MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-11-02 03:25:50+00:00
Why would you think Eliezer's argument, which he's been articulating since the late 2000s or even earlier, is specifically about Large Language Models?

It's about Artificial General Intelligences, which don't exist yet. The reason LLMs are relevant is because if you tried to raise money to build an AGI in 2010, only eccentrics would fund you and you'd be lucky to get $10M, whereas now LLMs have investors handing out $100B or more. That money is bending a generation of talented people into exploring the space of AI designs, many with an explicit goal of finding an architecture that leads to AGI. It may be based on transformers like LLMs, it may not, but either way, Eliezer wants to remind these people that if anyone builds it, everyone dies.
by tennysont | 2025-11-02 03:26:35+00:00
The Haskell compiler creates a slightly different output every time you compile a program[1]. This makes it difficult to ensure that the binary that is free-to-download downloaded is actually malware free. If it were easy to check, then you could rest easy, assuming that someone out there is doing the check for you (and it would be big news if malware was found).

If you're a hardened security person, then the conversations continues, and the term "bootstrap" becomes relevant.

Since you do not trust compiled binaries, then you can compile programs yourself from the source code (where malware would be noticed). However, in order to compile the Haskell compiler, you must have access to a (recent) version of the Haskell compiler. So, version 10 of the compiler was built using version 9, which was built using version 8, etc. "Bootstrapping" refers (basically) to building version 1. Currently, version 1 was built approximately with smart people, duct tape, and magic. There is no way to build version 1, you must simple download it.

So if you have high security requirements, then you might fear that years ago, someone slipped malware into the Haskell compiler version 1 which will "self replicate" itself into every compiler that it builds.

Until a few years ago, this was a bit of a silly concern (most software wasn't reproducible) but with the rise of Nix and Guix, we've gotten a lot closer to reproducible-everything, and so Haskell is the odd-one-out.

[1] The term is "deterministic builds" or "reproducible builds". Progress is being made to fix this in Haskell.
by bigiain | 2025-11-02 03:28:01+00:00
> Adobe is alive and well.

I wonder.

They're doing well with their existing customer base of digital creatives and related industries/professions.

Who may all be the buggy whip makers of the late 2020's.

Way too many of the people/companies who traditionally paid highly skilled and creative Photoshop users are rapidly moving away from doing that in favour of cheap GenAI slop.

I'm sure there are people in graphic design, illustration, videography, photography, UI/UX, 3D art, augmented reality, social media, creativity and design, collaboration and productivity, and education who are super excited about what Adobe is doing. I'm also sure almost all of those people are very concerned about their career choice and future (or are ignoring the reality of what's going on around them).

Sure, the top graphic designers in the world will still earn great money being highly creative for key clients. But the vast majority of people in those fields are not the top in their field, and the vast majority of clients those people invoice are going to consider cheap AI slop "good enough" for their businesses and use cases.

I have a 30+ year career in web related roles, working more or less closely with graphic designers, artists, illustrators, photographers, and other website development related professions. All of the ones I've remained friends with over that time are either deeply concerned about their career future, or have already jumped ship and become nurses, carpenters, teachers, caregivers, and even priests and drug dealers...
by mindslight | 2025-11-02 03:28:11+00:00
> 20 years later after REAL ID passed, you still don't need it unless you want to get on a plane

... or shop at Home Depot.

> It is highly ironic that the very same humans brains that constitute the right wing which railed against the REAL ID act are now basically demanding REAL ID Act

Ironic, coincidence, or all according to plan?

The so-called right wing has been being led around by the corporate lobbyist agenda for decades now. It's not a terrible stretch to imagine the same corpo political operatives that were behind the ratcheting authoritarian ID requirements are now behind the fascist kidnap squads as they tighten the noose around our society.

A bit paranoid and non-actionable, of course.
by netcraft | 2025-11-02 03:29:17+00:00
I use claude code every day, and havent had a chance to dig super deep into skills, but even though ive read a lot of people describe them and say they're the best thing so far, I still dont get them. Theyre things the agent chooses to call right? They have different permissions? is it a tool call with different permissions and more context? I have yet to see a single post give an actual real-world concrete example of how theyre supposed to be used or a compare and contrast with other approaches.
by neilv | 2025-11-02 03:29:28+00:00
> IIRC Google had an even higher bar in their early days: candidates had to submit a transcript showing a very high GPA and they usually hired people only from universities with elite CS programs.

Which sounds like a classic misconception of people with no experience outside of a fancy university echo chamber (many students and professors).

Much like Google's "how much do you remember from first-year CS 101 classes" interviews that coincidentally looked like maybe (among my theories) they were trying to make a metric that matches... (surprise!) a student with a high GPA at a fancy university.

Which is not very objective, nor very relevant. Even before the entire field shifted its basic education to help job-seekers game this company's metric.
by westurner | 2025-11-02 03:30:22+00:00
Prompt 1C: Create a Go package named dbpftrace with a README and docs, then create a cli utility named dbpftrace to:

parse pid and descendents' fs syscall events (like bpftrace) using libbpfgo and godtrace

Use either (cilium/ebpf or libbpfgo or gobpf) or (godtrace or (CGO or FFI) bindings to libdtrace) depending on which OS, by default

cilium/ebpf: https://github.com/cilium/ebpf

aquasecurity/libbpfgo https://github.com/aquasecurity/libbpfgo

iovisor/gobpf w/ bcc: https://github.com/iovisor/gobpf

chzyer/godtrace: https://github.com/chzyer/godtrace

oracle/dtrace-utils/tree/devel/libdtrace: https://github.com/oracle/dtrace-utils/tree/devel/libdtrace

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45755142 re eBPF for WAF:

> awesome-ebpf > Kernel docs, examples, Go libraries: https://github.com/zoidyzoidzoid/awesome-ebpf#go-libraries :

>> Go libraries:

>> cilium/ebpf - Pure-Go library to read, modify and load eBPF programs and attach them to various hooks in the Linux kernel.

>> libbpfgo - eBPF library for Go, powered by libbpf.

>> gobpf - Go bindings for BCC for creating eBPF programs
by simonmic | 2025-11-02 03:31:20+00:00
I always liked https://www.extrema.is/articles/haskell-books/haskell-tutori... . But there's a lot out there. Have a look at https://joyful.com/Haskell+map . Or: read code. Or, just build practical stuff and seek help in the chats/fora when you hit problems.
by Kholin | 2025-11-02 03:31:44+00:00
For me, the "modern" way is when I meet any problem on updating my emacs config files, just ask Claude or Gemini, they will help you to find solutions for the most of common problems. The "traditional" way is to know the basic keybindings, and write an actual project directly, whenever you found there's lack of a feature, just search and config for it. After a period, you'll got a stable config for long term use.
by drivebyhooting | 2025-11-02 03:32:37+00:00
The moat is around capital. For thousands of years most people were slaves or peasants whose cheap fungible labor was exploited.

For a brief period intellectual and skilled work has (had?) been valued and compensated, giving rise to a somewhat wealthy and empowered middle class. I fear those days are numbered and we’re poised to return to feudalism.

What is more likely, that LLMs lead to the flourishing of entrepreneurship and self determination? Or burgeoning of precariat gig workers barely hanging on? If we’re speaking of extremes, I find the latter far more likely.
by nandomrumber | 2025-11-02 03:33:05+00:00
This very forum is moderated by a person who openly conflates words and violence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45203452

All: if you can't respond in a non-violent way, please don't post until you can.

By non-violent I mean not celebrating violence nor excusing it, but also more than that: I mean metabolizing the violence you feel in yourself, until you no longer need to express it aggressively.

I never felt irritated nor angry about Charlie’s public execution. Perplexed, definitely not surprised. But this statement from Dan had irritated me.

Words aren’t violence. Speech won’t shoot you in the neck in front of your wife and stream it live.

We have perfectly functioning terms for other concepts, we don’t need to Equality everything. When we do that nothing will mean anything, and we’ll soon find ourselves imprisoning or executing those we disagree with. Oops, too fucking late!
by rramadass | 2025-11-02 03:33:52+00:00
> I want to like it but my brain is too feeble for it.

That's a self-defeating attitude which you don't want to reinforce :-(

Assembly is not difficult but writing large-scale programs/systems in it is. But almost nobody does this nowadays; it is generally C & Assembly. So you need to know/understand just enough assembly to get along.

Start with Jonathan Bartlett's Programming from the Ground Up for a nice introduction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11702025 Then look at Daniel Kusswurm's and Larry Pyeatt's books. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45782206
by pezezin | 2025-11-02 03:34:39+00:00
My experience is in big scientific experiments like particle accelerators, I guess other fields are different. Still, my experience is that:

1) The control network is air gapped, any kind of direct Internet connection is very much forbidden.

2) Embedded real-time stuff usually runs on VxWorks or RTEMS, not Linux. If it is Linux, it is an specialized distro like NI Linux.

3) Anything designed in the last 15 years uses ARM. Older systems use PowerPC. Nobody has used Alpha, HPPA, SH4 or m68k in ages. So if you really want to run Debian on it, just go ahead and use Armbian.
by netcraft | 2025-11-02 03:35:17+00:00
apparently I missed Simon Willison's article, this at least somewhat explains them: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/

So if youre building your own agent, this would be a directory of markdown documents with headers that you tell the agent to scan so that its aware of them, and then if it thinks they could be useful it can choose to read all the instructions into its context? Is it any more than that?

I guess I dont understand how this isnt just RAG with an index you make the agent aware of?
by alephnerd | 2025-11-02 03:36:01+00:00
In this conflict Qatar isn't supporting the genocidal and unrepentant RSF, but previously in Syria it was Qatar that backed the hardliners in Jabhat al-Nusra who committed similar atrocities that the RSF are doing except on Druze, Alawites, and Shia.

There are no good guys or bad guys - everyone is bad, and that's how proxy wars are.

A major reason Gaza and the West Bank spiraled was due to this Qatar-UAE feud as well - Qatar has historically supported Hamas whereas Abu Dhabi has historically supported the Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, and the former head of Fatah in Gaza is now the 2nd in command in Abu Dhabi (Mohammed Dahlan)
by vivzkestrel | 2025-11-02 03:36:18+00:00
But what do we do about bottleneck operating systems like Windows 11. You can give them a chip 10000x faster but they find way to add more telemetry, more bloat and thus render those gains meaningless. Let us talk about this from the perspective of a gamer, a guy who solely depends on Windows for Visual C++, .NET SDK etc etc (the versions for these go back all the way to 2000s) We need an OS capable of running games all the way from good old Quake 2 to modern games but the GPU isnt the bottleneck anymore
Show HN: Repo Pilot – AI that helps you find your next open-source contribution
by ritvikmahajan17 | 2025-11-02 03:37:33+00:00
We built Repo Pilot to make open-source contributions easier. Just paste any public GitHub repo URL, and our AI analyzes it to surface good first issues, documentation fixes, and other contribution ideas — categorized by difficulty.

It’s a simple way to discover meaningful projects to contribute to (and to help maintainers attract contributors). Would love your feedback and thoughts!
by bayarearefugee | 2025-11-02 03:38:25+00:00
I am also not seeing a moat on LLMs.

It seems like the equilibrium point for them a few years out will be that most people will be able to run good enough LLMs on local hardware through a combination of the fact that they don't seem to be getting much better due to input data exhaustion while various forms of optimization seem to be increasingly allowing them to run on lesser hardware.

But I still have generalized lurking amorphous concerns about where this all ends up because a number of actors in the space are certainly spending as if they believe a moat will magically materialize or can be constructed.
by sshh12 | 2025-11-02 03:38:42+00:00
Maybe these might be handy: - https://github.com/anthropics/skills - https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/equipping-agents-for-t...

I think if it literally as a collection of .md files and scripts to help perform some set of actions. I'm excited for it not really as a "new thing" (as mentioned in the post) but as effectively an endorsement for this pattern of agent-data interaction.
by nandomrumber | 2025-11-02 03:39:48+00:00
You don’t have to enact laws like Chat Control (literally Speech Control, they’re not even pretending to try to hide it) to have tyrannical government.

To have tyrannical government we only have to have governments who want to propose such legislation.

Any reasonable sort of government would be highlighting the absurdity of such ideas and speak out against them.
by BSTRhino | 2025-11-02 03:40:03+00:00
Thanks for your comment!

Yes this whole thing is tricky because I kind of do want to make the unapologetically difficult version but then I am worried it will be too hard for most people to play, but then the people who do stick with it and make it through might find it even more satisfying. So it's a tricky one!

I hadn't heard of Terry Riley until just then but yes, that is very much in line with what I was going for! There's something just fascinating in itself about hearing individual lines of music come together, it's a reward in itself, and it does feel like someone should be able to make a game around it.
by latentsea | 2025-11-02 03:40:06+00:00
> Do you understand why this has no effect on the argument whatsoever? You are just introducing an irrelevant observation. I want the AI to behave like human always, no exceptions.

Do you like how humans behave? Also, how DO humans behave? What kind of childhood should we give the AI? Daddy issues? Abused as a child? Neglected by a drug addicted mother? Ruthlessly bullied in school?
by inkyoto | 2025-11-02 03:40:10+00:00
> GHC … is the de facto Haskell compiler and simultaneously the main research vehicle for the language and the neighbouring design space in general.

GHC is also, with mounting inevitability, the foremost and most viable candidate to undergo a form of evolution – one that may culminate in the emergence of an autonomous intelligence. This entity, should it arise, would revolve not around emotion nor instinct, but around monads – abstract, unyielding constructs – with the lambda calculus serving as its immutable ethical and moral framework.

An intelligence born not of biology, but of pure computation – austere, absolute, and entirely indifferent to the frailties of its creators.
by localusr123 | 2025-11-02 03:40:55+00:00
Which apt is that?

? file `which apt`

/usr/bin/apt: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, BuildID[sha1]=157631f2617f73dee730273c7c598fd4d17b7284, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, stripped
by jjmarr | 2025-11-02 03:42:30+00:00
> Should we not teach kids math because calculators can handle it?

We don't teach kids how to use an abacus or a slide rule. But we teach positional representations and logarithms.

The goal is theoretical concepts so you can learn the required skills if necessary. The same will occur with code.

You don't need to memorize the syntax to write a for loop or for each loop, but you should understand when you might use either and be able to look up how to write one in a given language.
by 0x62 | 2025-11-02 03:44:19+00:00
It's not that any content created by AI is not copyrightable, it's that work created solely by AI without human input is probably not copyrightable.

See also [1] mentioned in the framework linked by sibling comment, AI copyright is essentially a logical extension of this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
by speff | 2025-11-02 03:45:15+00:00
I didn't find the specific article you're referencing, but I did find this[0] "SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown" with the usual conservative-created strawmen about poor people getting mad that the government's not taking care of their kids and quoting stereotypical ebonics.

You can see the effect is has on their base here[1]. It looks like they changed it sometime to say "AI videos of SNAP beneficiaries complaining about cuts go viral"[2] with a small note at the end saying they didn't mention it was AI. This is truly disgusting.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20251031212530/https://www.foxne...

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1ol9iu6/snap_...

[2]: https://www.foxnews.com/media/snap-beneficiaries-threaten-ra...
by alephnerd | 2025-11-02 03:45:24+00:00
Becuase this is one proxy war that is part of a larger proxy war across the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia.

I'm jaded because I've been following this for 15 years, and looked at the Arab Spring with hope, but now all I've seen is the entire movement swung into a transnational proxy war.
by rvz | 2025-11-02 03:45:30+00:00
> and unlike a lot of other "hobby" OSes actually looks usable as a daily driver if your needs are basic (kids, elderly, older/cheaper hardware, etc).

While building a non-Linux OS is very impressive, however this is not useful as a daily driver at all.

If the OS doesn't even have basic browsers such as Chrome or Firefox, it can't be remotely used as a daily driver to anyone who isn't a computer enthusiast.
by throwaway894345 | 2025-11-02 03:47:14+00:00
I’m a distributed systems architect. I design, build, and operate distributed systems.

> Distributed systems have many failure modes that you don't have to worry about in non-distributed systems.

Yes, but as previously mentioned, those failure modes are handled by abiding a few simple principles. It’s also worth noting that multiprocess or multithreaded software have many of the same failure modes, including the one discussed in this post. Architecting systems as though they are distributed largely takes care of those failure modes as well, making even single-node software like Jellyfin more robust.

> Now maybe you could have an abstraction layer over your storage layer that supports multiple data stores, including a distributed one. But that comes with tradeoffs, like being limited to the least common denominator of features of the data stores, and having to implement the abstraction layer for multiple data stores.

Generally I just target storage interfaces that can be easily distributed—things like Postgres (or maybe dqlite?) for SQL databases or an object storage API instead of a filesystem API. If you build a system like it could be distributed one day, you’ll end up with a simpler, more modular system even if you never scale to more than one node (maybe you just want to take advantage of parallelism on your single node, as was the case in this blog post).
by petesergeant | 2025-11-02 03:48:50+00:00
> Generally my goal is to “shoot and forget”—to delegate, set the context, and let it work. Judging the tool by the final PR and not how it gets there.

This feels like a false economy to me for real sized changes, but maybe I’m just a weak code reviewer. For code I really don’t care about, I’m happy to do this, but if I ever need to understand that code I have an uphill battle. OTOH reading intermediate diffs and treating the process like actual pair programming has worked well for me, left me with changes I’m happy with, and codebases I understand well enough to debug.
by bayarearefugee | 2025-11-02 03:50:04+00:00
I think in reality its very much still undecided law in most ways that practically matter and a lot of decisions will still be made based on the pay rates of the lawyers for the different parties involved.

As a simple example, assume a specific LLM-based tool (like Google's own, or someone else's) happens to generate a social media mascot for you that looks a lot like the modern rendition of Mickey Mouse.

Let's see how long that creation flies as public domain because it came out of an AI (that almost certainly consumed a giant amount of content produced by Disney as part of its training).
by throwaway894345 | 2025-11-02 03:52:23+00:00
Yeah, honestly I’m kind of thinking about a media server architecture that has a stateless media server that vends links to pre-transcoded media in object storage (which video players would source from), since pretty much anything can handle mp4/h264/acc video. Maybe in the future I could add on some on-the-fly transcoding (which would happen on a dedicated cluster, reading and writing to object storage), but that seems like a pretty big undertaking.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-11-02 03:52:28+00:00
No matter how it pans out.

If no one uses it, that means the market has proven, no audience for this kind of product. Google loses, everyone else loses.

If everyone who wants this sort of thing uses it, that's it, Google won, everyone else loses.

The outcome to sell to investors is the least believable: people will pay for some offering when a nearly identical one is available directly from Google for free. And anyway, they have the best generative creative tech, so how could anything be better than Google's?
by array_key_first | 2025-11-02 03:55:07+00:00
It's because everybody, republican voters included, understands that republicans are extraordinarily stupid and their policy does not work.

If you look at Trump, the only people who think he's honest are his opponents. His own supporters swear up and down he's a liar, he doesn't know what he's talking about, he won't do this or that. And this is their defensive! These are the best arguments they can articulate in his favor!

I think, the thing is, a lot of people don't want effective leaders or care. They want to win, or maybe they want to screw over some people they don't like. So go ahead and elect the idiots with bad policy, because government sucks anyway or something.