skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Author assumes contribution data from wp engine is distorted simply because they don't agree with Matt's communication / response from the trademark dispute. That doesn't seem to fair?

If they worked there for that long perhaps they can provide insight into the upstreaming of issues strategy or if it was an org focus or an afterthought?
Ask HN: How to deal with AI generated sloppy code
So this is something for my fellow hackers.

I run a successful tech business and I also consult others who want to start their own businesses.

Now this is a problem I'm seeing other tech CEOs start doing which is use AI to have the code written for them by either using some sort of editor plugin or by using something like Cursor.

The problem is that the code that is generated is usually humongous. There is just huge amounts of types and indirection and functions, calling functions and doing all sorts of nonsense which can be done manually, much simpler with fewer lines of code.

This is creating huge amounts of AI-generated slop.

Now when I come in to consult some of these tech architectures it takes me a really long time to figure out how to improve things because there is so much of indirection in the code base and the more troubling thing is that there are errors hidden in the architecture which earlier I would easily find out, but now it requires me to go through every single line of code.

In some of the worst cases, there have been bugs which have taken down their system and then they come and blame me for not being able to find it.

This is the same problem that I had with Java shops. A lot of Java programmers immediately start using a lot of classes and objects because they had for a very long time superior tooling and IDEs.

My theory is that Java is actually a pretty reasonable good language but because there is such easy tooling and easy autocomplete you can almost always increase the huge web of classes and objects because you can immediately reach for them by pressing a dot.

Now take that and increase it like 10x with all of this AI generated code. The medium is what influences what the code generated or written is.

So how are you all handling this problem? Do you find this to be a big problem in the code bases that you see?

It's also hard to tell them not to use AI because the code does work. I would say even most of the times the code does work.

But it's just written in the worst possible manner and maintaining it long term is going to be so much harder if instead they had just handwritten the code.
It’s a really common mistake, and IMO an easily excusable one.
Actually humans are much worse in this regard. The top performer on my team had a divorce and his productivity dropped by like a factor of 3 and quality fell of a cliff.

Another example from just yesterday is I needed to solve a complex recurrence relation. A friend of mine who is good at math (math PhD) helped me for about 30 minutes still without a solution and a couple of false starts. Then he said try ChatGPT and we got the answer in 30s and we spent about 2 minutes verifying it.
Matt hasn’t made any claims that need a rebuttal. Matt’s claims are factually correct. The issue is that they’re immaterial. Matt has demanded that WPEngine pay 8% of their revenue to Matt’s company (Automattic). Matt has retroactively changed the terms of use of the WordPress trademark to create a violation by WPEngine. Matt has engineered the situation, we can’t separate the claims from the conduct because they’re one and the same.

Matt’s position is (ostensibly) based on his hard line views about the moral obligation to contribute created through the use of open-source. The trademark sideshow is based on Matt’s understanding that a moral argument isn’t going to convince a private equity backed company to spend money they don’t need to spend. Matt believes WPEngine has a moral obligation to contribute and the trademark licensing fee is the easiest tool he has to force action.

Matt is making a moral argument. WPEngine don’t care because they’re driven by money not morals.
Humanoids are not a threat to anyone. Not from China and not from anywhere. They'll fall flat on their face, all by themselves.
A rip off of LLMs and loras. Wrapping it in a shiny sounding name for the normies doesn't mean they contributed anything to the space.
I wonder if this will escalate to fights over trademarking "Ultra Hero" or other superlatives next.
I didn’t get the Covid vaccine because of all the medical research fraud I’ve witnessed as a grad student.

Remember things like this the next time you try to mandate injections with no long term research.
This is a wonderfully insightful comment, I’d not heard of many of the points you raised.

As someone coming from the PoW worlds of Bitcoin and Monero there has always been something about PoS that gave me an ick, but I could never quite place my finger on it. Especially when Ethereum clearly seems to have PoS working well in practice. I’ve always had a suspicion that Ethereum could have never gotten off the ground, at least to the success level it currently has, if it had been PoS initially.

The mechanics of slashing not working are interesting. Do we know of any abuse attempts by validators and have we seen any validators get slashed yet?

Your point about PoS not being truly permissionless is a big one for me. Aside from it being fundamentally opposed to the core promises of cryptocurrencies, what’s to stop TPTB from slowly accumulating enough of a stake and then bam, we’re back to the legacy permissioned finance ecosystem but with MUCH more fine-grained tracking and telemetry. That seems like an extremely pernicious attack.

The point about trust is another big one. Cryptocurrencies are meant to be trustless. That means a user doesn’t need to trust anyone else as they can fully validate their view of the world for themselves. Of course they may trust other participants for efficiency, but they don’t need to. And caveat emptor, as with all distributed systems you must assume (trust) that you are not currency inside a partitioned network, since AFAIK there is no way a system can internally verify that it is not.

How much these things matter in practice only time will tell. Ethereum appears to be working well at the moment and just keeps chugging along.

I’d like to see more work put into finding ways to utilize the work from PoW. For example I have an idea to use Monero’s CPU-favoring PoW for PoW based DDoS protection as seen in Tor [0]. When a user accesses a website they are given a PoW challenge to complete. This challenge is actually for a share of mining rewards as in P2Pool. The mining reward share would go to the website operator. This would harmoniously improve several things about the web.
First, it would help protect websites against layer-7 DDoS attacks.
Second, this L7 DDoS protection reduces the webs dependence on companies such as Cloudflare, the internets biggest man-in-the-middle.
Third, it provides a way to pay website owners costing the users a small amount of their computers time and energy in much the same way as ads do currently.
Fourth, it reduces the webs dependence on advertising as the way to fund your website.
Fifth and finally, it helps secure the web-native currency in which website operators would be paid and which others can use for whatever they want.

I think such a solution would be truly beautiful.

0: https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-proof-of-work-defens...
> The Manhattan project was a government project that was run like a startup.

Run directly by the government employees, and directly hiring the nessesary people to work for the government. today we would call that socialist or some such, opposite of startup?

> If such a project happened today, academic scientists would be trying to figure out ways to bend their existing research to match the grants

You missed important step- such a project today would start by the government handing out grants, stimulus and tax breaks. If they directly hired the nessesary people, there would be no fighting for grants. People do what incentives demand
Yeah I might be getting a lot of excitement out of all these games now but I could do without the losses.

Maybe time to quit?
I think this is the incident referenced in WhatIf's exploration of how long you could swim in a nuclear reactor's spent fuel pool.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
"WordPress powers 43.5% of all websites as their CMS. Around 478 million websites are built on WordPress" Thanks to Matt Mullenweg's leadership and now you want him removed because he has flaws?

Let me guess you want another Mark Zuckerberg in there?

What's wrong with you people? He needs a stern talking to, not complete removal. This is another re-occuring case of "create hero, destroy hero" where the public likes to build someone up, find a flaw with them, act like they are irredemable, act like you're so distraught and hurt by their behavior, cry your tears, and destroy the hero you once celebrated.
In the Prime interview it sounded like there were attempts in the past to ensure the trademark was not violated and he expressed the feeling like they were stringing him along. If he had only hired lawyers, not made that talk with his accusations, and let the lawyers handle it would more people be on his side?
It's been decided conclusively, but it is also relatively rare in a practical sense. Trademark law requires the owner to protect their trademark to avoid dilution or genericide, which occurs when a trademark becomes so common it loses its distinctiveness (like what happened with "Aspirin" or "Escalator").

Not a lawyer, but talked about it at length with a trademark attorney when having to defend over the years. It was conveyed that if we aren't willing to legally defend a mark, we could potentially lose it.
That's an interesting perspective. We tend to make judgments based on what's possible today, not twenty years from now (obviously, there are exceptions, like privacy). So it's easy to fall into sloppiness and not expect consequences. Maybe there's a lesson here...
When electricity was first brought to people's homes, it wasn't something that could be easily produced in the home either.

This is an analogy, not a formula. And a great aspiration for a company that until recently was at the forefront of its industry.
My career has been in this space (medical research, not neuroscience) and I honestly cannot fathom how this happened. I don't understand how a researcher can wake up one day, manipulate data, and then show it to others. I feel bad for everyone's time that was wasted in building off this research, likely other's careers were chartered based on the basis of this research. What a shame.
Massively training LLMs in hoping they would magically turn intelligent is questionable. I hope I am wrong and nothing is wasted. Only time will tell
Goofy cartoon but I always thought it was very cleverly done in parts. The laugh followed by "fuck life is actually like that" aftertaste.
Every organization I’ve worked for has been able to change policies at will. I’ve written them for half a dozen. I don’t particularly like writing policies but if you do you’ll be able to remove the absurd and broken parts.
The problem is that’s what people do. And everyone else has to pay for it.
I will concede that my remark about a “smear campaign” is worthless or detrimental to the discussion.

1. The author claims dozens of other companies behave similarly and claims that Matt has not taken any action against them. However, the author makes no claim of what level of contribution to WordPress, cost to Wordpress.org, or any contractual agreements those companies may have with WordPress entities. Multiple companies do pay for trademark licenses. Scale is also an important factor here. Estimates are in the hundreds of millions of revenue for WP Engine. They are one of the largest companies in the ecosystem, of course they should be contributing more than smaller players.

2. The author claims that Matt attempted “extortion” and refused to give WP Engine more time to address his demands. It does seem true that Matt refused to give them more time. However, Matt claims this conversation has been going on for more than a year. A deadline seems appropriate if your counterparty keeps delaying.

3. The author claims that trademark confusion between WordPress and WP Engine is an unfounded concern, citing confusion Shopify and Spotify. This is ludicrous on its face, those companies serve completely different market needs, compared to the WP Engine literally offering the product produced by the trademark holder. The author claims that WordPress.com and WordPress.org is confusing the trademark, but doesn’t state whether WordPress.com has a license to use the trademark.

4. The author claims that Matt’s dissatisfaction with WP Engine’s contribution is unreasonable because there aren’t terms and conditions or a contract. This is missing the point entirely. The point is that good members of the community shouldn’t need to be forced to contribute. If they want to play by the letter of the law, Matt isn’t obligated to provide the free services that their business relies on, just as they aren’t obligated to give back. It cuts both ways, and if they won’t operate in good faith, it is self destructive to continue to enable them.

I’m out of energy to continue, so I’ll stop here.
The chips and cheese number feels like an all-in number; get a timestamp, do a memory read (that you know will not be served from cache), get another timestamp.

The anandtech article is latencies for parts of a memory operation, between the memory controller and the ram. End to end latency is going to be a lot more than just CAS latency, because CAS latency only applies once you've got the proper row open, etc.
Do you think WordPress is diluted? It definitely doesn’t seem to generically refer to blogging or website building software. It seems to me that even WP Engine isn’t diluting it, they’re hijacking it.
In a startup—especially one that is heavily funded, like a government—roadblocks that can be resolved by eliminating paperwork, cutting through bureaucracy, or simply by paying money, tend to disappear.

No serious person can argue this being plausible today. Sam Altman will drop 10B at a blink of an eye if it means unblocking a major problem for OpenAI.

The government spends 10x that all of the time without anything impressive to speak of since the moon landing.
that seems like a very poor allocation of engineer resources.
You can run JS in Excel now too though, I believe? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/referen...
They do a ton with Azure anyway. Makes sense.
That's not the complaint that Matt made against them, though. His complaint in public is all about trademarks and revisions, but then when they sent him a cease and desist asking him to cut it out he decided to cut them off of the plugins store to hit their customers (who are WordPress users).
I was looking for something like this, freken sick. gonna integrate it into intellinotes.co
I don’t know how much gambling is going on in minor leagues. In major leagues it’s a lot.
Because profits.
Which is not the promise of blockchain's hype artists. "Better than using Venezuelan bolivars" is not a high bar.
It just displays an image c
Is this mitigated by time to get between states?
Im quite good at writing pieces of code but if the application gets sufficently complex i tend to attack the problem by rewriting things in a circle. Sometimes complexity puts me in an infinite loop of rewrites. That this is an entirely different skill is quite the eye opener. Its now a known unknown if you like. Thanks!
They seem to execute JS locally in the browser. Google Sheets makes a network call for this, which results in a laggy experience. I ran into this while I was developing my own Google Sheets add-on [1] which allows inline definition of JS within Sheets but the lag makes the UX subpar.

[1]: https://www.evaljs.net/
Unrelated, but that site is so much better than their current one.

Now I finally know what they do and offer!
Piece of a fission reactor became radioactive due to neutron bombardment.

Lost track of this radioactive piece in the pool, found it by accident, zap!

Neutrons make hardware radioactive.

Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion (not fission) reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion (not fission) reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays.

If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we will need in our lifetimes.

Quoting John Carmack: "Deuterium fusion would give us a cheap and basically unlimited fuel source with a modest waste stream, but it is an almost comically complex and expensive way to generate heat compared to fission, which is basically 'put these rocks next to each other and they get hot'."
Firefox sez:

Uncaught runtime errors:

ERROR

window.$hsOverlayCollection is undefined

850/</<@https://intellinotes.co/scripts/preline.js:89:10223

850/<@https://intellinotes.co/scripts/preline.js:89:10516

ERROR

window.$hsOverlayCollection is undefined

850/</<@https://intellinotes.co/scripts/preline.js:89:10223

850/<@https://intellinotes.co/scripts/preline.js:89:10516

ERROR

window.$hsOverlayCollection is undefined

850/</<@https://intellinotes.co/scripts/preline.js:89:10223

850/<@https://intellinotes.co/scripts/preline.js:89:10516
WP has emerged as a de facto standard, but there were alternatives before, and there will be alternatives to come.
Do you know what exponential means? They might be getting getting but it hardly seems exponential at this stage.
> Even your description sounds like a dtartup
There was a hook to get the funding (easy to get weapons funding in wartime

Huh? Decision was made by the president Roosevelt, advised by government agencies and even Albert einstein.

This is like top-down, command economy with elements of technocracy. There are no investors, no markets, etc.
Wayback link seems to only show the first slide without an option to move forward.
There is nothing "source" about the "open source models" that companies typically release. The use of the term "open source" is deliberate marketing BS. If you want to argue there's a difference between software and a model, then don't use software terms that are already well-defined to refer to some property of the model.

https://opensource.org/osd
I cannot agree more.

I also want to add that I hate these "project generators" such as create-react-app when I'm just getting started. (It's just an example: I'm glad I learned React long before its existence.) They create an opinionated folder structure with template files and preconfigured tools. I don't function well in this model: if I don't immediately have a high-level overview of what the created files do, why they are created this way, I just become uneasy at all this magic that I do not understand. Each time a new thing is introduced, I need a high-level introduction covering its purpose that relates to the concepts I already know. I'm not comfortable dealing with magical black boxes unless I have at least a rudimentary understanding of the main interface of that black box.

To put this back into the concrete example, it means that hypothetically if I were to be learning create-react-app from scratch, I would immediately begin to investigate the purposes of the tools that have been configured by it, like Babel and ESLint.
I like AI… for me it’s a great way of getting the ‘average’ of a broad array of answers to a single question but without all the ads I would get from googling and searching pages.
For example, when searching for times to cook or grams of sugar to add to my gallon of iced tea…or instant pot cooking times.

For more technical things STEM related it’s a good way to get a base line or direction; enough for me to draw my own conclusions or implementations…it’s like a rubber ducky I can talk to.
> He needs a stern talking to, not complete removal.

He's getting one from his customers.
Those questions esp 1, 3, 5 sound almost like therapy. Maybe CBT, ACT?

Good orgs would ask at all 5 in every power gradient direction: so peers, managers, ICs, execs ... although not for everything as you would grind to a halt!
Nice, now lets see Paul Allen's web server.
I realized a few weeks ago that broadcast TV had at least one useful advantage over streaming - you don't have the option to pause it, and that makes it much easier to maintain attention.
"apparently has no proof in writing" sounds like there are emails and what not. But those should come out as the lawsuit progresses. Just because he didn't make any public now doesn't mean they don't exist.
Keep in mind that most of star trek was following the federation and the like. I've always considered them mostly the idealized versions of society or also workaholics and people who genuinely enjoying working as their past time.

I feel back on their main planets the regular folks probably did a lot more random entertainment
Please do clarify why LLMs aren't generalized - other than not being embodied, they seem quite general to me. Is there any particular reasoning task that you have in mind that chimpanzees are good at, but LLMs are incapable of?
Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption
I would never have guessed the term was trademarked. It seems far too generic.

And if it was granted in the late 60s, that’s what 30 years after Superman? Shouldn’t it have been common by then?
It was 1975ish, so a bit more than 30 years ago but Hudson’s Bay sounds right to me. That store was a much bigger deal in the 1970’s. My family always had their blankets kicking around.
Did you google "fraud in physics" or "fraud in chemistry"? (I just did.)

> Exaggerated claims occur, but much less than in day to day life.

"Day-to-day life" does not lay the foundation for millions of dollars in followup research, or set the direction of a grad student's research, i.e. their career.

> Reproduction is the essence of science.

Did you read OP's link to the Science article?
There are plenty of people who have their own voice that is between "soulless corporation" and "watch it all burn"…
This one really rubbed me the wrong way: https://ma.tt/2024/09/charitable-contributions/

> I have kept my personal philanthropy private until now.

> This is something I’ve tried to keep quiet, because true philanthropy isn’t about recognition.

...

> If Lee Wittlinger, who controls Silver Lake’s investments in the WordPress ecosystem, or Heather Brunner, the CEO of WP Engine, would like to publish their charitable contributions over the past 12 years, they are welcome to do so.

Is he trying to avoid turning charity into a pissing contest, or is he trying to use his affluence to shame a competitor? This guy literally can't keep his story straight over the course of a single blog post.
But I think that quote is a pretty gross mischaracterization of the parent comment.

I similarly am a big fan of Cursor. But I don't "turn [my] thinking over to machines". Even though I review every piece of code it generates and make sure I understand it, it still saves me a ton of time. Heck, some of the most value I get from Cursor isn't even it generating code for me, it's getting to ask questions about a very large codebase with many maintainers where I'm unfamiliar with large chunks. E.g. asking questions like "I would like to do X, are there any places in this codebase that already do this?"

I'm also skeptical of LLMs ever being able to live up to their hype ("AGI is coming sooooon!!!!"), but I still find them to be useful tools in context that can save me a lot of time.
We'll have to see how this compared to Zen 5 once 24H2 drops.

And once more than like three Zen 5 laptops come out.