skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Did everybody already forget only a month ago it was revealed Chinese hackers had access to US Treasury computers including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's own?

> I find it strange that neither activists nor politicians nor journalists cared about that enough to make it a continuous news cycle.

Because (a) that was a month ago and that's a long time given recent events. And (b), it's implicit that someone 'inappropriate' having access is a bad thing, but with Trump/Musk/DOGE it's being done on purpose.

It's the purposeful part that's at issue now.

There are people who have reportedly just graduated high school that have root-level access to things:

* https://futurism.com/elon-kids-gutting-opm-doge

Beside being party loyalists, do they have any kind of qualifications?
Better price and better lead time, if achieved, seems like enough differentiation to me, at least to enter the market successfully
People en masse cannot imagine things not within grasp, and policy makers are of no exception. Until we approach mass change it won’t be part of main stream conversations, in part because the actual ramifications are muddled. We don’t really know what will arrive when, or how that will affect the future.

My nanny’s job seems very safe for now. I don’t imagine we’d want a robot raising children for a very, very long time. Mine, well, we’ll see. Gotta be adaptable I suppose!
What is reasoning? What is understanding? Do humans do either? How do you know?
Easy: this is political retribution.

USAID: 0.6% of the budget
CFPB: 0.011% of the budget

It has nothing to do with saving money and is well beyond the executive order than instantiated the agency.

If all they do is disrupt things enough for some crypto dorks and Russians to make a play it was all worth it.
This is the part quite a lot of people seem to not grasp. While there is certainly a portion of them that are regretful and feel misled, a lot of them actively wanted this. The cruelty is the point, the end is the cherry on top.
>> Isn't ada like 40 years old? How have its users not found new languages?

C is more than 50 years old. And yet there are new versions of the C standard that keep the language up to date:

https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/23

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C23_(C_standard_revision)

Ada is about 45 years old. And yet there are new versions of the Ada standard that keep the language up to date:

http://ada-auth.org/standards/ada22.html

The same can be said for FORTRAN and COBOL which both have 2023 standards and are still widely in use.

Programming languages do not age the same way as physical objects. Merely being old does not make them less useful and in many cases the code that was written decades ago still works fine.
I've answered all these questions many times at great length over the last few days. In fact, it feels like I've done little else!

You shouldn't have any trouble finding those explanations, which link to other explanations going back many years, that fully explain how we approach moderating all of this. Here are a couple of fresh starting points:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011

If you read those and follow the links there, and still have a question I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

If you don't have a question, but disagree with how we do it, I respect that, and I respect that quite a few other users share that feeling. But that's not enough to change fundamental moderation principles—for that, I'd need to see a convincing argument proposing better principles. This is certainly possible and would be quite interesting. First, though, anyone who wants to make such a proposal needs to understand what the existing principles are, and what the mandate of the site is. Otherwise we're just talking past each other.

Could you please stop posting off-topic meta threads now?
The discourse around synthetic data is like the discourse around trading strategies — almost anyone who really understands the current state of the art is massively incentivised not to explain it to you. This makes for piss-poor public epistemics.
Apparently 18 years old is old enough to be handed a rifle and sent into war but not access a database.
> Meta believes the dollars at the end of the AI race will be in walled gardens

Will those walls keep AI-generated content out, or will they keep the people outside from accessing the AI-generated content in the garden?

If it's the first, somebody should tell them the slop's already up to their navels and they probably shouldn't be helping people generate more of it.

If it's the second, then the models that supply the content to the garden must have some kind of uniqueness/value, because otherwise you could get identical content from anywhere.

This is a genuine question, because I don't understand the logic here.

(I had assumed it was more like hardware companies funding open source way back when - Commoditize Your Complement).
Oh good catch. Singsong should be in the infilling section. There's a Chinese lab model that does vocal synth but i forget the name of it!
No, the neo-nazis can defend themselves. I just support personal freedoms.
A prefix/suffix for views is maaybe acceptable. But definitely not within database functions and procedures.
> If I write it, they will come. They won’t. There are billions of blog posts out there. The internet is an infinite void, and your blog is a whisper in a hurricane.

Where are the interesting, technical blog posts that nobody is reading? Are they being posted to HN? Someone please point me to them.
i am in an active bookclub that uses a chat group. we collect nominations, vote on the selection, and after about a month we have an online meeting to discuss the book. for that we first vote on which day we want to meet, and then on the time for the meeting on the selected day. so three votes for each book, two of which are the same kind of vote every time. occasionally we also use a vote to find out if people need more time or if everyone is done.

we use wechat for that because most of us are in china, and no other chat platform works for everyone. wechat has mini apps that we can use for voting, but collecting the nominations and setting up the votes each time is a manual and sometimes tedious process.
once we used an external voting app, but there the problem was the lack of integration with the wechat users. we could not tell who already voted, and more importantly people could not tell for themselves if their vote was counted or not.

better integration would be nice. getting everyone off wechat into slack is probably going to be the biggest challenge though. i don't even know if slack works for everyone in china.
I'm not sure about using Nix (the package manager) on other distros/macos, but I remember that when I tried out NixOS years ago, one of the things that struct me was just how little PATH stuff was needed. Literally the only thing in /usr/bin was `env`, and everything else was specific to each given package. My naive expectation would be that most of the stuff to be self-contained, like maybe a single script to `source` per package that could get set up as part of an invocation at the end of a shell config, and that worst case, switching back would be as simple as removing that invocation.
So next time someone says "in cloud you don't need anyone to manage it for you" you can link them this article.
Yeah, except that requires the entire hyperv and constantly running into memory issues.
Wsl1 on the other hand is way too slow on some use case.
I stay with cygwin for common shell, wsl1 for simple linux user space tools, and ssh to a remote system if I need a real Linux.
That is hopeless, but man that's a dumb place to put a pole.
Not necessarily. Other peoples' work can assume what "everyone knows"; starting from first principles can (sometimes) show up where that's the case. That doesn't mean you're not very smart; it means you're aware enough to know that some limitations that aren't real creep in to the body of knowledge of a field.

Or it can be just arrogance. (In fact, even when it's reasonable, it probably also contains some arrogance...)
I could certainly do with one of these given the state of the world. What a lovely idea
Hey, I'm definitely on your side of the Great AI Wars--and definitely share your thoughts on the overall framing--but I think you're missing the serious nature of this contribution:

1. Small correction, it's actually a whole book AFAIK, and potentially someday soon, a class! So there's a lot more thought put in then the typical hot-take blog post. I also pop into one of these guy's replies on Bluesky to disagree on stuff fairly regularly, and can vouch for his good faith, humble effort to get it right (not something to be taken for granted!)

2. RE:“the AI has no ground truth”, I'd say this is true, no matter how often they're empirically correct. Epistemological discussions (aka "how do humans think") invariably end up at an idea called Foundationalism, which is exactly what it sounds like: that all of our beliefs can be traced back to one or more "foundational" beliefs that we either do not question at all (axioms) or very rarely do (premises on steroids?). In that sense, this phrase is simply recalling the hallucination debates we're all familiar with in slightly more specific, long-standing terms; LLMs do not have a systematic/efficient way of segmenting off such fundamental beliefs and dealing with them deliberately. Which brings me to...

3. RE:“can’t reason logically”, again this is a common debate that I think is being specified more than usual here. A lot of philosophy draws a distinction between automatic and deliberate cognition. I give credit to Kant for the best version, but it's really a common insight, found in ideas like "Fast vs. Slow thinking"[1], "first order vs. recursive" thought[2], "ego vs. superego"[3], and--most relevantly--intuition vs. reason.[4] At the very least, it's not a criticism to be dismissed out of hand based on empirical success rates!

4. Finally, RE:“can’t explain how they arrived at conclusions”, that's really just another discussion of point 2 in more explicitly epistemic terms. You can certainly ask o3 to reason (hehe) about the cognitive processing likely to be behind a given transcript, but it's not actually accessing any internal state, which is a very important distinction! o3 would do just as well explaining the reasoning behind a Claude output as it would with one of its own.

Sorry for the rant! I just leave a lot of comments that sound exactly like yours on "LLMs are useless" blog posts, and I wanted to do my best to share my begrudging appreciation for this work.

The title is absurdly provocative, but they're not dismissing LLMs, they're characterizing their weaknesses using a colloquial term -- namely "bullshit" as used for "lying without knowing that you're lying".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
[2] https://www.mit.edu/~dxh/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/pa...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_superego
[4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuition/ , and a flawed but interesting one from Gary Marcus: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/llms-dont-do-formal-reason...
Massena has benefitted heavily from being a town with a flat/declining population and almost no industrial growth. They are entirely beholden to NYPA (also a public utility) for their cheap energy, and unfortunately for them, NYPA has already released a proposed rate change to triple their preferred rates over the next ~5 years.
You missed the second part where article says that "it actually runs much slower than the original version", "wasting two multiplications and one or two additions", based on idea that compiler is unable to do a very basic optimization, implying that compiler compiler will actually multiply by one. No benchmarks, no checking assembly, just straightforward misinformation.
Rubio was a vocal supporter of USAID until he had to bend the knee to Trump and by extension Elon.

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1298330380232200198

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1109221983907184641

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1179134071374598145

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1011667756209573888

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1331037375179452416

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1557806801491578886

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1222876152131457025

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1173664868408483840

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1097238672909451269
This is _exactly_ what overpriced management consultants would have done … the only question is which AI tools are they feeding the data to?
Show HN: LeetCode for Kotlin Interviews
I have given so many interviews in the past 6 months and thought of compiling all the questions asked in a single place. The project just started to grow from there. Everything is free and no login is required as well!
What levels of observability did you have for costs of data transfer and how did you do it?
> And I have NFI how you'd deal with potential malicious changes to your data and backups.

The backups should be stored on WORM tape. They can't be altered (easily or at all?). Of course they're probably wiping their asses with the backups like they are the constitution.
Just as an example, there's some pretty funny AI-assisted memes people pass around. The Harry Potter Balenciaga fashion one was a while ago and an example I remember.

Also, the business doesn't need to be reinvigorated. It is booming and they are investing in places to stack more gains down the road & cement current status, which investors like to see. Many big techs right now are flailing and trying to artificially keep profits up by slashing costs only and not increasing revenue, which dents innovation. Meta is managing to sink money into AR/VR AND AI while seeing big revenue growth.
Code depending on specific low precision is very likely to be so fragile it won't make it anywhere near release.
Somewhere, a hopeful startup founder scribbles furiously in a moleskine notebook.
> Hmm. I am hesitant to engage this post, but it may be well worth to point out, that some of issues with status quo […]

Is one of the issues that an audit log of actions was created? Because it seems to me some of the levels of access given to the DOGE folks mean that auditing and traceability has now gone out the window like a Russian oligarch.

I'm a sysadmin who 'just' runs a bunch of HPC stuff—nothing 'important' like HIPAA or SOX—and even my systems have some level of auditing and logging.
It sounds to me like that short quote is saying (paraphrasing here) that 'studies seems to show omega-3 is beneficial, but theoretically apart from the beneficial mechanisms there could be a harmful mechanism so we're not sure why we don't see that happening'
The last thing we need is a "new republic" designed by someone like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
The country is indeed learning about tech-debt.
You can't spend more fast, but you can always spend more.
I don't see how this is remotely incompatible with the parent. What percentage of the 8am-2am grind, do you think said Elon-tweets take? 1%? Less? What the team is doing during the unpublicized 99% is of more interest to me.
This assumes Putin cares about all that.
Political scientists who study authoritarian regimes are pretty sure the only thing Putin cares about is keeping power. For that, poor population alienated from the world is exactly what is needed.
This is just flame bait without an explanation. The spending data is already public and regularly audited, and if you want to argue kleptocracy you need to start by defining what you mean by that term, who specifically you’re referring to, and what evidence you’re basing that belief on.
Knowing that it might eventually be read by someone, does change the way you approach it
Birdie – Snapshot Testing
He can't touch things like national defense, because that means all his SpaceX and friends' Palantir contracts get exposed for what they are. Cash orders. Once all the smaller hurdles, see CFPB, are out of the way, then the rest of the a16z and Founders Fund clowns will come in with their solution-based ideas shelling their own stupid stocks on how to make America build, dynamic and great. USAID is the lowest-hanging fruit, with everything in plain sight, minimum effort was needed to create maximum distortion. All the peanuts are for him and his gang.
Some for me. I'm a man with a relatively deep voice. The translation was read out by some generic female AI voice.
As with almost everything in medicine, you can find papers both for and against

It doesn’t mean that either paper’s claims or results are automatically invalid

Research is hard
I once saw a manager proudly put on a presentation that her team has a 5:1 ratio of female to male employee, as if it is something to be celebrated.

Nobody raised a concern. Nobody dared to say a single thing about that. And that ratio is unfortunately not rare in that company.

This is a large multinational corp in a highly technical field, as in STEM master and PhD are normal requirements.

That event gave me a shock and made me realize why there is such a huge backlash against the DEI folks these days. It is easy to have a perception of "the pendulum has swung too far" when these things happen often enough.
Cyril and Methodius didn't create Cyrillic. That's a very common misconception. They created the Glagolitic[1] alphabet which was a precursor script. Cyrillic was developed later by their students and other scholars in the Preslav Literary School[2]. They named it Cyrillic to honour the brothers, but the brothers themselves didn't create Cyrillic.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preslav_Literary_School

EDIT: Sorry, I misread what you wrote. It's late and it's been a long day. You weren't saying the brothers created Cyrillic. As for whether they were Greek/Bulgarian I cannot say. I've read different opinions on that throughout the years. Definitely Byzantine, but anything else I cannot say.
FinOps isn't even new (my definition of new is "once you have an O'Reilly book on the topic it is not new anymore").
There are couple of reasons why I blog. Some of them are the typical ones like to reach my audience, to inform about your products or opinions that I have.

But there is one thing that hasn’t been mentioned here yet.

Sometimes I also blog to put something onto the record.

For example, if there’s something really important for me that the company should follow like our open source philosophy.

I blog about it to make sure that people see it and measure us against it. It is basically a way for me to help we stay on our course because we don’t want to break a public record.
I don't believe the POTUS is bound by the government's assessment of an employee's security risk.

Whether or not ignoring such things is a good idea is something voters must judge.
Borrow checking is not the only way to achieve memory safety.
Link? There’s nothing in your bio
CORS has killed a lot of my SPA ideas too. Also I've been toying with Svelte which I was told was a lightweight framework. But you still need npm to use it which generates dozens of other boilerplate files.

The JS ecosystem does indeed suck.
There have never been any grid-scale nuclear power plants in the state of Berlin. I don't see how this statement relates to the prior discussion in any way other than vague geographic proximity.
Norway allows you to see / search almost everyone's personal tax record (including name, birth year, postal code, net income and net wealth). You can do this online here: https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/forms/search-the-tax-lists/
I believe the term is 'patsy' or, more generally, a scapegoat.
When you're the president, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Especially if you're sending someone in to shut down entire departments and freeze communications.
Correct, it's cost both for insurers AND provider organizations. We have an entire team of humans who call insurance companies on the telephone to verify insurance benefits because most insurers make it EXTREMELY difficult to determine benefits in an automated manner because that makes it easier to bill them. They do everything they can to make it difficult for patients to get coverage and for providers to collect. We're actually working with an AI company to build a tool that uses AI and lots of data to predict with better accuracy benefit coverage. All because insurers want barriers to treatment to lower their costs.
Are you hosting this on residential internet? I think that's probably the main drawback.

I host these types of things on a single vps - actually I have a few projects on one vps using different domains, so if you amortize the cost, it's probably $5/mo per - the total vps being around $20/mo although it has less compute than you'd have here, it is in a datacenter which I like.

They are mostly idle and you can run the webapp, nginx, and db all on the same host without any problem.
Generated code for RDNA 1:

https://shader-playground.timjones.io/5d3ece620f45091678dcee...
OnePlus 13 and Oxygen OS 15 Accessibility: Persistent Challenges for Blind Users
it all mirrors the Twitter takeover (fetishizing "hardcore coders", micromanagement, randomly breaking or cancelling things), so this might just be how Elon Musk approaches things.
> And if you need a "FinOps" team to manage your cloud cost,

somehow i misread that as "massage your cloud costs", and it.. sticks..
Killing a Bad Strategy Before It Kills You
Better targetting

Better moderation (to the extent they still care)

Generation of AI slop for the sheep to feed on

Use of AI is really core to their business, so understandable they want to build it themselves, but not so clear why they want to "open source" (weights) it other than to harm companies like OpenAI
So roads are also socialism?

Privatisation of utilities has been fairly disastrous in the UK. I understand what you're saying but they're natural monopolies who have limited scope for innovation. They literally aren't really any different to roads or 'sidewalks'.

Probably the safest industry to put in the hands of the state, if you're going to do it.
I recognize that people use this shorthand often and am not really trying to hold _you_ responsible, but it has never made any sense to me.

We generally mean an asterisk as a glob wildcard, and *nix definitely doesn't match Linux. There are vanishingly few operating systems whose names match this glob, and all of the ones I'm aware of are either true UNIXes or Unix-likes.

One of my favorite examples of this precision-be-damned absurdity is from the wiki page for Unix-like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix-like):

> Other parties frequently treat "Unix" as a genericized trademark. Some add a wildcard character to the name to make an abbreviation like "Un*x"[2] or "*nix", since Unix-like systems often have Unix-like names such as AIX, A/UX, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, Minix, Ultrix, Xenix, and XNU.

Of these, zero match `Un*x` and only "Minix" and "Xenix" match `*nix`.

If we want to talk about the category of OS that includes both UNIXes and Linux, I wish we'd just call them Unix-like :)
Did you try https://github.com/numtide/nix-gl-host/ to help with nix & opengl drivers on non-nixos distros?
How to Achieve Immortality
The Secret Museum of Mankind
AI make stock go up.

I think this is it. I'm kicking myself for not going harder, but I was very much into LLMs/ML back in 2019, had I not given up I might have a startup right now.

I'd need like 70k and a minimum of 6 months, but I still have a few ideas for AI driven startups.
I was the biggest meta naysayer given they've never realeased an original product till date. But there is no denying that they have money tree in the ads business.
My Trip to Quit Sugar Became a Journey into Hell