skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is exactly what assert() does, so literally any C library that contains an assert() can produce a nonrecoverable error.

GP's point is that most libraries will not even assert(), but instead just assume the invariant holds and proceed accordingly, resulting in UB. And it is, of course, infeasible for a library to constantly test for invariants holding at every single point in the program. So in practice you have to assume that a library breaking its internal invariants is going to UB. If library dev added some asserts to this, they are doing you a favor by making sure that, at least for some particular subset of broken invariants, that UB is guaranteed to be a clean abort rather than running some code doing god knows what.
Needs more work.

>> Right now, the YesNoError website contains many false positives, says Nick Brown, a researcher in scientific integrity at Linnaeus University. Among 40 papers flagged as having issues, he found 14 false positives (for example, the model stating that a figure referred to in the text did not appear in the paper, when it did). “The vast majority of the problems they’re finding appear to be writing issues,” and a lot of the detections are wrong, he says.

>> Brown is wary that the effort will create a flood for the scientific community to clear up, as well fuss about minor errors such as typos, many of which should be spotted during peer review (both projects largely look at papers in preprint repositories). Unless the technology drastically improves, “this is going to generate huge amounts of work for no obvious benefit”, says Brown. “It strikes me as extraordinarily naive.”
Crap article with zero insight that wasn't worth my time.

There are better ways to argue the same position but it's probably indefensible.

Neural networks are fundamentally approximators, both when they are approximating long-range relations between concepts (like LLMs do) or when they denoise some noise for images. They approximate thought and intelligence, because we have coded it in our writings. Our writings are a complete fingerprint of the thought process, because we are able to pick up
any thought process from a book, without ever seeing or otherwise having contact with the author. Therefore there is an increasingly more high-fidelity "real thought" in there.

> that in and of itself is a monumental achievement but there is no real thought involved.

Pretty much anything that requires our current level of thought is therefore reachable with ANNs now that we know how to train them in depth and width.

The real question is whether this is enough. We want ASI, but our texts only have AGI, and everything that comes from biology (including intelligence) is logarithmic in scale. There is zero evidence that language models will ever learn to create abstract entities better than any collection of humans do. AI companies are advertising armies of PhD students, but we already have millions of PhD students , yet our most pressing problems have not made a lot of progress for decades. That's what should be worrying to us, not the fact that we will all lose our jobs.
Cloud init/Cloud config is a standard way to provision Linux hosts. It is slowly being outcompeted by Ignition and the friends, though.
This looks like a neat idea, but I'm not too positive about it.

This makes using computers even harder to explain to people who do not spend their entire day keeping up with the latest developments. They cannot form a mental image or reuse any memory of what will happen next, because it is all context dependent.

On the other end of the spectrum, for power users, dynamically adapting user interfaces can also be quite annoying. One can't type ahead, or use shortcut keys, because one doesn't know what the context will be. Having to wait any positive amount of time for feedback is limiting.

Then again, there are probably tons of places where this is useful. I'm just a bit disappointed that we (as a society) haven't gotten the basics covered: programming still requires text files that can be sent to a matrix printer, and the latency of most applications is increasing instead of decreasing as computers become faster.
Sit in a VW Golf for a minute and then tell me more about how premium Tesla is. It is bizarre how polished the ergonomics and interior fit and finish is, especially given the price.
I totally buy the consciousness bit. I mean why did people even need to dive deep into "philosophical" discussions when there's nothing wrong with "a conscious horse" vs "an unconscious horse" in the first place which is a dead simple distinction? Sometimes an unconscious horse is just a horse without consciousness.
I think Rust could use some syntax improvements for pointer manipulation. It has suffix .await, so maybe the community is ready for suffix .* for dereference now too. Visually scanning left and right, along with the extra parentheses, makes pointer-based code in Rust worse than C++ almost. A fully left-to-right syntax would be amazing. EDIT: found https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/10011 and https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3577
I think there is room for innovative presentations/visualizations, but yeah, I have to agree this one just misses the mark. Between the various transitions and fades it takes an annoying amount of time to navigate between pages. The 3D transitions between scenes are flashy but, again, slow and don't really add anything. And they went to all this effort of getting 3D models of the inside, but your camera is fixed in place and can barely even rotate around? And you can't zoom? So all you get is a blurry, murky view. A standard photo album would genuinely have been better.

The 360-degree view from the top is cool, though.

For anyone else who was mostly curious to see the interior shots, Jeff Geerling has a great pair of videos where he and his father go inside a similar broadcast site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_u8x8V4YYs
Screen readers do actual B/I fine. Unless I’m missing something, the case here is using math symbols in place of B/I where the platform doesn’t allow native styling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces

The stories you are talking about, also known as The Monomyth, have been part of every recorded culture and civilization.

It seems that the Chosen One stuff is not a result of stories. It is a fundamental part of our species and that is reflected in our most popular stories. From ancient times all the way to today.
I mean the price is but the fit and finish is offensively bad for the money vs a BMW/Merc/Lexus/Volvo.
Christie's AI art auction outpaces expectations, bringing in more than $728,000
Doesn't Kagi Search just regurgitate Google's search results?
You can't generalize the EU. It are dozens of completely different countries.

> In fact, all the amazing software engineers I know in Europe.. work for US companies, making US software products (and making US total comp).

What is an amazing software developer if it is not someone who delivers business value? Because there are a lot of software development companies in the Netherlands for instance, or teams part of companies, and they surely deliver business value or they wouldn't exist.

By now I would also bet that of the small subset of developers considering emigrating to the States, sure think they've now dodged a bullet.
I didn't have a good term so I went with "API layer" (not merely "API"), but, to try to clarify... that's what you also get with SOAP/WSDL or any of the other numerous attempts over the years to build an API "layer" thing: you can use the one universal SDK you have, plus only the schema / IDL, to use the API. Every time people try to describe MCP it just sounds like yet another API description language when we already have a giant drawer of those that never really worked out, including OpenA"P"I (lol ;P).

https://www.openapis.org/

Regardless, again: if the AI is so smart, and it somehow needs something akin to MCP as input (which seems silly), then we can use the AI to take, as input, the human readable documentation -- which is what we claim these AIs can read and understand -- and just have it output something akin to MCP. The entire point of having an AI agent is that it is able to do things similar to a software developer, and interfacing with a random API is probably the most trivial task you can possible do.
Yeah I just removed redis from my php app. It runs slightly slower but not enough that my user would notice. Redis was overkill
> That would mean that all invariants are either assumed true

What, exactly, is the benefit of assuming the invariant holds without checking it, over checking and aborting if it's not true? In the first case, you're likely to segfault anyway, just at some later point, making it harder to locate the point at which invariant was actually broken - and that's the best case. Worst case, you'll silently compute and return the wrong result based on garbage data.
But you could trust a $3 drug-store checkout isle slim wallet calculator (with solar panels for recharging) to perform those calculations and you'd get more nines of reliability from that calculator than the LLM. And it didn't cost hundreds of billions of dollars to develop the calculator, so you won't end up paying thousands of dollars for it.

That LLMs cannot beat a $3 calculator is because they're not fit for purpose. Everything they offer is a hallucination. Just because that fabrication matches with reality some of the time does not make it good. Reliability matters and these things just don't have it.
atheists like Simony are almost as good as believers
Sorry but I'm extremelly annoyed with this idiotic take that many people seem to have. Is it that easy to prompt AI to write code and call an API predictably?
i suppose that links back to the other comment i made - is hype the root issue you are trying to get at?

would be interesting to see what examples there are of this in recent history
Medium does the inverse of this, but sort of the same idea. Content creators are rewarded money from a pool of subscription revenue based on community involvement. I think rewarding good content is more powerful than some barrier to entry.
https://millionshort.com/ might be the search engine you are looking for.
I saw you were downvoted and could not understand why, so I'm both upvoting and replying. This is all correct. MCP is, realistically speaking, the extension API for Claude Desktop and Cursor. It's really cool if you do want to extend those apps, but that's all it's for. The article in this case is really confusing and unnecessary.
kids these days, right?
Everything is fine. America and Russia have always been allies. War is peace. Flag and move on to a technical story.
> why should he lie about something like that?

Nobody's that naive.
So long as they don't build the models to rely on earlier papers, it might work. Fraudulent or mistaken earlier work, taken as correct, could easily lead to newer papers which disagree or don't use the older data as wrong/mistaken. This sort of checking needs to drill down as far as possible.
Alibaba and ByteDance have both successfully broken out.
https://archive.ph/nzJ0I
I don't know if they still do it, but I loved my old Saab 99 with the ignition switch in the console between the front seats. Intead of locking the steering, it locked the gearshift in reverse. It didn't make anything work better, but it made the end user experience feel different/special.
Very convincing quote.
Rust panics are pretty much exceptions under a different name. You can even "catch" the object passed to panic!().

The main difference is that with exceptions, they always unwind. With panics, the person building the binary can decide whether the panic should unwind or immediately abort.
I don't think one day in solitary quite counts as torture. Obviously longer term it is, but one day is hyperbolic.
Palmer Luckey Gets His Moment
Thanks for this, I still provision with a bash script.
You somehow must be able to, as everyone I know has feeds full of that sort of thing, and I've never seen even one short or game on my youtube home page.
https://archive.ph/QUtNn
The distinction from human thinking and what the current AI hype cycle calls "thinking" is that all the machine model is doing is outputting the most probable text patterns based on its training data. We can keep adding layers on top of this, but that's all it ultimately is. The machine has no real understanding of what the text it's outputting means or what that text represents in the real world. It can't have an intuitive grasp of these concepts in the same way that a human with our 5 senses can gather over our lifetime.

This is why it's disingenuous to anthropomorphize any process of the current iteration of machine learning. There's no thinking or reasoning involved. None.

This isn't to say that this technology can't be very useful. But let's not delude ourselves thinking that we're anywhere close to achieving AGI.

"Arguing" about this topic with an LLM is pointless.
MCP is not that hard to understand why does it keep getting the wackiest comparison?
> just because it accelerates their hack project, it won't accelerate someone who's an expert.

I would say that this is the wrong distinction. I'm an expert who's still in the code every day, and AI still accelerates my hack projects that I do in my spare time, but only to a point. When I hit 10k lines of code then code generation with chat models becomes substantially less useful (though autocomplete/Cursor-style advanced autocomplete retains its value).

I think the distinction that matters is the type of project being worked on. Greenfield stuff—whether a hobby project or a business project—can see real benefits from AI. But eventually the process of working on the code becomes far more about understanding the complex interactions between the dozens to hundreds of components that are already written than it is about getting a fresh chunk of code onto the screen. And AI models—even embedded in fancy tools like Cursor—are still objectively terrible at understanding the kinds of complex interactions between systems and subsystems that professional developers deal with day in and day out.
Are you assuming the people crafting remedies haven't thought of this? You should tell them immediately!!! LOL. of course they've thought through that and will have a "you can't just rebuild it" clause in the remedy. This isn't hard unless you're trying to make it hard and I'm not sure why anyone would want to do that except to side with Big Tech over consumers trying to muddy the waters and convince others it's all just too darned hard to do anything about so we should let our betters in Big Tech continue dictating our lives.
It began with a rabbit: Unraveling the mystery of memory
My take on what the issue is, is primarily in the ramifications of Conway's law and how our social structures map to systems.

When the system is small, it makes a great deal of sense to be an artisan and design simple automations that work for exactly that task, which for the most common things is always supported by any production-oriented programming environment - there's a lot of ways in which you can't go wrong because the problem is so small relative to the tools that any approach will crush it. "Just get it done" works because no consequence is felt, and on the time scale of "most businesses fail within five years", it might never be.

When it's large, everyone would prefer to defer to a common format and standard tools. The problems are now complex, have to be discussed and handled by many people, they need documentation and clear boundaries on roles and responsibilities. But common formats and standards are a pyramid of scope creep - eventually it has to support everyone - and along the way, monopolistic organizations vie for control over it in hopes of selling the shovels and pickaxes for the next gold rush. So we end up with a lot of ugly compatibility issues.

In effect, the industry is always on this treadmill of hacking together a simple thing, blowing out the complexity, then picking up the pieces and reassembling them into another, slightly cleaner iteration.

Maintenance can be done successfully - there are always examples of teams and organizations that succeed - but like with a lot of infrastructure, there's an investment bias towards new builds.
In that sense perhaps he was more similar to someone like Hitler, that’s true. But the amount of content he published hardly related to his actual actions. He was a power seeking pragmatist above all else (ideological concerns were usually secondary).
Already happened. With predictable results.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Y7QPXzDmloI?embeds_referring_...
This? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
Has any company ever truly believed that outsourcing their customer service to India would improve the experience for their customers? No, but they did it anyway, because it cut costs. AI can be obviously worse than humans and still put them out of work, because GPUs are much cheaper than people.
> ... includes a reference to an article in the Bulletin de l’Institut français du Caire. But the author points out that the article is actually in the Bulletin de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale. Whoops! 0x$1.00 for you!

I do wonder whether this is more likely to be a case where the journal actually changed its name over time (perhaps because the Institut itself did) and then made the older papers available under the new name - which would mean both references are ultimately correct.
To greatly oversimplify, the first 4 Discworld books are about fantasy. The ones after that are about other subjects, using the fantasy world of Discworld as a vehicle. And Pratchett really does this masterfully.
I had one. IMO they were crap, and died out for good reason. Cheap, but not good value because you never wanted to use one if you could avoid it.
If you think an LLM is unfit for purpose, try getting a calculator to write poetry.
there is scary, as in physicaly dangerous
and then there is scarry, as in I cant stand looking at media any more, scary
and scary as in my job is threatened
or the price fixing scams have unhomed you
or the app that provided my job leads, has been super optimised, and is no longer viable
and scary as , all of the above can be ignored
, defended, as the app "just did it defence"
with no one liable for the abuses, scary
I caught my fish! Thank you :-)
A good example of valid use of catch_unwind() would be for a desktop app to try to save a copy of any unsaved in-memory state before it crashes for good. Since invariants are already broken, it might or might not work, and may possibly save some garbage data, but it is much better than saving nothing at all.

The one common thing for all such patterns is that they happen at or near the topmost layer of the app (e.g. around the main loop for GUI apps, or around the request handler for web apps).
I had a quick look, that "deploy" user can run any sudo command without password? It's basically root at that point. I think that forcing a password (maybe using some lax timeout if you don't want to insert it so often) is a much better option.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I also see that there are secrets in the file (e.g., gmail SMTP creds). Make sure the file is protected in read at a minimum. If those are your gmail app credentials, they are pretty serious and obtainable by just reading the file (same goes for postfix config).
I am seeing this a lot recently, people trying to switch to EU based alternatives.

I am not sure exactly what are your motivations but if it is privacy and trying to fight some sort of tyranny, I am afraid this might be a bit naive and maybe counterproductive.

The EU is as much influenced by the interests of Big tech than the US. Maybe even more in a way. The regulations and fines you hear about are kayfabe.

It is looking more and more like the net of regulations the EU is rolling out is turning Europe into a digital Gulag.

Right now they only really met a resistance for that ChatControl one [0] but they have been trying for years over and over again, and will probably win at the end.

The irony is if you want and EU alternative you might need to defeat the EU first, who has been preventing the emergence of alternatives for decades now. Or just selfhost as much as possible at home for now.

- [0] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/
It’s hard enough to get developers to build what you want when they’re sitting one cubicle over.

> But the world is full of very smart people who have a decent grasp of American and European culture

Haha no. And maybe even more importantly, the Americans have zero grasp of theirs.
Ah. So this is either the absolute height of hypocrisy, or the whole clearance and classification system was and is meaningless, just rigamarole. Here's some red tape to get rid of, easy.
My issue with this line of thinking is not that it's wrong but it's being manipulated by silicon valley.

Open AI is not arguing that AI is harmless they are agreeing it's dangerous. They are using that to promote their product and hype it up as world changing. But more worrying they're advocating for regulations, presumably the sort that would make it more difficult for competition to come in.

I think we can talk about the potential dangers of AI. But that should include a discussion on how to best deal with that and consciousness of how fear of AI might be manipulated by silicon valley.

Especially when that fear involves misrepresentation - eg. AI being presented to the public as self directed artificial consciousness rather than algorithms that mimic certain reasoning capabilities
Thanks again, I made some new quick adjustments by providing a dialog when user is not signed in and clicks on the input.
It really is. I don’t know what kind of electric vehicles you have been using, but the Renault Zoe, Peugeot E-308, and Hyundai IONIQ I’ve been using before Teslas are a PAIN to use and recharge (especially the Peugeot). Tesla still (unfortunately) is years ahead because of the Superchargers. The competition needs to step up.
Yes you can, with something like uBlock Origin, or even a simple stylesheet override.
Why won't selling data fly?

Why not sell premium features?

Why not add affiliate codes to links?

Why not sell ads on new tab pages?

All of these are fine examples of how a not-Google Chrome could make money. They could even get paid by Microsoft or some other not-Google search for that traffic.

This isn't hard unless you're trying to make it hard to convince us all we should just give up and let Google continue running our online lives through monopolization.
Clearly HN is smarter than an entire team of Aero/Mechanical/Electrical engineers who have not thought of the obvious solution.
While panics can be made to unwind and be caught, at that point the different error handling methods are really abort/Result bubbling/Result bubbling but cooler, and I want the last one to be packaged up nicer than "unwinding panic" is today. Stack unwinding should be orthogonal. And I think Result bubbling the boilerplate way is good unless performance is paramount. Keeps the happy and error paths abundantly clear to the developer. I don't know the details of C++'s zero-cost exceptions, but Rust's certainly are not.
I'd be very interested to see a transcript or two of such a 30 second interaction, if you have any you could share?
Do people still think crypto is a scam in 2025?
I'm late to the table, but I've been reading about blockchain. Searching 'blockchain' led to lots of discussions about what its purpose is and which problems it solves - if any.

The general consensus (in my opinion), seems to be that its only real useful application had been in cryptocurrencies. From my view, cryptocurrencies are here to stay, but there is still a lot of dissent that crypto is a ponzi scheme or for fraudsters.