MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2025-04-03 19:51:48+00:00
> the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values

This is an incorrect and cynical statement. I understand why you feel this way (for one thing, it's the exact type of language coming out of many of each party's idealists) but it's simply false.

One party supports gun rights while the other supports gun control. Those aren't values. Democrats want to pursue safety from guns. Republicans want to pursue safety from tyranny. Both sides care about personal safety.

Abortion rights is about personal liberty. Gun rights are also about personal liberty. Both sides care about personal liberty.

The competing talking points aren't always conveniently about the same issue though. For Democrats their border policies are about compassion and human rights. For Republicans their border policies are about domestic prosperity.

Do Republicans care about human rights? Yes. Do Democrats care about domestic prosperity? Yes. To pretend otherwise is to willfully push apart the tribes in your own mind, and to trivialize the perspective of the opposition.

The real problem is the one you are contributing to: the unwillingness to empathize. Empathy is the only way to come to a compromise. With a little empathy you might even find that you have to compromise less because you might actually convince someone of your argument, for once.
by shermantanktop | 2025-04-03 19:52:44+00:00
I agree. But massive changes in scale or leverage can undermine this type of principled stand.

One death is a murder; 100k deaths is a war or a pandemic. One piece of chewing gum on the ground will get you a caning in Singapore; when everyone does it, that's NYC.

Up until now, one had to have some level of graphical or artistic skills to do this, but not anymore. Again, I agree that it attaches to the human...but we now have many more humans to attach it to.
by ignoramous | 2025-04-03 19:53:00+00:00
> I don't know enough about the Palestine/Israel conflict to be able to make an informed opinion on it, so I won't comment on that.

Wise, given the guilt & political climate. But, see also:

Progressive except Palestine (also known as PEP) is a phrase that refers to organizations or individuals who describe themselves politically as progressive, liberal, or left-wing but who do not express pro-Palestinian sentiment or do not comment on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_except_Palestine
by rtp4me | 2025-04-03 19:53:52+00:00
And honestly, you should have been downvoted for calling them "low-information" voters. Not only is it condescending, you simply discounted them for being part of the "other" party. Perhaps they are very informed - maybe much more than you regarding the deficit, the economy, their frustrations, etc.

It is great to have a spirited debate, but to call people derogatory names simply because they don't share your viewpoint is the wrong path to take.
by weard_beard | 2025-04-03 19:53:59+00:00
Anecdotally it’s the triple whammy of depression/anxiety, social isolation, and scarcity/precarity.

The precariousness I think is more of a factor as the long term poor have still managed to survive historically. The randomness and changing social safety nets and possibility of needing to migrate to survive is probably a big factor.

It feels like we’re all bracing for the end of the world all the time.

Procreation (or lack of it) is voting “no candidate”. It’s the only control anyone has over their life today.
Show HN: AI Fundamentals – A textbook on AI with a math and programming approach
by rockenman1234 | 2025-04-03 19:54:15+00:00
Written through a collaborative effort by faculty and researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, AI Fundamentals explores AI from 1925 to 2025, covering major topics in depth. This course teaches AI — not just API calls. You'll use Python to build your own AI systems from the ground up!
by chimpanzee | 2025-04-03 19:54:15+00:00
> It's just doing what many human artists would do, if they're not explicitly being paid to create new IP.

It isn’t an independent human. It is a service paid for by customers. The moment it provides the image to a paying user, the image has thus been used commercially.

In fact, the user may not even necessarily have to be paying in order to infringe copyright.

And besides, even amateur artists are ashamed to produce copies unless they are demonstrating mastery of technique or expressing adoration. And if it happens spontaneously, they are then frustrated and try to defend themselves by claiming to never have even experienced the original material. (As happens with simplistic, but popular musical riffs.) But AI explicitly is trained on every material it can get its hands on and so cannot make such a defense.
by airstrike | 2025-04-03 19:54:46+00:00
The US outsourced to China because of cheap labor, not because Chinese products are good--precisely because US companies were competing with each other and needed ways to reduce prices and improve margins.

That this ultimately had the effect of diminishing the manufacturing base in the US doesn't speak to the ability of US or Chinese companies to compete.

China is a centrally planned economy. To argue it's more competitive than the US is again not tenable.
by sweatybridge | 2025-04-03 19:54:46+00:00
> When they started integrating this tool on some trial candidates they found SO many inconsistencies between environments: server settings differences, extraneous or missing indexes, vestigial "temp" tables created during previous migrations, enum tables that should be static with extra or missing rows, etc, etc. All the environment differences meant that deployments had to be manual in the past. Once they got through the initial pain of syncing up the environments the whole department got way more efficient.

That was exactly our experience too.

Perhaps we didn't highlight enough in the blog post that schema diff was not meant to replace manual review. It simply provided a good starting point for us to iterate on the migration, which often boosts efficiency.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-03 19:55:08+00:00
I think this, more than anything else, has been the real issue ( and I even think there was a recent Marketwatch article that basically said the same thing ): 'erratic decision making process'. There is an argument to be made about the direction of the policy, but the crazy back and forth, where it is not entirely clear 'who/how/why' and so on that people who do have to make decisions about future moves are left guessing. No one likes uncertainty.
by greg7gkb | 2025-04-03 19:55:18+00:00
> very real national problems that this might address.

This is a dubious claim to begin with. If you believe that 'trade deficits are bad,' can you explain why? Post Covid, the US economy has emerged in significantly better shape than nearly every other country in the world, so I'm failing to see how these deficits are meaningful.

> Globalization has played a big role in creating the massive income inequality in our country

What is your source for this belief, especially when comparing globalization with other factors that cause inequality? From my understanding, the biggest recent contributors to a higher cost of living in the US are housing, health, and education. Health and education purely services-oriented, and housing is one-third a labor cost.

> our society as such is biased heavily toward importing goods rather than exporting goods

I think that's great. America exports services. We innovate to create new technology, are a leader in designing the things and systems that people want (think of our tech industry), and we delegate the work of manufacturing to others. That seems fine to me, and a function of having (relatively) open, free trade.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-03 19:55:31+00:00
>AlphaGo Zero mastered Go from scratch, beating professional players with moves it was never trained on

Thats all well and good, but it was tuned with enough parameters to learn via reinforcement learning[0]. I think The Register went further and got better clarification about how it worked[1]

>During training, it sits on each side of the table: two instances of the same software face off against each other. A match starts with the game's black and white stones scattered on the board, placed following a random set of moves from their starting positions. The two computer players are given the list of moves that led to the positions of the stones on the grid, and then are each told to come up with multiple chains of next moves along with estimates of the probability they will win by following through each chain.

While I also find it interesting that in both of these instances, its all referenced to as machine learning, not AI, its also important to see that even though what AlphaGo Zero did was quite awesome and a step forward in using compute for more complex tasks, it was still seeded the basics of information - the rules of Go - and simply patterned matched against itself until built up enough of a statistical model to determine the best moves to make in any given situation during a game.

Which isn't the same thing as showing generalized reasoning. It could not, then, take this information and apply it to another situation.

They did show the self reinforcement techniques worked well though, and used them for Chess and Shogi to great success as I recall, but thats a validation of the technique, not that it could generalize knowledge.

>That's an engineering decision, not a fundamental limitation

So you're saying that they can't reason about independently?

[0]: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphago-zero-starting-...

[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2017/10/18/deepminds_latest_alph...
by immibis | 2025-04-03 19:56:19+00:00
The problem with boot security is that the computer has no way to know its owner from someone who isn't its owner. All it can go on is who was there first. Which, you guessed it, was Lenovo.

I have no problem with secure boot as a concept but I don't know how to implement it so it can't be used to lock you out of your own computer. And an implementation which allows that is worse than no implementation.
by ffsm8 | 2025-04-03 19:56:45+00:00
People have been predicting the singularity to occur sometimes around 2030 and 2045 waaaay further back then 2015. And not just by enthusiasts, I dimly remember an interview with Richard Darkins from back in the day...

Though that doesn't mean that the current version of language models will ever achieve AGI, and I sincerely doubt they will. They'll likely be a component in the AI, but likely not the thing that "drives"
by jMyles | 2025-04-03 19:57:01+00:00
> It's not getting "better." It always just copied. That's all it /can/ do

That's true of all the best artists ever.

> They're just there to whitewash away liability from blatantly stealing someone else's content.

That's because that's not a thing. Ownership of "content" is a legal fiction invented to give states more control over creativity. Nobody who copies bytes which represent my music is a "thief". To be a thief, they'd need to, you know, come to my house and steal something.

When someone copies or remixes my music, I'm often not even aware that it has occurred. It's hard to imagine how that can be cast as genuine theft.
by ColinWright | 2025-04-03 19:57:14+00:00
Missing so many languages.

I mean, it's fun, but it's missing at least these:

Z80, 6502, M68K, sh, csh, fexl, snafl, algol, PL/1, Z, C99, ForTran99, ...

It recognises bash but not sh or csh.

Still, a bit of fun.
by jodacola | 2025-04-03 19:57:28+00:00
I appreciate your frustration, dumbledoren. Your comment speaks to perspectives I could expect to face in another country - thank you.

I can only say my personal intent isn't that. I live a simple life. My family has a small, old home. We garden, grow our own food, and are respectful to our environment.

I prioritize supporting small, local businesses.

I wouldn't want to parachute into another country acting as though I Know Better™ and bringing my "American sensibilities" to another country.

If I were to leave the US, I see myself entering another country, hat in hand, knowing fully I'm not better or special, and it's my job to adapt and to respect the culture and country.
Show HN: Hooksy – The Toaster Oven of Webhooks (Simple, but gets the job done)
by choraria | 2025-04-03 19:57:42+00:00
You know how everyone says "build what you know"? Well, I’ve been down the webhook rabbit hole before. I built Webhooks for Sheets, a Google Workspace add-on that generates free webhooks… but only for Google Sheets. This little side project got over >150k installs (no joke!), but here’s the thing: that’s a vanity number. If one person installs it as an admin in a big org, boom — the number goes up. But the real insight? It came from the emails I received.

I got tons of messages from users asking about missing features, bugs, and the challenges of the Apps Script ecosystem. For example, there’s the whole issue with not being able to set specific response codes. These were my real insights into the user base — and it made me realize that people are really just looking for a simple solution to log webhook data in the tools they already use.

People love simple solutions. They want to log webhook data to their tool of choice without paying $$$ to tools like Zapier or Make.com. So, I thought, why not build something that does just that?

And that's how Hooksy was born!
by 827a | 2025-04-03 19:57:45+00:00
Readers should, charitably, interpret this as "the sequence of events which need to happen in order for OpenAI to justify the inflow of capital necessary to survive".

Your daily vibe coding challenge: Get GPT-4o to output functional code which uses Google Vertex AI to generate a text embedding. If they can solve that one by July, then maybe we're on track for "curing all disease and aging, brain uploading, and colonizing the solar system" by 2030.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-03 19:58:02+00:00
This is a difference in the subject of coherence.

Logical coherence refers to the variation and predictive power of the reasoning.

Coherence can also be used to describe the variability and predictability of positions or states themselves.

If you measure the characteristics of some photons in a coherent laser, you know what the other photons are doing. They are predictable using a model.

Logic is a poor predictive model for politics. Tribe identification is a strong predictive model for politics
by IgorPartola | 2025-04-03 19:58:11+00:00
If I pay you to tell me the plot of Indiana Jones, privately, because I don’t have time to watch it, and you agree, did you violate copyright laws?

If you do it for free, is it different?

If I ask a friend to draw me as Indiana Jones? Or pay an artist? In either case I just want that picture to put in my rec room, not to sell.
by delusional | 2025-04-03 19:58:30+00:00
You're either not really thinking through what you're saying, or you're being disingenuous because you want to promote AI.

A formalism isn't "person says Y". It's about adhering to a structure, to a form of reasoning. Mathematical formalism is about adhering to the structure of mathematics, and making whatever argument you desire to make in the formal structure of formulas and equations.

Saying "A palindrome is a word that reads the same backwards as it does forwards" is not a formal definition. Saying "Let r(x) be the function that when given a string x returns the reversed string, x is then a palindrome iff x = r(x)" (sans the formal definitions of the function r).

Formalism is about reducing the set of axioms (the base assumptions of your formal system) to the minimal set that is required to build all other (provable) arguments. It's not vague hand waving about what some market wants, it's naturally extrapolating from a small set of axioms, and being rigorous if ever to add new ones.

If your hypothetical "business person" every says "it was decided" then they are not speaking a formal language, because formalism does not have deciders.
by jchap | 2025-04-03 19:58:50+00:00
Are there any (simple) tools out there where the API contract is like:

- POST a statechart to something to kick it off/validate transitions/log events, schedule waits/etc

- receive POSTs (webhook-like) back to a handler endpoint to actually execute side effects

The SCXML spec defines stuff that supports this really well (ie the send/invoke tags)

Closest things I’ve been able to find:

Stately/XState

Temporal

AWS Step Functions

Step functions probably the closest to what I'm looking for but is the task token thing the only way to “receive” events?
by frumplestlatz | 2025-04-03 19:58:51+00:00
> If we produced housing like we did cars, all the "low-skill" people would be able to move to the city and find a job in the many other services that require human labor.

Why would they want to do that? Their priorities are myriad, but raising a family, having a degree of autonomy and space to themselves, and remaining a part of their community are all generally on the list.

What’s generally not on the list is living in a tiny rabbit hutch, owning nothing, working a dead-end service job, trying to raise a family in a city (or just not trying at all), and paying a higher price for the privilege.
by devmor | 2025-04-03 19:59:13+00:00
I don't think your detraction has much merit.

If I don't understand how a combustion engine works, I don't need that engineering knowledge to tell you that a bicycle [an LLM] isn't a car [a human brain] just because it fits the classification of a transportation vehicle [conversational interface].

This topic is incredibly fractured because there is too much monetary interest in redefining what "intelligence" means, so I don't think a technical comparison is even useful unless the conversation begins with an explicit definition of intelligence in relation to the claims.
by tristor | 2025-04-03 19:59:21+00:00
> It's sort of like not taking philosophers seriously unless they've considered the question of solipsism first.

Solipsism only makes sense if you completely reject the concept of objective reality. It's mostly sophistry. The lack of being able to prove that reality exists beyond your own perceptions is not sufficient to prove that it does not, nor to make that assertion. See also "Simulation Theory".
by neilv | 2025-04-03 19:59:22+00:00
The two you cite, OpenFoodFacts and OpenStreetMap are non-profit/not-for-profit, known for their databases, not for competing commercial apps.

I appreciate the difficulty of building a good database. Can you say why you created a new one, rather than starting with OpenFoodFacts? (Was it quality issues? Too hard to update? You wanted additional info? You didn't want their licensing terms? You wanted the advertising boost?)
by tshaddox | 2025-04-03 19:59:58+00:00
It's a neat goal to keep an organ playing for hundreds of years. I just don't think that's related to the musical composition itself, which is not impressive to me. The fact that Cage added the phrase "as slow as possible" is not, in my opinion, musically interesting.

It would be analogous to writing a screenplay, adding the note "produce the film using as much money as possible," and then having someone attempt to do that. It's technically impressive to spend $500 million on a film production, sure, but that small note at the end of the screenplay is not cinematically interesting.
by flenserboy | 2025-04-03 20:00:03+00:00
the guardrails are probably going to end up being way too close together when the dust settles — imagine if something as simple as "young wizard" would be enough to trip the warnings. someone could be looking to do an image from Feist's early novels, or of their own work, & that will be verboten. it may turn out that we're facing the strongest copyright holders being able to limit everyone's legitimate use of these tools.
by justonenote | 2025-04-03 20:00:36+00:00
> it all rests on (relatively) simple mathematics. We know this is true. We also know that means it has limitations and can't actually reason information.

This was the statement I was responding to, it is stating that because it's built on simple mathematics it _cannot_ reason.

Yes we don't have a complete mathematical model of human intelligence, but the idea that because it's built on mathematics that we have modelled, that it cannot reason is nonsensical, unless you subscribe to a non-materialist view.

In a way, he is saying (not really but close) that if we did model human intelligence with complete fidelity, it would no longer be intelligence.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-03 20:00:41+00:00
Just grabbing definitions from Google:

Rationalize: "An attempt to explain or justify (one's own or another's behavior or attitude) with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate"

Rational: "based on or in accordance with reason or logic"

They sure seem like related concepts to me. Maybe you have a different understanding of what "rationalizing" is, and I'd be interested in hearing it

But if all you're going to do is drive by comment saying "You're wrong" without elaborating at all, maybe just keep it to yourself next time
by airstrike | 2025-04-03 20:01:19+00:00
Why are you making such sweeping assumptions about us? I studied architecture and art history for over a year, I'm the son of a painter, I have an uncle who's a Grammy-winning musician and an aunt who's a musical scholar who literally has a doctorate degree on John f* Cage of all people... which is to say I grew up surrounded by art. I've visited every museum you can name this side of the Berlin Wall's remains, many more than once.

I have a degree in humanities, another in business and another in computer science.... and while I still don't mind Cage that much, I do think most of contemporary art is absolute shit.

I don't have to agree with you for my opinion to have value. You need to learn to name call people less and make your points on the merits of arguments. It's tiring for everyone else to engage otherwise.
by miki123211 | 2025-04-03 20:01:27+00:00
Steam also did the legwork to adapt to other countries' cultures, means and payment systems.

They do regional pricing, including systems which make it difficult to pretend you live in a poor country, which you absolutely need if you want publishers to adopt that. They do local payment methods. They let kids (and kids and teenagers are an important part of this market) buy gift cards in physical stores, and pay for them with cash.

Mobile App Stores are a lot worse at all of these, especially Apple's.
by xg15 | 2025-04-03 20:01:28+00:00
Hmm, maybe I misunderstood that part, but so far I thought the KV cache was really just that - a cache. Because all the previous tokens of the sequence stay the same, it makes no sense to compute the same K and V vectors again in each round.

But that doesn't change that the only input to the Q, K and V calculations are the tokens (or in later layers information that was derived from the tokens) and each vector in the cache maps directly to an input token.

So I think you could disable the cache and recompute everything in each round and you'd still get the same result, just a lot slower.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-04-03 20:01:37+00:00
> “The code was wrong, so it was OK that I made it slower" is a message board argument, not a business argument.

And yet, here I am, in a business, watching that argument play out in realtime.

> The performance of code that runs on consumer devices has less of a measurable economic impact than that of code that runs on the server.

The performance of the device literally in the entire world’s hands every day is arguably quite a bit more impactful that Facebook having to buy more servers.