrop, I’d rather people are asking the flagship models specific questions and getting specific answers that are halfway decent.

Obviously the stuff you glean from the AI sessions needs to be taken to a doctor for validation and treatment, but I think coming into your 5-minute appointment having already had all your dumbest and least-informed ideas and theories shot down by ChatGPT is a big improvement and helps you maximize your time. It’s true the people shouldn’t recklessly attempt to self-treat based on GPT, but the unwise people doing that were just self-treating based off WebMD hunches before.
by abhishekbasu | 2025-11-06 05:53:33+00:00
Great product and congratulations on the launch. Who is the target user vs customer? On the surface, and I may be wrong here, this feels like a LLM layered on top of a typical AutoML structure eg: TPOT, Caret. Is that the correct mental model for a tool like this? And if so, do you see a similar problem that these tools faced in broader adoption at companies?
by 3RTB297 | 2025-11-06 05:54:15+00:00
Kinda, but not really. IRL, feature phones and cheap smartphones subsidized to carry Whatsapp and Facebook apps starting 20 years ago pushed "people using the internet" and at this point Whatsapp is 90% of what people use internet for in Africa because data is cheaper than talk and text.

There's also the perception of usability. I have personally had relatively well-paid Africans tell me that $4 a month for 10 GB of (4G mobile) data was "the most expensive on Earth." Which is not true, I checked, but people say it to try and rumor mill the price down. However, it's sort of almost true in the sense of trying to pay for streaming services and being online like anyone from London or LA on one's hone and not home fiber connections, which only the wealthy have. But that's not how people use their phones anyway. So there's no market for high bandwidth use, and only the wealthy are willing to use bandwidth and pay for it because prices drop per GB once you're doing unlimited fiber connections at home on post-paid accounts. The middle ground is the barrier.

But people like the author who barely know where Africa is on a map love to throw around stats like "85% of Africa is online!" Not like how most Westerners think. Kids in wealthy areas will push being on IG and Tik Tok. In malls in larger cities there's a shop that sells gaming consoles.
by bawolff | 2025-11-06 05:54:47+00:00
> Murdering people for "committing" a nonviolent crime in international waters

If that is the rationale usa used, then yes it would be an obvious war crime. You can't shoot people in war because they are guilty of a crime unless they can legitamently be targeted for some other reason.

I think USA is probably going to try and spin it as they are members of an armed group USA is in an armed conflict with, and they were targeted on that basis and not because of any particular crime any particular person comitted.

How convincing that is is debatable [ianal but it sounds pretty unconvincing to me], and you of course still have the problem of how exactly the US can claim self-defense against a foreign drug cartel.
by flowerthoughts | 2025-11-06 05:55:55+00:00
(Not a user, just evaluated it previously. Please correct what I got wrong.) They compile the reactivity statically, so instead of tracking effects at runtime, they generate code for it. I'd guess it means slightly more JS to download, but less initialization in runtime.

However, they recently added runtime reactivity to be more flexible, so it seems to me they are becoming VueJS.
by Jweb_Guru | 2025-11-06 05:56:10+00:00
This is what really scares me about people using AI. It will confidently hallucinate studies and quotes that have absolutely no basis in reality, and even in your own field you're not going to know whether what it's saying is real or not without following up on absolutely every assertion. But people are happy to completely buy its diagnoses of rare medical conditions based on what, exactly?
by jama211 | 2025-11-06 05:56:41+00:00
The devil is in the details, e.g. people usually self report very different levels of happiness if you ask them more or less frequently, and if you ask them about general happiness or in the moment happiness.

Also someone if someone told you they couldn’t make you happier but they could make you more comfortable, more healthy, or more secure, that’s still a life improvement, so it’s possible it’s linked to other positive life outcomes. Happiness quite literally isn’t everything.

Also, when someone is unhappy they will usually report that accurately, but when people are not unhappy they often fail to report themselves as happy or even just not unhappy, when perhaps they should, because they normalise to it and so on. We’re just bad at reporting this stuff.
by exidy | 2025-11-06 05:57:01+00:00
It depends on the inverter. Older "grid-following" inverters would isolate themselves from the grid to avoid putting any current on the line when presumably in an outage it should be de-energised, as well as relying on the grid for reference frequency.

Modern hybrid & multi-mode inverters are capable of isolating themselves from the grid, generating their own reference frequency and managing connection and disconnection from the grid. However you might not get one of these types of inverters unless you specifically ask for "backup power" or similar.
by manmal | 2025-11-06 05:57:17+00:00
> Soon there is so much solar that you don't need the expensive gas most of the time.

In the EU (winters with weak solar radiation) this only works if you can store power over multiple months. Getting rid of gas means purchasing and maintaining a giant amount of batteries. Slow storage won’t save you from outages during peaks. We do have very cheap power from solar, during the hot months. In winter, its wind and offshore turbines that are prevalent, but they are as unpredictable.

So, solar and wind power is trivial. Storage is the issue. And consumers will pay that storage, in both grid cost, and spot prices.

I don’t understand why peak producers should dictate prices for all levels of service. Make an exception for them that’s adequate, like a second peak market, and done? Why should a solar producer (who doesn’t buffer!) get 3x the price only because Russia turns up gas prices and the big producers start panic buying expensive gas futures, poisoning their whole lineup in the process? Solar producers just pump whatever’s coming out of their panels into the market, with no regard for grid stability.
by xp84 | 2025-11-06 05:57:21+00:00
And this seems actually wildly reasonable. It’s actually pretty scammy to take people’s money (or whatever your business model is) for legal or medical advice just to give them whatever AI shits out. If I wanted ChatGPT’s opinion (as I actually often do) I’d just ask ChatGPT for free or nearly-free. Anyone repackaging ChatGPT’s output as fit for a specialized purpose is scamming their customers.
by benatkin | 2025-11-06 05:57:49+00:00
Indeed. Turning it off would still satisfy marsf's requests:

- I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs.

- I request to remove all my translation from learned data of SUMO AIs.

Before fixing it and re-enabling it in some capacity, they could work with marsf to find a solution.
by glerk | 2025-11-06 05:58:17+00:00
Fascinating. Air traffic controllers shouldn’t be a bargaining chip. Planes must keep flying. If the US federal government is too dysfunctional to provide this service (which it is paid to provide), it should be stripped of the privilege of providing it and some other entity should step in to fill the gap. “Shutdown” should be an abdication of sovereignty plain and simple.
by ssivark | 2025-11-06 05:58:33+00:00
Peter Drucker has an interesting analysis of the "American" -vs- "Japanese" styles of decision-making + alignment, presenting a complementary perspective: https://www.joaomordomo.com/files/books/ebooks/Peter%20Druck...

IMHO the only correct way to measure the effectiveness of decision making is from the quality of executed outcomes. It is somewhat nonsensical to sever decisions from execution, and claim that decisions have been made rapidly if the decision doesn't lend itself to crisp execution. Without that, decisions are merely intentions.
by bawolff | 2025-11-06 05:59:23+00:00
Its kind of irrelavent in an armed conflict. There are a bunch of rules (i.e. the geneva conventions) around who can and cannot be targeted in an armed conflict, but innocent vs guilty is not how it works. Innocent people being killed can sometimes totally be consistent with the rules of war. Guilty people being killed can sometimes be a violation of the rules. Innocent vs guiltly is the wrong metaphor for what makes a legal target.
by iAMkenough | 2025-11-06 06:00:50+00:00
Pretty black and white to me.

Mozilla destroyed decades of work on a production server without even discussing it with the passionate volunteers that provided them free labor for decades. Didn’t even evaluate on a staging server to check for quality issues.

The AI isn’t the focus of the issue. The management decision to disregard and disrespect their own unpaid contributors and their organization’s history is a clear indication of Mozilla’s current and future priorities.
by alyxya | 2025-11-06 06:01:49+00:00
There are a couple problems that come to mind. One is that a lot of people aren’t interested or willing to take a one sided interview with a machine. This is more true for candidates who have more options, and they’ll feel disrespected by this. The other is that I doubt this would be accurate or any more useful than an automated resume screen. It’s worth going through this from the candidate’s perspective rather than from the hiring side.
by lunar_mycroft | 2025-11-06 06:02:50+00:00
> Literally this. Microsoft used to ship a free web browser. Then they stopped. That's not something anybody can object to.

There is a fundamental difference between ceasing to make a browser and continuing to make a browser, while not meeting your expectations as a browser maker.

> If standards are more important that real use cases, then the fact that XSLT has been removed from the html5 standard is enough justification to remove it from Chrome.

Browsers very much have not depreciated support for non-HTML5 markup (e.g. the HTML4 era <center> tag still works). This is because upholding devs and users expectation that standards compliant websites that once worked will continue to work is important.
by mjbale116 | 2025-11-06 06:02:58+00:00
> I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought?

Indeed you don't; let me help you out then:

Arguments must be made in good faith; and when you hear anyone saying anything I mentioned above it is immediately obvious that they are not arguing in good faith.

If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed.

If anyone considers the above arguments valid and worthy of discussion, they need to exempt themselves from this discourse.
by nickff | 2025-11-06 06:03:07+00:00
Could you please clarify this statement for me:

>”You can't shoot people in war because they are guilty of a crime unless they can legitamently be targeted for some other reason.”

From what I understand (and I am no expert), in a war, the default is that you can shoot someone if you believe them to be acting in a manner which is against your side’s interests (and have not surrendered while satisfying certain conditions).