MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ordu | 2025-11-15 17:14:37+00:00
You know, there was an idea of a planned economy, which promised the best allocation of resources. But it didn't work in practice. What works is a chaos, when everyone does what they deem worthy to do. We can see, that the overall result is a progress, ideas are tried, rejected or accepted. But we can also see that efficiency of the process is not ideal. You talk about this non-ideals in terms of "fragmentation" and "tech debt". My point is: we can claim that costs of fragmentation and tech debt are avoidable, if we cannot propose a way to avoid them, while keeping benefits.

You think that it will be better for people to stop developing programming languages, but how do you think new programming languages will appear? Will they be better? To be better you need to try new ideas and to look how they work in practice. And very probably your ideas will fail when tested by reality. How to organize the activity to test new ideas without risks of fragmentation? We can't keep our results of developing an experimental language in secret, because then everyone will do the same, and we would need to test all ideas without any hope to learn from other's experience. U'see, the very activity of testing new ideas is almost a synonym for fragmentation.

I don't think you have any viable alternative to "every programmer should create its own programming language".
by osigurdson | 2025-11-15 17:14:58+00:00
My best "AI win" so far was in an area where I had to create a number of things that all followed a similar pattern. I created one hand-crafted example and created a general spec and specific ones for each component. It worked really well and I was, for a moment, experiencing a 10-30X productivity boost while having resultant code that I could review quickly and understand. It was also more consistent that I think I would have gotten from hand coding as it is easy to drift a little in terms of style and decisions.

Of course, this is all very situational and based on the problem being solved at the time. The risk with "practices" is they are generally not concerned with problem being solved and insist on applying the same template regardless.
by jamzer | 2025-11-15 17:15:42+00:00
I think they're referring to the verification end, in terms of being required to hand over personal info to various parties, a certain percentage of which will have insufficient security and be compromised resulting in your info being leaked.

Or otherwise that if you want to effectively ban VPNs you'll end up at the point where secure encryption is effectively banned, because there are ways to tunnel traffic over pretty much any protocol eg. SSH, HTTPS if you're creative.
by grogers | 2025-11-15 17:16:37+00:00
It sounds like part of the problem was how the application reacted to the reverted fail over. They had to restart their service to get writes to be accepted, implying some sort of broken caching behavior where it kept trying to send queries to the wrong primary.

It's at least possible that this sort of aborted failover happens a fair amount, but if there's no downtime then users just try again and it succeeds, so they never bother complaining to AWS. Unless AWS is specifically monitoring for it, they might be blind to it happening.
by LexiMax | 2025-11-15 17:16:43+00:00
Our current crop of leaders are, to quote Succession, not serious people.

You could point to many examples why, but I don't think there's a better example of this than how China managed to utterly snooker the west when they tried to run the same old economic imperialism playbook on them.

The nepo-babies making those decisions who wanted to coast on the US's global superpower status were outsmarted by a hungry up-and-comer. Now they're pissed off, but don't have an actual plan for how to fix things, so they're resorting to a series of own-goals that make them feel good in the moment.

Some of them are even building bunkers, but don't seem to have the foresight to understand that they're either setting themselves up to bend the knee to the first warlord who lays siege, or betrayed from within by their bodyguards. Like I said, not serious people.

These are dark times, and as an individual it can sometimes feel hopeless. I don't know if we can save our country. But you can try saving yourself, your friends, your family, you community, the people you truly care about.

Good luck, everyone.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-15 17:18:28+00:00
Not the best example they could have used because the root cause is ambiguous.

I try to be prepared and on-time, but being late some times is unavoidable if there’s a car accident on the freeway that leaves me locked in a traffic, I get a flat tire, my flight is delayed, or any number of other unpredictable things outside of my control happen. I think that’s what the article is trying to talk about.
by kccqzy | 2025-11-15 17:18:56+00:00
Agree with a lot of what you said. Definitely to a lot of corporations C++17 was the peak of the language. Apple prioritized Swift afterwards and Google started doing Carbon and begrudgingly accepted Rust.

First time hearing about the embed issue and god that person’s experience is awful: https://thephd.dev/finally-embed-in-c23 and it feels like a job for only the best project managers.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-15 17:19:07+00:00
> This is the magic argument reskinned. Transformers aren’t copying strings, they’re constructing latent representations that capture relationships, abstractions, and causal structure because doing so reduces loss.

Sure (to the second part), but the latent representations aren't the same as a humans. The human's world that they have experience with, and therefore representations of, is the real word. The LLM's world that they have experience with, and therefore representations of, is the world of words.

Of course an LLM isn't literally copying - it has learnt a sequence of layer-wise next-token predictions/generations (copying of partial embeddings to next token via induction heads etc), with each layer having learnt what patterns in the layer below it needs to attend to, to minimize prediction error at that layer. You can characterize these patterns (latent representations) in various ways, but at the end of the day they are derived from the world of words it is trained on, and are only going to be as good/abstract as next token error minimization allows. These patterns/latent representations (the "world model" of the LLM if you like) are going to be language-based (incl language-based generalizations), not the same as the unseen world model of the humans who generated that language, whose world model describes something completely different - predictions of sensory inputs and causal responses.

So, yes, there is plenty of depth and nuance to the internal representations of an LLM, but no logical reason to think that the "world model" of an LLM is similar to the "world model" of a human since they live in different worlds, and any "understanding" the LLM itself can be considered as having is going to be based on it's own world model.

> Saying “it understands nothing because autoregression” is just another unfalsifiable claim dressed as an explanation.

I disagree. It comes down to how do you define understanding. A human understands (correctly predicts) how the real world behaves, and the effect it's own actions will have on the real world. This is what the human is predicting.

What an LLM is predicting is effectively "what will I say next" after "the cat sat on the". The human might see a cat and based on circumstances and experience of cats predict that the cat will sit on the mat. This is because the human understands cats. The LLM may predict the next word as "mat", but this does not reflect any understanding of cats - it is just a statistical word prediction based on the word sequences it was trained on, notwithstanding that this prediction is based on the LLMs world-of-words-model.
by Demiurge | 2025-11-15 17:19:47+00:00
Russia was primarily an agricultural exporter, but it was most certainly a capitalist society prior to revolution. It bought and sold many things, and was an industrial nation, on par with many others in Europe, with a capacity to build war ships, tanks, artillery, trains and so on. It had other tremendous inequalities, but without factories, without lower officers in the navy and army, without the first revolution where the capitalists took over, there would be no second revolution of the bolsheviks, or soviets.
by ceh123 | 2025-11-15 17:19:51+00:00
On the topic of simplices! I did my PhD in dynamical systems and the space of invariant measures [0] is (in the compact setting) always a simplex and the extreme points are the ergodic measures. It's because of this that you can kind of assume your system is ergodic do work there and frequently be able to generalize to the non-ergodic case (through ergodic decomposition).

But the real thing I wanted to mention here was the Poulsen Simplex [1]. This is the unique Choquet simplex [2] for which the extreme points are dense. This means that it's like an uncountably infinite dimensional triangle where no matter where you are inside the triangle, you're arbitrarily close to a corner. It's my favorite shape and absolutely wild and impossible to conceptualize (even though I worked with it daily for years!)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invariant_measure

[1] https://eudml.org/doc/74350

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choquet_theory
by holysoles | 2025-11-15 17:20:19+00:00
I was referring to the rules/patterns provided by crowdsec rather than the distribution of known "bad" IPs through their Central API.

The default ban for traffic detected by your crowdsec instance is 4 hours, so that concern isn't very relevant in that case.

The decisions from the Central API from other users can be quite a bit longer (I see some at ~6 days), but you also don't have to use those if you're worried about that scenario.
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-15 17:20:43+00:00
As someone not an expert in capitalism but generally curious and knowledgable across a lot of subjects, my biggest skepticism of communism is that I don't see parallels to it anywhere in nature.

When I reflect on the patterns that seem to repeat across levels of abstractions (physics, chemistry, biology, psychology...) is there any example of a mechanism that evolved towards optimal that resembles (even roughly) the basic shape of communism?

I haven't found one yet, but if there were one I would expect it to show up in how cells in complex multi celled organisms (e.g. humans) organize themselves and manage resources. In other words, it someone can make a compelling case that a system in our bodies regulating our cells at large scales has strong parallels to communism, I'll be more inclined to think communism has a role in optimally regulating human behavior at scale. What I know is far far less than what I don't know, so it's possible there are many examples I just haven't come across yet.

Whereas I can see parallels to capitalism (free market competition and cooperation) all over nature.

Note I'm not making a moral argument here. I'm trying to use an understanding of the universe and nature to get an intuition of whether communism is a hallucination or an optimal algorithm, and if it is an optimal algorithm in which contexts is it optimal?
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-15 17:21:15+00:00
The argument is that Tesla needs to be doing hundreds of thousands of miles without intervention to be trusted for robotaxis.

Most people using FSD don't come close to the mileage needed to get an idea of the safety level needed. If a Tesla robotaxi kills a kid, Tesla is done, and there won't be a coming back.

So Tesla actually needs millions of miles without critical intervention before they can confidently let these things en masse out on the streets.

A whole tesla fanboy meetup collectively will not have enough FSD miles to see something like that, but a robotaxi fleet will encounter it within a year.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-11-15 17:22:20+00:00
One problem for your argument is that transformer networks are not, and weren't meant to be, calculators. Their raw numerical calculating abilities are shaky when you don't let them use external tools, but they are also entirely emergent. It turns out that language doesn't just describe logic, it encodes it. Nobody expected that.

To see another problem with your argument, find someone with weak reasoning abilities who is willing to be a test subject. Give them a calculator -- hell, give them a copy of Mathematica -- and send them to IMO, and see how that works out for them.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-15 17:22:29+00:00
> They used to pay soldiers in salt. That’s the origin of the word salary.

Note that the amount of evidence supporting this claim is zero. There is a Roman source that makes the claim, based on the resemblance of the words, but at the time of writing, no one was paid in salt, and there is no record of anyone ever having been paid in salt.
by seemaze | 2025-11-15 17:22:32+00:00
There’s 1,000 established industries that don’t offer the rapid growth and pay outs of the modern tech ecosystem. I’m excited to see some of the current industrial backwaters soak up technical talent freed up by the SV AI brain drain.

To think we’ve handsomely paid our best and brightest the last few decades in pursuit of.. advertising?
by georgehotz | 2025-11-15 17:22:40+00:00
1 and 2 are supported, 1 you need to specify, 2 will be found with BEAM. We are working on reimplementing HipKittens in tinygrad, all the stuff is there to do it. See the amd_uop_matmul example.

tinygrad doesn't support 3 yet, it's not needed on any AMD GPUs, and not needed on NVIDIA consumer. It wouldn't be hard to add, but it's important to figure out how it best fits with the existing abstractions. I think everything will eventually move to a more producer-consumer model.
by ordu | 2025-11-15 17:23:51+00:00
> 1) You are NOT serious (in effort to be invested, resources, knowledge), then don't do it.

I did it while being non-serious. I got like a half of a language working. And I don't regret it. It was fun. I've got a little bored and distracted by other things, and so I've stopped working on it.

Such posts are great, because they let you pick some new ideas that will be fun to code.

> You ARE serious, then go for it.

I don't think it works this way. To become serious you need some really good idea. But to get a really good idea you need to do at least a couple of full loops through the four phases the article begins with. Before you invested a lot of time into writing languages, you are highly unlikely can get a really good idea for a new language.
by hexbin010 | 2025-11-15 17:23:54+00:00
What made you go without salt? Have you seen any major health benefits?

We don't have the best-tasting product here in this part of north west Europe unfortunately, so things do taste pretty bland. And if you're trying to get your kid to eat more veg, a tiny bit of dressing is worth the trade off.

Even the Italians and French love dressing salads despite much better tasting produce. I tend not to disagree with what the Italian and French do when it comes to food :-)
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-15 17:24:05+00:00
That would be great, but starting from scratch would take away Windows' core strength: backwards compatibility. There's a lot of legacy out there that depends on all that old cruft being there. There's still critical infrastructure running on Windows XP.

MS could probably just virtualize it or containerize the old parts, but people made a lot of dumb choices back then and windows software got its tendrils into every part of the OS and so weird things can break when you try and containerize it.
by brookst | 2025-11-15 17:24:06+00:00
The examples are similar in that they demonstrate that reducing probability is a reasonable goal, and it is a mistake to say anything imperfect is useless.

Your take on TSA seems to be in the imperfect=useless camp. There are good ROI, efficiency, and philosophical reasons to want to abolish TSA, but it seems naive to say there is zero value and their mere existence has not deterred anyone.
by softwaredoug | 2025-11-15 17:24:19+00:00
A lot of software process exists to solve a specific problem IMO:

Devs get married to their first implementation; Stakeholders don’t tolerate rework

If companies and individuals could throw more away, then we wouldn’t need to obsess over planning. The “spec” and “design” would get discovered through doing. I’ve never worked anywhere where a long up front design addressed the important design issues. Those get discovered after you’ve tried to implement a solution a few times and failed.

If we say throwing away as a feature rather than a bug, we’d probably work more efficiently.
by firefoxd | 2025-11-15 17:24:20+00:00
I had to revisit my strategy after posting about my zipbombs on HN [0]. My server traffic went from tens of thousands to ~100k daily, hosted on a $6 vps. It was not sustainable.

Now I target only the most aggressive bots with zipbombs and the rest get a 403. My new spam strategy seems to work, but I don't know if I should post it on HN again...

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43826798
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-15 17:24:32+00:00
> Like saturated fat, salt has been incorrectly demonized in the course of propping up ill-conceived modern dietary standards.

The history actually runs in the other direction - step one was that someone decided that salt was bad, and step two was that a bunch of dietary standards were created to express the revealed truth that salt was bad. The demonization is the beginning of the process and was done for its own sake.
by freakynit | 2025-11-15 17:25:29+00:00
Publication manager: Jean DOMINIQUE

Author of response PDF to Adguard: someone named "bob"

Uses Microsoft and Office 365

RNA number W691110691.

Was declared on February 15, 2025, and published in the Journal Officiel on March 18, 2025

Headquartered at 131 rue de Créqui, 69006 Lyon 6 in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, specifically in the Rhône department.

Publication number: 20250011, announcement number 1688
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-15 17:25:43+00:00
> Humans buy products that delight them.

Individuals aren't Microsoft's core customer which is why they don't care. It's the same reason Apple never went after the enterprise. Steve Jobs wanted people to choose the product, not have it chosen for them.

For Microsoft, they don't care. Businesses/IT Departments are the ones choosing and shoving it on everyone else. The users don't have to like it.
by librasteve | 2025-11-15 17:26:25+00:00
fwiw I think Perl was so popular in the late 90s that a transition like Python2.0 to 3.0 that traded some backward compatibility for some structure COULD have been successful. However, the Perl community also got tired of waiting such a long time for what is now Raku, and it was so different with no incremental migration path, that the lifeboat never materialized. Its not like Larry and the community didn't know that a transition was needed, but the execution was not there.
by Mathnerd314 | 2025-11-15 17:26:43+00:00
Typically people develop aphasia after a stroke. This provides a natural before/after comparison. When for example Mark Brodie had a stroke, he wasn't able to speak - and he also wasn't able to read or write computer programs. This indicates that natural and programming languages use overlapping regions of the brain.

Regarding language being in conflict with other modes of thinking, there is indeed a "savant" effect of aphasia, where after an aphasia-inducing stroke people suddenly develop amazing abilities in visual art, music, or mathematical thinking. But it is not consistent - most people don't develop these. And it comes with impairment of emotions, memory, etc. So really what the evidence suggests is that some people suppress parts of their brain, and these injuries unlock that potential because the suppression mechanisms break. It's most likely a cultural thing - people act how they are "expected" to act. There is some evidence that females actually have more biological capability for math (in cultures with very high gender equality) but typically you see less performance, so the conclusion is that the culture essentially "programs" in the lower performance. It is probably the same with the supposed "conflict" between thought, action, and language - the culture treats these as distinct modes and inhibits cross-modal thinking like synesthesia.
by jamzer | 2025-11-15 17:26:58+00:00
The issue being that governments in the west have repeatedly demonstrated they will implement blanket surveillance and not follow due process in using it.

Further those who do wish to break the law could still utilize cryptography to avoid backdoors so this would only really apply said surveillance to those not breaking the law.

Perhaps this is also different for digital activities due to the history of the digital space and the scale/ease at which if allowed it can be surveilled.
by webpraktikos | 2025-11-15 17:27:21+00:00
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