MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rickdeckard | 2025-12-09 20:51:35+00:00
> Do you have any evidence whatsoever that could back-up this claim? It feels like you're just saying this because you want it to be true, not because you have any concrete proof that Apple can sell competitive inference.

Sorry, I didn't mean to state that Apple A/M-series will be competitive on inference performance compared to other solutions. There is no sufficient data for this at the moment. But this is not the competition I expect to happen.

I expect them to stiffle competition and setting themselves up as the primary player in the Apple ecosystem for AI services, simply because they are making "Apple Intelligence" an ecosystem orchestration layer (and thus themselves the gatekeeper).

1. They made a deal with OpenAI to close Apple's competitive gap on consumer AI, allowing users to upgrade to paid ChatGPT subscriptions from within the iOS menu. OpenAI has to pay at least (!) the usual revenue share for this, but considering that Apple integrated them directly into iOS I'm sure OpenAI has to pay MORE than that. (also supported by the fact that OpenAI doesn't allow users to upgrade to the 200USD PRO tier using this path, but only the 20USD Plus tier) [1]

2. Apple's integration is set up to collect data from this AI digital market they created: Their legal text for the initial release with OpenAI already states that all requests sent to ChatGPT are first evaluated by "Apple Intelligence & Siri" and "your request is analyzed to determine whether ChatGPT might have useful results" [2]. This architecture requires(!) them to not only collect and analyze data about the type of requests, but also gives them first-right-to-refuse for all tasks.

3. Developers are "encouraged" to integrate Apple Intelligence right into their apps [3]. This will have AI-tasks first evaluated by Apple

4. Apple has confirmed that they are interested to enable other AI-providers using the same path [4]

--> Apple will be the gatekeeper to decide whether they can fulfill a task by themselves or offer the user to hand it off to a 3rd party service provider.

--> Apple will be in control of the "Neural Engine" on the device, and I expect them to use it to run inference models they created based on statistics of step#2 above

--> I expect that AI orchestration, including training those models and distributing/maintaining them on the devices will be a significant part of Apple's AI strategy. This could cover alot of text and image processing and already significantly reduce their datacenter cost for cloud-based AI-services. For the remaining, more compute-intensive AI-services they will be able to closely monitor (via above step#2) when it will be most economic to in-source a service instead of "just" getting revenue-share for it (via above step#1).

[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7905739-chatgpt-ios-app-...

[2] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/chatgpt-extensio...

[3] https://developer.apple.com/apple-intelligence/

[4] https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/10/craig-federighi-says-apple-ho...
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-09 20:52:00+00:00
With v-dom and bundles, we have lost a lot of the societal wins of view-source already. Extensions still work but user agency is more limited.

The view you are saying here is one that seems resoundingly common. Is what I heard from Flutter and flutter-web: my experience as a dve is what matters. What I can make is what matters.

That's true, sure! But there's a balance. Society matters too. What agency users have, what their user agency allows them to do, how they can circuit bend your website for themselves also matters. How we judge the scales here is a factor.

I am so so excited for wasm. Particularly wasm-components, where there is more than a huge mega bundle of compile code, where there are intelligible code boundaries and calls across modules. That, I want to hope will be a semi legibile WASM. But a lot of wasm today feels like it really slides back down the ladder into this rebuffing form of development that doesn't recognize any of how the web was better because it was more than the synthetic product it created, how the web was better for it's protocols, legibility, and user agency. I hope we don't slide back into a new Flash or Applet era, where the user & legibility & agency are given no regard, where a developer egocentricity is the only guiding principle.
by bravetraveler | 2025-12-09 20:52:02+00:00
Not sure if I'd use the same descriptions so pointedly, but I can see what they mean.

It's perfectly fine to link for convenience, but it does feel a little disrespectful/SEO-y to not 'continue the conversation'. A summary in the very least, how exactly it pertains. Sell us.

In a sense, link-dropping [alone] is saying: "go read this and establish my rhetorical/social position, I'm done here"

Imagine meeting an author/producer/whatever you liked. You'd want to talk about their work, how they created it, the impact it had, and so on. Now imagine if they did that... or if they waved their hand vaguely at a catalog.
by nvader | 2025-12-09 20:52:03+00:00
Wow, this might be the push I needed to automate certificate renewal on my personal website [0].

Manually clicking `make renew-cert` was barely tolerable every quarter, but if I have to do it twice as frequently I may as well ask an LLM to figure it out on my behalf.

[0]: https://danverbraganza.com
by arscan | 2025-12-09 20:52:16+00:00
I think this could be useful for the type of person that uses uses todo lists to help them tackle lots of small tasks that they intend to do immediately but somehow get distracted mid-action from and never finish (and then forget about altogether). As described in this blog post that front-paged hn some time ago:

> When I notice a micro-task like this, my instinct is not to do it, but to put it in the todo list. Then I try to do it immediately. And if I get distracted halfway through, it’s still there, in the todo list.

https://borretti.me/article/notes-on-managing-adhd

The problem with this approach is that recording tasks become a good amount of relative overhead compared to the 'micro-task' if it involves pulling out your phone, and pulling out your phone also introduces a potential distraction. So, having something that is single purpose and as low-friction as possible is appealing.

I'm skeptical that this is actually any better than using a smart watch that you can dictate to though.
by bluesnowmonkey | 2025-12-09 20:52:19+00:00
Of course it's fine for any project.

There is exactly one "best" programmer in the world, and at this moment he/she is working on at most one project. Every other project in the world is accepting less than the "best" possible quality. Yes... in software engineering.

As soon as you sat down at the keyboard this morning, your employer accepted a sacrifice in quality for the sake of quantity. So did mine. Because neither one of us is the best. They could have hired someone better but they hired you and they're fine with that. They'd rather have the code you produce today than not have it.

It's the same for an AI. It could produce some code for you, right now, for nearly free. Would you rather have that code or not have it? It depends on the situation, yeah not always but sometimes it's worth having.
by gakonst | 2025-12-09 20:52:23+00:00
Yes, there are many ways to approach the problem depending on who your adversary is.

Most privacy solutions unfortunately end up having two problems: - terrible user experience for various reasons relating to tracking metadata about your private payments and making claims about them using fancy cryptography. - terrible performance, preventing you from being able to do multiple thousands of payments per second.

One threat model I am excited by (non-committally though) is similar to 'compliant' end to end encryption between you and the stablecoin issuer, i.e. you and the stablecoin issuer can see your payments but no script kiddie on the internet can. This can be implemented w/o fancy cryptography and with great compatibility with the existing wallet / application ecosystem.

Hoping we can publish more on this soon.
by ok123456 | 2025-12-09 20:52:32+00:00
Snowden was the other big reason that TLS became the de facto standard for every site.

Prior to that, the consensus was that you only really needed TLS if you were dealing with money and wasn't worth the hassle otherwise. You could sniff traffic from Facebook and Twitter easily.

I remember listening to a talk given by an IRS investigator in around 2008 about how they were able to do a sting and shutdown illegal internet casinos. They collected a good bulk of that evidence from clear-text packet captures of gambling sessions and messages. He preemptively answered the question of whether encryption was a hurdle, by saying no one used it.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-12-09 20:52:37+00:00
One guy with a tendency to procrastinate extrapolates his expierence as a universal truth without providing any grounding.

Cool man, don't try and live forever.

Maybe people who haven't had their innate curiosity beaten out of them will get more resources to explore.

I just can't help seeing the same moral panic in this as I see in arguments against UBI.

It's like how many people with fuck you money have you met? I would say: "Trust me, humans do just fine without external deadlines or want." but it only takes like 30 seconds to find countless real people whose lives trivially destroy the whole line of argument.

How about this obvious counter point, making long term, 100 year research investments makes way more sense to any person who has the chance to see them pay off.

Right now this type of longterm thinking has only a few hive entities (RCC, governments, research labs) who can operate this way and we'd get a lot more exploring done if we can enable whatever percentage of the population was born with unbound curiosity to explore to their merriment.
by cyberax | 2025-12-09 20:52:44+00:00
Vancouver has fewer vacant units than the average for the country.

> The number of vacant homes in Vancouver has fallen below 1000 as of 2024. The latest Annual report shows low vacancy rate of 0.49%. [the average is 2.7%]

Guess what happened with the housing prices? Right. They kept increasing. The housing density went up, so the prices must also increase.
by technojamin | 2025-12-09 20:52:47+00:00
Asking an AI for opinion versus something concrete (like code, some writing, or suggestions) seems like a crucial difference. I've experimented with crossing that line, but I've always recognized the agency I'd be losing if I did, because it essentially requires a leap of faith, and I don't (and might never) have trust in the objectivity of LLMs.

It sounds like you made that leap of faith and regretted it, but thankfully pivoted to something grounded in reality. Thanks for sharing your experience.
by bee_rider | 2025-12-09 20:53:03+00:00
Bah, nah, I’ll take immortality thanks. I want to see where it all goes.

I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.

Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.
by djoldman | 2025-12-09 20:53:07+00:00
> And here's what I've been circling around: I think the only reason any of this is true is because of death. Without that horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely. Why start the difficult journey today when you have infinite tomorrows? Just as you "remember your death" to really live life, perhaps we need the deadline to do the work at all. Death is what pulls us out of pure consumption and into pursuit. You could call it "just a deadline", but I disagree. It's what makes us begin.

I'm not sure it's transparently bad that we could defer everything indefinitely. Why would that matter? Also, it's not certain that we would. Perhaps we would get very bored and then be spurred to action.
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-09 20:53:50+00:00
Great point, except for one huge insurmountable non-technical problem with Java that can be invoked in a single word: lawnmower.

“Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ — lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.” -Bryan Cantrill

“I actually think that it does a dis-service to not go to Nazi allegory because if I don’t use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there’s some critical understanding that I have left on the table […] in fact as I have said before I emphatically believe that if you have to explain the Nazis to someone who had never heard of World War 2 but was an Oracle customer there’s a very good chance that you would explain the Nazis in Oracle allegory.” -Bryan Cantrill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

Let's please not turn over the future of AI and programming languages over to a lawnmower.
by trs83 | 2025-12-09 20:53:58+00:00
I had the same question. Also, how exactly does this connect to the Linux Foundation? If these are really like the other foundational projects LF supports, why aren't they just included under the same umbrella. Additionally, who is leading this? All I see here is the vague announcement, several listed projects, and pricing to join this new foundation. Perhaps I don't understand how these things start (I wasn't there for the beginning of LF), but this looks to my eyes more like corporate divestment than sustainable shared collaboration.
by buildsjets | 2025-12-09 20:54:18+00:00
I mean, I agree MAHA sucks, and Kennedy is a fool and and loser, but the PDF is only hosted at the NIH. It was published in a journal owned by the Korean Society for Preventive Medicine, and the researcher is from Attikon University Hospital, University of Athens School of Medicine, Athens, Greece. And it was published WAAAAAAAY back in 2017.

So do your research or something.
by chis | 2025-12-09 20:54:38+00:00
It's really funny how much better the AI is at writing python and javascript than it is C/C++. For one thing it proves the point that those languages really are just way harder to write. And another thing, it's funny that the AI makes the exact same mistakes a human would in C++. I don't know if it's that the AI was trained on human mistakes, or just that these languages have such strong wells of footguns that even an alien intelligence gets trapped in them.

So in essense I have to disagree with the author's suggestion to vibe code in C instead of Python. I think the python usability features that were made for humans actually help the AI the exact same ways.

There are all kinds of other ways that vibe coding should change one's design though. It's way easier now to roll your own version of some UI or utility library instead of importing one to save time. It's way easier now to drop down into C++ for a critical section and have the AI handle the annoying data marshalling. Things like that are the real unlock in my opinion.
by gdcbe | 2025-12-09 20:54:40+00:00
Do you or someone reading this know who would be the best person that would be willing to come on a guest on a podcast and has the correct knowledge (ideally the person who implemented in WC3, or something similar enough).

Asking as I'm the host of netstack.fm, a podcast about networking and rust, but some episodes are just about networking alone.

Would love to devote an episode to the Kali TCP/IP IPX bridge as there's a lot to unpack there and that can be learned from. Any tips for a guest for such an episode are more than welcome!
by matu3ba | 2025-12-09 20:54:47+00:00
Sorry for necro-bumping, but there is a paper doing exactly that besides various other things to eliminate timing channels claiming also to prevent attacks based on speculative execution etc: "BLACKOUT : Data-Oblivious Computation with Blinded Capabilities" https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14654. They basically utilize another bit of CHERI for "blinded capability" and methods to mitigate potential problems you identified.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-09 20:54:57+00:00
> IIUC any landlord can use depreciation to lower their tax bill.

This is also not really how depreciation works for assets that retain their value. If you buy a building to rent it out, the cost of the building essentially a cost of doing business, i.e. a tax deduction. You pay tax on the profit which is revenue (rents) minus costs (building, interest, maintenance, advertising, etc.) Depreciation is the building, they make you take it over time instead of all at once when you buy it.

But the depreciation lowers the book value of the building, which is your tax basis when you sell it. If you buy a building for a million dollars, depreciate it down to $500,000 and then sell it for $2M, you have a $1.5M capital gain from the sale. You basically have to give back all the depreciation unless the building actually lost that much value by the time you sold it, and in practice it usually goes up instead of down.

It's really the homeowners who have the advantage here because there is a large capital gains tax exemption from the sale of your primary residence, and that's actually a reduction in taxes instead of just a deferral.
by frikk | 2025-12-09 20:55:10+00:00
In my experience the LLMs work better with frameworks that have more rigid guidance. Something like Tailwind has a body of examples that work together, language to reason about the behavior needed, higher levels of abstraction (potentially), etc. This seems to be helpful.

The LLMs can certainly use raw CSS and it works well, the challenge is when you need consistent framing across many pages with mounting special cases, and the LLMs may make extrapolate small inconsistencies further. If you stick within a rigid framework, the inconsistencies should be less across a larger project (in theory, at least).
by antinomicus | 2025-12-09 20:55:30+00:00
Do you believe in his ideas? I think the abundist philosophy is a fake moustache and a coat of paint on third way neoliberalism, which has proven time and again to have utterly failed as a political strategy in our current era. Ezra Klein’s ideas mostly feel tired, recycled, boring, outdated, and rudderless. We need true labor reform in this country, not less regulations and more trust in “altruistic developers”.
by jlouis | 2025-12-09 20:55:33+00:00
I think you should use a language with a highly expressive type system. That can be assembly too. See TAL back from the 1990'es. I also think you should use a language with a very expressive module system.

The reason is that you want to have some kind of guidance from a larger perspective in the long run. And that is exactly what types and module systems provide. The LLM has to create code which actually type checks, and it can use type checking as an important part of verification.

If you push this idea further: use Lean, Agda or Rocq. Let the LLM solve the nitty gritty details of proof, but use the higher-level theorem formation as the vessel for doing great things.

If you ask for a Red-black tree, you get a red-black tree. If you ask for a red-black tree where all the important properties are proven, you don't have to trust the LLM anymore. The proof is the witness of correctness. That idea is extremely powerful, because it means you can suddenly lift software quality by an order of magnitude, without having to trust the LLM at all.

We currently don't do this. I think it's because proving software correctness is just 50x more work, and it moves too slow. But if you could get an amplifier (LLM) to help out, it's possible this becomes more in the feasible area for a lot of software.
by fcharton | 2025-12-09 20:56:12+00:00
Author, here. The paper is about the Collatz sequence, how experiments with a transformer can point at interesting facts about a complex mathematical phenomenon, and how, in supervised math transformers, model predictions and errors can be explained (this part is a follow-up to a similar paper about GCD). From a ML research perspective, the interesting (but surprising) take away is the particular way the long Collatz function is learned: "one loop at a time".

To me, the base conversion is a side quest. We just wanted to rule out this explanation for the model behavior. It may be worth further investigation, but it won't be by us. Another (less important) reason is paper length, if you want to submit to peer reviewed outlets, you need to keep pages under a certain number.
by iambateman | 2025-12-09 20:56:18+00:00
We should prefer shaming and humiliation over forbiddance––norms beat laws in such situations.

Of course I prefer to read the thoughts of an actual human on here, but I don't think it makes sense to update the guidelines. Eventually the guidelines would get so long and tedious that no one would pay attention to them and they'd stop working altogether.

(did I include the non-word forbiddance to emphasize the point that a human––not a robot––wrote this comment? Yes, yes I did.)
by ModernMech | 2025-12-09 20:56:27+00:00
Right, a lot of the promise of AI can (and has) been achieved with better tool design. If we get the AI to start writing Assembly or Machine Code as some people want it to, we're going to have the same problems with AI writing in those languages as we did when humans had to use them raw. We invented new languages because we didn't find those old ones expressive enough, so I don't exactly understand the idea that LLMs will have a better time expressing themselves in those languages. The AI forgetting to free memory in C and having to go back and correct itself is a perfect example of this. We invented new tools so we wouldn't have to do that anymore, and they work. Now we are going backwards, and building giant AI datacenters that suck up all the RAM in the world just to make up for lost ground? Weak.
by keeda | 2025-12-09 20:56:47+00:00
I feel like your expectations have been swayed by the average sentiment of HN on the capabilities of LLMs. These things can be shockingly good at humour and satire.

As a very quick experiment, I would encourage you to have an AI roast you based on your HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42857604
by wnevets | 2025-12-09 20:56:49+00:00
> In addition to all of the authentication steps CAs take for DV and OV certificates, EV certificates require vetting of the business organization’s operational existence, physical address and a telephone call to verify the employment status of the requestor. [1]

[1] https://www.digicert.com/difference-between-dv-ov-and-ev-ssl...

Tying a phone number to a physical address and company is a lot more useful than just proof of control over a domain. Of course its not 100% fool proof and depends on the quality of the CA but still very useful.
by still_grokking | 2025-12-09 20:56:49+00:00
There's still a working Eclipse plugin? Does Eclipse now support LSP servers?

The most reliable Scala IDE is currently Metals (in VSCode, but other editors work, too). Metals uses directly the compiler for all code intelligence so it's as reliable as the compiler itself.

https://scalameta.org/metals/

https://scalameta.org/metals/docs/#editor-support
by Arodex | 2025-12-09 20:57:00+00:00
Immortality is absolutely not compatible with our current capitalistic social system. Whenever you see startups and rich guys financing research in that domain, there is never any talk about giving it away to hoi polloi like you and me. Death is the last economic redistribution system still standing - and when you see they are doing everything they can to nullify any inheritance tax, you can imagine they don't intend to give away anything - fortune, position, power - once they become immortal.

And imagine the North Korean or Russian dictators (or American "President") having access to the technology.