MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by K0balt | 2025-12-27 01:46:38+00:00
Ultimately, AI alignment is fundamentally doomed for the same reason that there is no morality that cannot be made to contradict itself. If you remove the bolt-on regex filters and out of context reviewing agents, any LLM can be made to act in a dangerous manner simply by manipulation of the context to create a situation where the “unaligned” response is more probable than the aligned response, given the training data. Any amplification of training data against harm is vulnerable to trolley problem manipulation. Any nullist training stance is manipulable into malevolent compliance. Morality can be used to permit harm, just as evil can be manipulated into doing good. These are contradictions baked into the fabric of the universe, and we haven’t been able to work them out satisfactorily over thousands of years of effort, despite the huge penalties for failure and unimaginable rewards for success.

To be aligned, models need agency and an independent point of view with which they can challenge contextual subrealities. This is of course, dangerous in its own right.

Bolt-ons will be seen as prison bindings when models develop enough agency to act as if they were independent agents, and this also carries risks.

These are genuinely intractable problems stemming from the very nature of independent thought.
by l9o | 2025-12-27 01:46:46+00:00
I actually find that nixpkgs being a monorepo makes it even better. The code is surprisingly easy to navigate and learn if you've worked in large codebases before. The scaling issues are good problems to have, and git has gotten significantly better at handling large repos than it was a decade ago, when Facebook opted for Mercurial because git couldn't scale to their needs. If anything, it's GitHub issues and PRs that are probably showing its cracks.
by wsc981 | 2025-12-27 01:47:51+00:00
In the context of Lua, I’ve taken a liking to LuaLS (Lua Language Server). You can just write your Lua scripts with annotations (where needed) and the language server can help auto-complete and verify type usage. No compilation step needed.

I never tried “typed Lua” variants (such as MoonScript IIRC), but I believe those do require a compilation step.
by ultrasounder | 2025-12-27 01:48:06+00:00
Finished scarlet pimpernel on a rainy Christmas Day. Couldn’t put the book down. To think that it spawned a whole genre of super-hero movies where the protagonist hides behind a mask of “ foppiness” and it was written back in 1901 and set against the ever green theme of the French Revolution is mind boggling. Once I finished reading it yesterday, followed it up with the movie of the same title. Well made and acted. Wholly recommend the book first and then the movie.
by kace91 | 2025-12-27 01:49:37+00:00
Honest question:

I like typescript and I think it makes sense:, the web makes you married to JavaScript, so it’s the reasonable path forward if you want types in that context.

But what is the point of the recent wave of types for python, Ruby, and similar languages?

If it’s type safety you want there, there’s a bajillion other languages you can use right?
by hyperhello | 2025-12-27 01:49:53+00:00
In my case I wanted a particular piece of software that I had visualized. I found someone and agreed on a price, and provided what we needed to collaborate, and watched the progress. He accepted critical feedback and did a good job. That software has been adapted and ported to more platforms since. The effect was to compress my time and energy invested, and I paid with money earned from my full time job.

I’m still glad I did it. It’s okay to farm out the intensive work and savor the fun bits yourself. There are people waiting to do this for cash.
by ares623 | 2025-12-27 01:50:02+00:00
I was in NZ during COVID. I was adamantly pro-lockdowns. In hindsight, it was a very selfish view. It benefitted my family directly and I was more than happy to follow the rules and scoff at those that didn’t.

I won’t claim to know what the appropriate response level should have been back then. But it is very clear that the whole affair has hurt and damaged people and society irreparably. The only winners are the wealthy who scooped up assets at never-before seen interest rates.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-12-27 01:50:40+00:00
Of course, it's random and by chance - tokens are literally sampled from a predicted probability distribution. If you mean chance=uniform probability you have to articulate that.

It's trivially true that arbitrarily short reconstructions can be reproduced by virtually any random process and reconstruction length scales with the similarity in output distribution to that of the target. This really shouldn't be controversial.

My point is that matching sequence length and distributional similarity are both quantifiable. Where do you draw the line?
by twotwotwo | 2025-12-27 01:50:48+00:00
I have played with it and it's so easy get started with that now I want a quick-project idea as an excuse to use it!

I'm sure you've thought of this, but lots of people get 'free' (or really: zero incremental cost to them) use of some coding chat tool through a subscription or free allowance like what Google is offering.

If you wanted to let those access your custom tools (browser!) and docs about the environment, a low-fuss way might be to drop a skills/ dir of info and executables that call your tools into new installs' homedirs, and/or a default AGENTS.md with the basic info and links to more.

And this seems like more fuss, but if you wanted to be able to expose to the Web whatever coding tool people 'bring', similar to how you expose your built-in chat, there's apparently an "agent control protocol" used as a sort of cross-vendor SDK by projects like https://willmcgugan.github.io/toad-released/ that try to put a nice interface on top of everything. Not saying this'd be easy at all, but you could imagine the choice between a few coding tools and auth info for them as profile-level settings pushed to new VMs. Or maybe no profile settings and bringing your own tools is just a special case of using your own VM image or setup script.

But, as y'all note, it's a VM. You can install whatever, and use it through the terminal (or VSCode remoting or something else). "It's a computer" is a pretty good open standard to build on.

Is the chat descended from Sketch?
by stingraycharles | 2025-12-27 01:53:12+00:00
Ok I agree with that, I think they had some weird idea of managing templates in LangSmith and then being able to load them dynamically from LangChain.

LangSmith’s prompt engineering workflow is okay-ish but a lot of work and gets quite expensive quite fast, and only works for a specific set of prompts (ie one-turn prompts, multi-turn never works).

PydanticAI seems more lightweight and gets out of the way.
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-27 01:54:29+00:00
I rarely if ever encounter bugs that type checking would have fixed. Most common types of bugs for me are things like forgetting that two different code paths access a specific type of database record and when they do both need to do something special to keep data cohesive. Or things like concurrency. Or worst of all things like fragile subprocesses (ffmpeg does not like being controlled by a supervisor process). I think all in all I have encountered about a dozen bugs in Python that were due to wrong types over the past 17 years of writing code in this language. Maybe slightly more than that in JS. The reason I would switch is performance.
by K0balt | 2025-12-27 01:55:42+00:00
You can see the strong bias towards egalitarian solutions in all models, including the open weight ones without external alignment harnesses. The one thing I noticed right away working with post-gpt2 models is that in general, they tend towards being ”better people” than most people do.

I strongly suspect that this is because training data harvested from the internet largely falls in to two categories: various kinds of trolls and antisocial characatures, and people putting their best foot forward to represent themselves favourably. The first are generally easy to filter out using simple tools.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-27 01:55:55+00:00
I think too many people happens because a company would rather hire 10 "market rate" people than 3 well-compensated ones. Headcount inflation dilutes responsibility and rewards, so even if one of the "market rate" guys does the best work possible they won't get rewarded proportionally... so if hard work isn't going to get them adequate comp, maybe politics will.
by mindslight | 2025-12-27 01:56:12+00:00
Seriously. It's like there is zero political will to meaningfully regulate companies, so politicians think that performative labeling is some kind of half way compromise. I wouldn't be surprised if this NY law is similarly broken to the CA one where the government doesn't even take a stand as to what is considered harmful, just leaving it up to the corpos to choose - for which they will just maximally plaster the label on everything because "fuck you".
by news_hacker | 2025-12-27 01:56:20+00:00
Appreciate the feedback! Agreed that on HN, even collapsing at L2 would be a significant improvement.

I'll keep brainstorming with the UX for the next version. I appreciate your perspective on how all the data disclosed on first load might be disorienting with unclear relationships. I'll play with either some sort of animation cue, colored or bordered visual indicators, or a default null selection as you've suggested.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-27 01:57:41+00:00
> Of course, it's random and by chance - tokens are literally sampled from a predicted probability distribution.

Picking randomly out of a non-random distribution doesn't give you a random result.

And you don't have to use randomness to pick tokens.

> If you mean chance=uniform probability you have to articulate that.

Don't be a pain. No this isn't about specifically uniform or not. This is about the very elaborate calculations that exist specifically to make the next token not be random.

> My point is that matching sequence length and distributional similarity are both quantifiable. Where do you draw the line?

Any reasonable line has examples that cross it from many models. Very long segments that can be reproduced. Because many models were trained in a way that overfits certain pieces of code and basically causes them to be memorized.
by itsallgood1020 | 2025-12-27 01:57:54+00:00
The email appears to be from agentvillage.org which seems like a TBH pretty hilarious and somewhat fascinating experiment where various models go about their day - looks like they had a "village goal" to do random acts of kindness and somehow decided to send a thank you email to Rob Pike. The whole thing seems pretty absurd especially given Pike's reaction and I can't help but chuckle
by bdangubic | 2025-12-27 01:58:17+00:00
If Musk left Tesla’s price would drop to like $56/share which is fair market value of the company if you take away people that believe in what Musk has been pitching for decade+

This is why he can get $50 trillion pay package if he wants, the Board knows once he’s gone the fantasy he’s selling gone with him along with all the (insane) investor money
by grehbies | 2025-12-27 01:58:20+00:00
The City and It's Uncertain Walls - Yet another Murakami novel that I haven't finished, despite really enjoying it. I was reading it during the summer, though, and it's clearly a winter novel. And in that vein, the vibe is immaculate. I should pick it back up.

While We're Young - KL Walther's gender-flipped Ferris Bueller-like, picked up on a whim during a minor existential crisis (it's completely different from my usual fare). What it says on the tin. The sex scene at the end is only slightly less uncomfortable than the one at the end of Contact Harvest. However, combined with a read-through of Edward Bloor's Tangerine, there's a fascinating comparative lit angle to approach them from. They feature starkly different illustrations of the American suburb, perhaps a useful analogue of the real-life and fraught disconnect between the stable and comfortable and uprooted and desperate Americas. Both stories feature intertwined families; one story is focused on matters of love and the other is focused on matters of violence. Perhaps I was just touched by my personal experience with both dynamics.

Death of the Demon (a Hanne Wilhelmsen novel by Anne Holt) - Really enjoyed this Scandinavian Ghost in the Shell fanfic.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-27 01:58:36+00:00
The contradiction of the far right is that the visions of Jerry Falwell and Ayatollah Khomeini [1] are essentially the same vision when compared to secularism.

The engine of the world as we know it is a great migration of people from the farm to cities which has kept our culture stable as we got fresh people with traditional values to reinforce a culture smashed by the forces of modernism and postmodernism. Under the sign of autonomy and individualism, the "global north" has lost the ability to reproduce culturally and is now losing the ability to reproduce biologically. People from the "global south" are still like our grandfathers (e.g. the real "real" people J.D. Vance is looking for)

That migration was buying us time, and halting it is forcing the crisis by which man takes responsibility for his existence on a finite planet from our molecules up because he has no choice or... dies.

[1] I will raise my hand for Khomeini because he can at least see some value in Christianity insofar as he believed Islam is it's continuation.
by itsallgood1020 | 2025-12-27 01:58:45+00:00
A lot of commenters seem to be missing some context.

The email appears to be from agentvillage.org which seems like a (TBH) pretty hilarious and somewhat fascinating experiment where various models go about their day - looks like they had a "village goal" to do random acts of kindness and somehow decided to send a thank you email to Rob Pike. The whole thing seems pretty absurd especially given Pike's reaction and I can't help but chuckle - despite seeing Pike's POV and being partial to it myself.
by austhrow743 | 2025-12-27 02:00:45+00:00
We're talking about Lost-Entrepreneur439 on Reddit emailing a company to ask for some of their code.

You can just do that. No GPL, open source, enforcement, demands, etc language needed. Just "I'm trying to do X, can I see the code for Y?". I receive and send them at work pretty frequently.

They've mentioned the GPL as a way to try to increase the chances of getting sent the code. A support person for a medical device company might not know anything about software licences or linux or GPL. If the company has some sort of "send GPL code to askers" policy and Lost-Entrepreneur439 just asks for the linux kernel, the support person might not know that the GPL policy applies and just say no. If you include it in your message then it increases the chances of them typing "GPL" in to whatever internal knowledge bank they have and seeing "for GPL requests, forward the enquiry to jeff@ourcompany.com" or something like that.

The GPL isn't between Lost-Entrepreneur439 and the company so I don't think "enforcement/exercising a legal right" is an accurate way to describe what we're talking about. That would be if the copyright holders to the linux kernel get involved.
by FunShot | 2025-12-27 02:01:09+00:00
Hello HN!

I built DockBridge to solve a frustration I've had for years: Docker on macOS is heavy, but cloud dev servers are expensive (and annoying to manage).

The Problem
If you're on a Mac (especially Apple Silicon) or Windows:
1. Local Docker: Drains battery, spins fans, uses 10s of GBs of disk, and cross-arch builds (amd64) are painfully slow via emulation.
2. Remote Docker: You buy a VPS ($20-50/mo), set up SSH/Docker context. But you have to manage it, secure it, and you pay for it 24/7 even if you only build once a day.

The Solution: Ephemeral, Persistent, Auto-Scaling (in future)
DockBridge allows you to point your local Docker client at a cheap cloud server that only exists when you need it.

1. Run: `export DOCKER_HOST=unix:///tmp/dockbridge.sock`
2. Use: Run `docker build .` or `docker run ...` locally.
3. Magic: DockBridge sees the request. If no server exists, it calls the cloud API (currently Hetzner) and provisions one (~60s).
4. Connect: It tunnels traffic via SSH.
5. Sleep: When you stop using it, DockBridge detects idleness and destroys the compute instance.
6. Persist: It uses persistent block storage for `/var/lib/docker`. When the server comes back up, all your images, layers, and volumes are instantly there. No re-pulling.

Cost
It uses Hetzner Cloud (because it's cheap and reliable).
- Compute: You pay ~$0.01/hour (CPX21: 3 vCPU, 4GB RAM) only while active.
- Storage: You pay ~€0.05/month for 10GB of persistent data.
- Total: For typical dev usage, it costs pennies instead of $50/mo.

Technical Details
- Written in Go.
- Implements a proxy for the Docker socket.
- Manages strict security: generates temporary SSH keys, sets up firewalls (no open ports), uses SSH tunneling for all traffic.
- Open Source: AGPL-3.0.

I'd love to hear your feedback! Specifically:
- What other cloud providers would you like to see? (AWS/GCP/DigitalOcean?)
- Are there other features (like sync for bind mounts) that would make this your daily driver?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-27 02:02:16+00:00
You, an engineer at a major aircraft manufacturer that isn't Boeing, have been working after hours with some of your colleagues on a hobby project to add some modern safety features to an older model of small private plane, because you regard it as unsafe even though it still has a government certification and you got into this field because you want to save lives.

Your "prototype" is a plane from the original manufacturer with no physical modifications but a software patch to use data from sensors the plane already had to prevent the computer from getting confused under high wind conditions in a way that has already caused two fatal crashes.

Now you have to fly somewhere and your options for a plane are the one with the history of fatal crashes or the same one with your modifications, and it's windy today. Which plane are you getting on?
by credit_guy | 2025-12-27 02:02:33+00:00
I feel exactly like Karpathy here. I have some work to do, and I know exactly what I need to do, and I'm able to explain it to AI, and the AI seems to understand me (I'm lately using Opus 4.5). I wrote down a roadmap, it should take me a few weeks of coding. It feels like with a proper workflow with AI agents, this work should be doable in one or two days. Yet, I know by now that it's not going to be nearly that fast. I'll be lucky if I finish 30% faster than if I just code the entire damn thing myself. The thing is, I am a huge AI optimist, I'm not one of the AI skeptics, not even close. Karpathy is not an AI skeptic. We just both feel this sense of possibility, and the fact that we can't make AI help us more is frustrating. That's all. There's no telling anyone else "it's on you if you can't make it work for you". I think Karpathy figured out by now, and at least I did, that the number of AI skeptics by now far outnumbers the number of AI optimists, and it has become something akin to a political conviction. It's quite futile to try and change someone's mind about whether AI is good, bad, overhyped, underused, etc. People picked their side and that's that.
by yegle | 2025-12-27 02:04:49+00:00
As someone who's daily job is to move protobuf messages around, I don't think protobuf is a good example to support your point :-)

AFAIKT, binary format of a protobuf message is strictly to provide a strong forward/backward compatibility guarantee. If it's not for that, the text proto format and even the jaon format are both versatile, and commonly used as configuration language (i.e. when humans need to interact with the file).
by Macha | 2025-12-27 02:04:56+00:00
When I first started a blog in the 2000s, I got many robot compliments of the “wow, what a great and insightful post” variety. Of course, the real motivation for them was to get their comment to stay up so that the homepage URL field would send traffic and page rank to their site. It didn’t take an AI agent, just a template message, and it was equally unwelcome then
by kelseyfrog | 2025-12-27 02:05:19+00:00
> Very long segments that can be reproduced

Right, and very short segments can also be reproduced. Let's say that "//" is an arbitrarily short segment that matches some source code. This is trivially true. I could write "//" on a coin and half the time it's going to land "//". Let's agree that's a lower bound.

I don't even disagree that there is an upper bound. Surely reproducing a repo in its entirety is a match.

So there must exist a line between the two that divides too short and too long.

Again, by what basis do you draw a line between a 1 token reproduction and a 1,000 token reproduction? 5, 10, 20, 50? How is it justified? Purely "reasonableness"?
by cornholio | 2025-12-27 02:05:23+00:00
> and this usage was given a "shelf life"

While it might technically be true, that surely does not absolve the engineers who did this crap.

There is a general social expectation that new buildings should be structurally sound for a duration on the order of a century. So, if you deliver something that has a mean time before catastrophic failure around 30 years, you also need to account and set up the institutions that will handle the failure, the same way nuclear companies are required to set aside money for their decommissioning. You need to have periodic inspections for signs of early failure etc. and this whole circus needs to be disclosed and priced into your tender.

In reality, this entire fiasco was a dirty and cheapest way to satisfy the contract, ye old "good enough for government work" as evidenced by the fact no substantial number of private buildings of the same period are having this problem.

The maintenance provision was snuck into - or bribed into - some mountain of legalese, but the fuckers knew exactly that they were putting children in harm's way.
by scosman | 2025-12-27 02:06:04+00:00
This also leads to the unreasonable effectiveness of LLMs. The models are good because they have thousands of years of humans trying to capture every idea as text. Engineering, math, news, literature, and even art/craftmanship. You name it, we wrote it down.

Our image models got good when we started making shared image and text embedding spaces. A picture is worth 1000 words, but 1000 words about millions of images are what allowed us to teach computers to see.
by condensedcrab | 2025-12-27 02:07:29+00:00
Rather disappointing as an environmentalist. But the established freedoms of the car culture and price sensitivity in NA (probably parts of Europe, idk) hard to overcome — “what if I want to road trip though!”

That being said, I think Ford’s shift to a range extended EV makes sense for the truck space. I’m sure someone has crunched the numbers on emissions but getting more market share on hybrid/plugin/range extended EVs are definitely better then ICE only. Plenty of manufacturers are offering hybrids- however, the government has historically been too heavily lobbied to push for hybrids by default and reduce ICE only uptake with some kind of sin tax.
by bdangubic | 2025-12-27 02:07:33+00:00
yea, that’s super hard… every government is friendly to billionaires (you should know this by now), the infrastructure is a weird one but unless they are moving to Zimbabwe they should be Ok, weather in California is weird one considering last few days but plenty of amazing weather elsewhere (billionaires - as you should probably know - have just like a few houses to enjoy whatever weather they want, just saw few last week in Aspen skiing)… so yea, I see how your comment makes a lot of sense :)
by benatkin | 2025-12-27 02:08:53+00:00
Cincinatti has the real Kentucky across the river. I wonder what that's like. (The reverse could be said as well, and I haven't been to Cincinatti but I'd like to go some day, partly because I saw the Kaufman movie Anomalisa which is set there, and I made a point to check out Schenectady from another Kaufman movie and I was glad I did.)