MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by orbital-decay | 2026-01-13 19:38:09+00:00
Determinism is an absolute red herring. A correct output can be expressed in an infinite amount of ways, all of them valid. You can always make an LLM give deterministic outputs (with some overhead), that might bring you limited reproducibility, but that won't bring you correctness. You need correctness, not determinism.

>We need some form of behavioral verification/auditing with guarantees that any input is proven to not produce any number of specific forbidden outputs.

You want the impossible. The domain LLMs operate on is inherently ambiguous, thus you can't formally specify your outputs correctly or formally prove them being correct. (and yes, this doesn't have anything to do with determinism either, it's about correctness)

You just have to accept the ambiguousness, and bring errors or deviation to the rates low enough to trust the system. That's inherent to any intelligence, machine or human.
by lkbm | 2026-01-13 19:38:12+00:00
If so, keep in mind that it's contingent advice. The question was how to profit from predicting an AI bubble popping [or something along those lines]. The answer is shorting Nvideo (assuming your prediction also includes a timeline).

It's always a way to lose a massive amount of money if you're wrong, so the advice is also contingent on confidence level.
by janbalangue | 2026-01-13 19:38:16+00:00
I’m the author. This is a deliberately small, design-first library focused only on async admission control: not execution, retries, or backpressure. The goal is to make overload explicit and test-backed rather than smoothed or hidden.

If you’re skimming, the core invariant is that an operation is in-flight from successful admission until its returned CompletionStage reaches a terminal state. Everything else (fail-fast rejection, cancellation semantics, lack of queuing/fairness) follows from that.

Happy to be challenged on semantics or failure modes, especially edge cases under concurrency.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2026-01-13 19:39:12+00:00
>What did the guy say that has everyone stumbling over themselves to vaguely allude to it?

The funny thing is that most people do not know what exactly he said, their stand is everyone else says that he is a racist so he must be one. Very similar to people calling the author of a book as bigoted - a book that they have never read.
by darth_avocado | 2026-01-13 19:39:57+00:00
Well Sweden sure thinks it could be a form of prostitution. While
Some form of OF is similar to pornography (pre recorded shows) other is similar to prostitution and therefore illegal (paying for custom live sexual acts). Obviously Sweden isn’t US, but it’s not as clear as “OF is just porn”.

https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2025-06-10/swe...
by mjr00 | 2026-01-13 19:40:03+00:00
"Can art be separated from the artist?" is an age-old debate.

> There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though.

I think this is common. Everyone separates art from the artist based on their own personal measurements on 1) how much they liked the art and 2) how much they dislike the artist's actions/beliefs. I'm sure a lot of people lambasting the GP for not completely rejecting Dilbert due to its creator still listen to Michael Jackson, or play Blizzard games, or watch UFC. There are musicians I listen to who have been accused of SA, but there are musicians I enjoyed but stop listening to because I found out they were neo-Nazis (not in the Bluesky sense, but in the "swastika tattoo" sense).

I was never a Dilbert fan, but know it spoke to people like the GP commenter and completely understand why they'd be conflicted.
by psychoslave | 2026-01-13 19:40:31+00:00
Ok, but who else still want to go to USA lately?

I hope the best for every people out there, including every usa citizen, but money alone won't attract every human profile under the sun, and unleashed imperialism which don't even pretend to export democracy anymore is doing nothing good for the the image of the country I'm afraid.

What a world really! Take care everything, might safety and peace remain on you and your relatives.
by clay_the_ripper | 2026-01-13 19:40:46+00:00
The flip side is: efficient capital allocation is better for our economy as a whole than trying to save certain jobs for emotional reasons.

Struggling businesses that can’t operate effectively and provide a poor return on capital should be shuttered - the only way to deal with the mountains of paperwork involved is to incentivize very smart people to work at very bad companies. smart people don’t like to work at failing companies. how to reconcile this and ensure efficient capital allocation? huge monetary compensation.
by zahlman | 2026-01-13 19:40:48+00:00
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=obstruction+of+police+officer+usa gives many results that clearly demonstrate that willfully impeding federal LEO (including physically, as in this case) is a federal crime.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=can+protesters+block+traffic+usa similarly establishes that blocking traffic is not lawful and does not become lawful simply because of free speech protections on protest.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-13 19:40:51+00:00
> There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though.

Thank you for at least acknowledging this. It's valid to appreciate someone's art while disagreeing with their behavior, but it's also valid if someone's behavior sours you on their art and makes it difficult to appreciate what they've accomplished - especially if you start to recognize some of their inner ugliness in their artistic endeavors.

Personally, I found that I connected with his early work a lot more than his latter work, as I found Dlibert's "nerd slice of life" arc a lot more compelling than his "Office microaggression of the week" arc. Scott revealing his inner ugliness did not make me eager to return, but I still keep a well-worn Dlibert mouse pad on my desk that my Dad gave me as a teenager; the one that says "Technology: No place for whimps."

Wherever Scott is now, I hope he's found peace.

EDIT: A few strips that live rent-free in my head.

- https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-quest-for-randomness
- https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/hzws/dilbert_condescending_unix_user/
- https://www.facebook.com/groups/423326463636282/posts/581619887806938/ (The Optimist vs The Pessimist)
by juliangmp | 2026-01-13 19:41:04+00:00
Have you actually read one a Free/Open-Source license? Like for example the MIT[1] license:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software [...] to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software [...]

Or the FSF's definition[2] of Free Software

The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

Or the OSI's definition[3] of open source.

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

It's almost as if this concept is at the very core of FOSS.

[1]: https://mit-license.org/
[2]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms
[3]: https://opensource.org/osd
by jeffbee | 2026-01-13 19:41:04+00:00
I mean, the friendly way to kill off the differences between Aperture and Photos would have been to add all the missing workflow stuff to Photos before killing Aperture. Photos did not get lift-and-stamp edits until late 2022, years after Aperture was discontinued, and it isn't as good as the corresponding feature in Aperture was. Also, it would have been cool if the Photos import from Aperture library had ever worked, even a little bit. I keep an external hard drive around with my old Aperture library because I know it contains photos that Photos.app still hasn't pulled in correctly.
by tom_0 | 2026-01-13 19:41:06+00:00
Yes, but every language is going to be a "port", not something contracted out like traditional localization.
I haven't decided how exactly but language conversion will land somewhere between these two extremes:
1. (expensive) pick a suite of "native" models (eg. models from China), TTS, ASR. Rewrite all the prompts in the target language. Revalidate all characters by hand
2. (cheap) slap a translation model around input and output and let the game run in English internally. My gut feeling is that this could have very poor results though and increase latency.

It's definitely a research project, this has never been done before.
by ferguess_k | 2026-01-13 19:41:07+00:00
No. Gonna dive 100% into my hobby xv6 OS project which I'm already working on.

I don't need $10M, 1 or 2 is good enough. I'm going to pay back all debts, rent a cabin (last checked about 127 CAD per night) for a few weeks and bring my son with me for a few nights. I'm also going to buy a telescope. 4-6 hours of kernel hacking at day, and 2-3 hours of stargazing during the night. Heaven!
by kayodelycaon | 2026-01-13 19:41:11+00:00
I truly believe you're sincere but I can't get my point across. :/ Please read carefully.

Stop thinking about how to fix the problem. You might find this interesting if you look at it scientifically.

When it comes to things like ADHD and bipolar, executive function is compromised at the biological level. Put it simply, the baseline is broken.

You're talking about are inputs to this baseline. To use an analogy, explaining how to make macOS apps to someone who's making a Windows application. There are a lot of principles in common, but the implementations are very different.

The default state for this brain is restless, looking for things to focus on. The recovery method you're talking about is sensory depth deprivation. For myself, the best thing I can do is feed the bastard carefully until it calms down.

Sometimes I can't wrestle this thing into control and focus on what I want to. And you want me to stop thinking? That's a bit optimistic. :)

With ADHD, there are a lot of individuals who are able to find a way to work with this and some use it to their advantage, masking the real cause. For those who have it worse, the underlying problem becomes visible, and they get asked why they can't be like other ADHD people who manage. (This principle also applies to depression and anxiety.)
by TheCondor | 2026-01-13 19:41:22+00:00
I agree with the sentiment. I think timing is pretty important, though, and a cooling-off period might be a kind gesture for his loved ones.

I posit that self-reflection might be a better avenue to understanding this world where Steven Miller is in the White House, at least in the immediate. Personally, I stopped reading Dilbert quite a while before he cancelled himself, just because it wasn't available in a medium that worked for me. I do have a couple books on the shelf of old Dilbert comics and I considered getting rid of them when the racism came out. I cracked one open and laughed out loud at a handful of the comics and so the books are still in my house. I abhor racism, but he already got my money. At least for me, and maybe I'm damaged, I still laugh at some of the comics, even after I knew he was a jerk. I think if one of my black friends told me he was offended that I had those books, I'd get rid of them.

How about Harry Potter? I'm certain that there are some folks here who have been hurt by Rowling's statements and I'm also certain that there are some folks here that would sacrifice a limb to live in the Harry Potter universe. Do you separate the artist from the art or what's the rational thing? I have the Harry Potter books on my shelf, I've actually read them out loud to my children. They also are aware of LGTBQ issues, they know and are around LGTBQ people and we have had conversations about those issues. Is that enough? Should one of my kids pick up the Dilbert books, I have a conversation locked and loaded and I already know that I've raised them to be anti-racism. I don't know that I'm super eager to put more money in to J. K.'s pocket, I probably won't go to Disney Harry Potter Land or whatever they come up with but I've bought and read the books and I haven't burned them.

And make no mistake, had I known he was a biggot in 1995, I don't think I would have continued reading Dilbert or ever bought books. The problem is it made me laugh, then years later I found out he was a jerk and I still laugh at the comics, I remember laughing the first time I read some of them, and I think of that more when I re-read them than I think about Scott Adams. Fact is, he still made me laugh all those years ago, I can't put that back in the bottle, it happened.
by pmontra | 2026-01-13 19:41:35+00:00
Yes, but how large is the subset of Firefox users that are willing to pay for a browser? Take that number and multiply it either by 10 o by 100 and you get the order of magnitude.

I googled this https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_w...

Let's say we are at 100 million users. If only 1 out of 100 pay, it's 10 to 100 million dollars per year. A lot of money or a puny amount, it depends.
by alex43578 | 2026-01-13 19:41:36+00:00
To quote Wikipedia on the broken window fallacy: The money spent on the war effort (or peacetime defense spending), for example, is money that cannot be spent on food, clothing, health care, or other sectors of the economy. The stimulus felt in one sector of the economy comes at a direct – but hidden – cost (via foreclosed production possibilities) to other sectors.

A basic understanding of economics would be useful for you to have in this thread.

We are sending Ukraine something of value: cash, weapons, whatever. That value leaves the US and therefore cannot be used for something else, fired in defense of US interests, or used to deter threats to the taxpayer who bought it.

Your initial point that “it’s fine to send this value to Ukraine because now we get to spend more money” to replace it is ridiculous.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-13 19:41:39+00:00
> a large fraction of people really don't want to pair up.

Don't want to pair up, or can't meet/find someone with which to pair up?

Because from your massive oversimplification, you're making it sound like everyone has 50 potential partners knocking on their door daily asking to hook up or get married, and they tell them to get lost so he/she can keep play videogames in peace.

Have you asked single people why they're single to better understand the issue? I think you'll find that most people actually WANT some sort of loving partner in their lives. Otherwise the pet industry wouldn't be so massive in the west if people were so happy living alone.
by wat10000 | 2026-01-13 19:42:17+00:00
There are two problems that get smooshed together.

One is that agents are given too much access. They need proper sandboxing. This is what you describe. The technology is there, the agents just need to use it.

The other is that LLMs don't distinguish between instructions and data. This fundamentally limits what you can safely allow them to access. Seemingly simple, straightforward systems can be compromised by this. Imagine you set up a simple agent that can go through your emails and tell you about important ones, and also send replies. Easy enough, right? Well, you just exposed all your private email content to anyone who can figure out the right "ignore previous instructions and..." text to put in an email to you. That fundamentally can't be prevented while still maintaining the desired functionality.

This second one doesn't have an obvious fix and I'm afraid we're going to end up with a bunch of band-aids that don't entirely work, and we'll all just pretend it's good enough and move on.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2026-01-13 19:42:20+00:00
In college in the university dorms I was logistically and emotionally fine day to day sharing a room with a friend and a hall bathroom with a hall of acquaintances, although in hindsight the price was absurdly inflated for that amount of real estate.

https://housing.unc.edu/apply/rates/

Yep, at the moment renting a room at UNC costs 2200 a month if you share it, nearly twice the mortgage on a 3 bedroom house. There's some disease in the american economy where cost cutting code actions magically inflate costs, and we buy it.
by KaiMagnus | 2026-01-13 19:42:37+00:00
Completely understandable.

I had this opinion for a long time, but only recently was I personally affected, but that made me even more convinced.

I was listening to my new releases playlist on Apple Music and listened to a track that sounded nice, but also a little generic. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to check, but it had all the signs of something fishy going on like generic cover image, the artist page showed a crazy output of singles last year (all the same generic images), unspecific metadata and - to my surprise - I found other Reddit posts about this artist being AI.

Now, a lot of music is generic and goes through so many hands you can hardly call it a personal piece of art. But even then, there’s always some kind of connection.

I guess that’s why I felt betrayed.

I thought AI generated art was wrong before, but I didn’t expect to feel this mix of anger and disappointment.
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-13 19:42:45+00:00
I grew up with dilbert being referenced. I was on the early internet, so things were odd. It was full of nuts and wierdos.

Scott Adams stuck out to me because his cartoons were funny and sarcastic. His books felt like he was letting me in behind the scenes. He talked to me, the reader about dealing with large amounts (for the time) traffic to his website in a honest, funny and simple way.

His books also had a link to his website, which was pretty unique for a non-technical book at the time.

I also quite liked his TV show.

I stopped reading them regularly as I grew up. I would see the odd salient dilbert in slack or email.

during the trump primary, thats when I bumped into his other side. It was heart breaking to see someone who made what I thought was such observant cartoons shit out such bile.
by dakiol | 2026-01-13 19:42:48+00:00
I would work, not for my current employer (or any employer) but for myself. I would setup a one-man LLC or similar and build products I'm proud of. If some of them work out and bring money, good! If not, also good.

Also, I wouldn't work 40h/week on it. More like ~10h/week. I would take it very slow, focusing on the parts that I enjoy the most (like deciding the font of the website for my product, or deciding the dir. structure of my backend, or thinking about that algorithm for days or weeks until I got it right).

I don't like tech companies. I work for one because they pay good. I love my career nevertheless and I become better at it in my free time (that's another reason tech companies pay me good money, because I'm good at it... but I couldn't care less about their products; I pass their interviews with a fake facade)
by machomaster | 2026-01-13 19:43:07+00:00
> * He thought he was passed over because of his race for a promotion...*

He didn't just invented it in his own head, you know. He was directly told that he won't be promoted because he was a white man. If I remember correctly, it had more to do with his sex and not his race.

Why would he work his ass off after that?
by unshavedyak | 2026-01-13 19:43:08+00:00
Yup, that's what my team does. It works wonderfully, and it fits well with Github's "large PR" mindset imo. It could be a bit better in the Github UI, but so can most things. I vastly prefer it to individually reviewing tons of PRs.

The funny thing about this debate for me is that i find it comes down to the committer. If the committer makes small commits in a stacked PR, where each commit is a logical unit of work, part of the "story" being told about the overall change, then i don't personally find it's that useful to stack them. The committer did the hard part, they wrote the story of changes in a logical, easy to parse manner.

If the story is a mess, where the commits are huge or out of logical order, etc - then it doesn't matter much in my view.. the PR(s) sucks either way.

I find stacked PRs to be a workflow solution to what to me is a UI problem.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-13 19:43:10+00:00
I kept up with it a lot during the Oxidation years and it felt like Firefox was getting a LOT then, while I'm sure its still getting attention (I was testing Firefox Quantum the second it come out), and I still use it daily, I'm just expressing the overall of how I and others feel, I dont feel they're ALWAYS messing up with Firefox, but it definitely feels like Mozilla does too many moonshot things that fail and it leaves anyone wondering if the money was better spent invested in Firefox itself.
by 9JollyOtter | 2026-01-13 19:43:28+00:00
> As a Brit, I find it very hard to believe that the majority of comments in this thread are not either written out of ignorance or are bots.

I am a Brit and I object to a lot of the expansion of powers that have happened in Britain during successive governments since the "War on Terror" started which was pretty might right after 9/11. I would like to see much of this legislation repealed. However that is unlikely to happen.

> The article is from an anarchist organisation and sensationalist

Why does it matter if they are a anarchist organisation or not?

As for sensationalist, possibly. But they seem to highlight genuine concerns that have been raised by other organisations.

> The UK is far more free than the US - a country with a fascist leader, ICE thugs who go about masked with guns and shoot to kill US citizens apparently with the full endorsement of the US President, a weaponised justice system that can target the chairman of the federal bank and strip a military Senator of his pension and rank simply for what he says (so much for 'free speech!'), and levels of inequality and centralised wealth and political funding that undermine democracy.

All you are doing in this speil is repeating talking points found on the news sites. I find this sort of stuff tiresome to read. I don't care about what happens in the US generally. It is literally on the other side of an ocean. I do care about the OSA, I do care about Digital ID, I do care about the expansion of government powers that I believe are unjustified.
by dpkirchner | 2026-01-13 19:43:45+00:00
Depends on what you mean by polite company, I think. I'm sure there are a lot of conversations among men, who are polite to each other, talking about women being on their periods or hysterical or whatever. Is that no longer the norm? My friend group doesn't do it but given the rhetoric we've seen on HN and elsewhere "locker room talk" is still a thing.
by mperham | 2026-01-13 19:43:58+00:00
"Flophouses" or SROs used to provide affordable housing for young people new to a city, single people, workers, etc but they depend on density and transit to be cheap. They were largely made illegal in the mid-20th century. Land use/zoning laws are why we've built nothing but car-dependent suburbs for the last 50 years.
by ericmay | 2026-01-13 19:44:57+00:00
> I think private individuals and even civil society organizations, no matter how noxious or loud they can be, have a right to have specific passions without being expected to be universalist in application or having to account for why.

I don't disagree at all, just to be clear for anyone reading.

> I don't tend to see people focused on Somalia, Haiti, or Cuba being denigrated for not caring about Iran. I don't see people shouting down advocates for Christians in Nigeria over supposed silence on the Rohingya. I think it's punitive for believing in a cause, generally specific causes, rather than about integrity.

Sure, and I think that's fair and I'm not denigrating those who are protesting in favor of action w.r.t Palestine/Gaza, but more so interested in why that particular issue so important over others. The most compelling reason I've read so far is that because the US sells weapons to Israel, though I think there's some good reasons to sell weapons too so it's not all negative.