MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by latentsea | 2025-04-24 07:52:05+00:00
> They shared the fondness for torture of accused criminals with the ancient Romans.

Well, with their "hostage justice" using torture tactics to extract false confessions relied on in court and their actual prisons where you have to work 8 hours a day and aren't allowed to say a single word while you do, I guess modern day Japan still has a thing for torturing accused criminals.
by esperent | 2025-04-24 07:52:12+00:00
> Create a plastic enclosure sized to go under a desk, ok add a usb receptacle opening, ok add flanges with standard screw holes

With vague specifications like these, you'd get garbage from a human too.

What works for software, and I suspect for other technical fields like CAD too, is to treat it like a junior developer who has an extreme breadth of knowledge but not much depth. You will need to take care to clearly specify your requirements.
by rda2 | 2025-04-24 07:52:33+00:00
I mean, this just appears to be fixed nominal returns, minus a fee, multiplied by a factor from an actuarial table.

Contrast it with a calculator like this [0] that uses combines historical return and inflation data with actuarial data to show the variance of outcomes, not just average returns.

For instance, your calculator shows a scenario of investing in bitcoin and withdrawing >20% of your portfolio every year which makes zero sense once you account for variance of returns.

I like the idea of tontines, I'm glad someone is trying to bring them back, and I don't doubt that your product could help with longevity risk, but I haven't seen anything so far that actually shows that.

I'd like to see actual results from backtesting, or a prediction that takes risk into account, not just a fixed return.

[0]https://engaging-data.com/will-money-last-retire-early/
by smt88 | 2025-04-24 07:52:37+00:00
The sensational "...as AI infiltrates the workplace" isn't supported by the study, which separately assesses the growth of skills-based hiring and GenAI replacing certain jobs.

The study says:

> It’s unclear at the moment whether comparatively high or low potential exposure to GenAI technologies is positive or negative for knowledge workers, and what impact it will have on educational requirements going forward.

The headline makes it seem like college degrees are being obviated by AI, and that isn't the case yet for anything except (maybe) graphic design.
by carpenecopinum | 2025-04-24 07:52:45+00:00
For me personally at least a few aspects about this are efficiency and control:

The number of CPU cycles my current android phone burns through just to boot and get ready to accept my "first useful input" is probably in the same order of magnitude as or higher than my old N900 would use for the entire day (600MHz single core vs. 8 cores at several GHz). Yet somehow the N900 could easily run quite a lot of things in parallel and would still react quickly to inputs, while I decided to get rid of my previous (still several times more powerful) phone because it would regularly hang for 10 more seconds without any good reason (also there were no more OS updates).

Also with the N900, I had control over every aspect of the system, I could easily script things in python without installing a huge app for it, which the OS would decide to randomly kill to save battery, etc.. Closest thing you can do on Android is root your phone and now every second app complains what a horrible person you are for wanting a bit more control over your own hardware.

That being said, I too eventually buckled to the fact that all the software you need to make a smartphone useful/entertaining is pretty much only available for Android and iOS. And the most realistic way to get "Android-compatibility" to a Linux phone is to just ship an entire Android build with it, due to how interwoven things are on Android.
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-24 07:53:26+00:00
“The year of the Linux desktop” has always been a stupid statement because it never quantifies what the success criteria is.

For example, we now have first class games support via Proton. First class application support via Electron and other web technologies. Linux used in schools via Chromebooks. Etc

Linux was never going to be Windows-killer but I’m constantly amazed at just how easy it is to use vanilla GNU Linux in a variety of previously closed domains and how Linux has taken over as the de facto base for many commercial systems too (phones, tablets, Chromebooks, smart TVs, set top boxes, etc.

There’s also plenty of OEMs that support and even ship Linux systems. And that would have been unthinkable to anyone who lived through the 90s and saw how MS penalised OEMs and retailers for shipping non-MS OSs.

So at what stage do people say “Linux desktop has picked up”?
by mabster | 2025-04-24 07:54:26+00:00
Thanks for the references - that was interesting reading, particularly that initialisation can be good for instruction pipelining.

A trick we were using with SSE was something like

__m128 zero = _mm_undefined_ps(); zero = _mm_xor_ps(zero, zero);

Now we were really careful with viewing our ops as data dependencies to reason about pipelining efficiency. But our profiling tools were not measuring this.

We did avoid _mm_set_ps(0.0f) which was actually showing up as cache misses.

I wonder if we were actually slower because cache misses are something we can measure?!
by masklinn | 2025-04-24 07:55:16+00:00
> Also, some languages intentionally randomize the order per program run, to avoid things like users intentionally stuffing hash tables with colliding keys.

Most modern langages do that as part of hashdos mitigation, Python did that until it switched to a naturally ordered hashmap, then made insertion order part of the spec. Importantly iteration order remains consistent with a process (possibly on a per-hashmap basis).

Notably, Go will randomise the starting point of hashmap iteration on each iteration.
by wavefrontbakc | 2025-04-24 07:55:47+00:00
Always online DRM has been the bane of law abiding citizens for a long while now, punishing those who pay for goods and services, limiting their options of when and how they can use the thing they just bought, all the while getting to see their pirate counterparts enjoy better performance and getting to keep it and do whatever they want with it.

It's really infuriating companies like these make it so hard to do the right thing.
by derelicta | 2025-04-24 07:56:23+00:00
> targeting anti-American leaders such as Congo's Patrice Lumumba, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro

Ahah yes, now I guess being against children getting their hands chopped off by the Belgian is anti-American. And naturally Castro is a dictator for having liberated the island, making it into a sovereign Republic.

The author of this article is truly depraved.
by throwup238 | 2025-04-24 07:58:05+00:00
I think you’re jumping too fast to the “vibe CADing” extreme. It’s been a while since I’ve used Solidworks in anger so I’d rather use ECAD as an example: I’d kill for the ability to give Altium a PDF datasheet and have it generate footprints or schematic components tailored to my specific pinout for a microcontroller. Or give it a pdf of routing guidelines and have it convert those to design rules tied just to those nets. Those are the details that take up most of the time (although I’d still spend quite a lot of tine verifying all the output).

In MCAD it’s less of a problem because all the big vendors like Misumi, McMaster, et al have extensions or downloadable models but anything custom could probably benefit from LLMs (I say this as someone who is generally skeptical of their vision capabilities). I don’t think vibe CADing will work because most parts are too parametrized but giving an AI a bunch of PDFs and a size + thickness is probably going to be really productive.
by smcl | 2025-04-24 07:58:34+00:00
It's more that functional languages just happen to be stricter in various ways that would've mitigated against this. You could quite happily design a functional language that has an unsafe equivalent to sscanf in its stdlib, or has big parts of the spec which are "undefined behaviour" that may differ depending on the underlying OS/compiler/runtime/stdlib in use. But the more popular functional languages have gained traction in part because they tend to have a "if you model the types correctly, the program basically works" philosophy around them. I don't think things like Haskell, Ocaml or F# would allow this if you wrote idiomatic code, you'd probably need to do something a little hacky or sketchy.
by amarcheschi | 2025-04-24 07:59:10+00:00
I wasn't explicitly referring to the more "sane" people expressing doubts regarding Ai.

Hinton at least says that other issues in Ai should be dealt with, rather than just being an Ai doomer who only fears Ai takeover he actually realizes that there are other current issues as well

At this point, how many times should we have been dead for eliezer?
by doix | 2025-04-24 07:59:16+00:00
> How if it hallucinate and gives you wrong code

Then the code won't compile, or more likely your editor/IDE will say that it's invalid code. If you're using something like Cursor in agent mode, if invalid code is generated then it gets detected and the LLM keeps re-running until something is valid.

> It is better to read documentations and tutorials first.

I "trust" LLM's more than tutorials, there's so much garbage out there. For documentation, if the LLM suggests something, you can see the docstrings in your IDE. A lot of the time that's enough. If not, I usually go read the implementation if I _actually_ care about how something works, because you can't always trust documentation either.
Ask HN: How to migrate from LineageOS 22.1 to 22.2
by sterness | 2025-04-24 07:59:28+00:00
I was working on LineageOS 22.1 source code, LineageOS released 22.2 version for the supported devices. All my work is still on LineageOS 22.1 version. How can I migrate all the source code from 22.1 to 22.2?

Is this possible with a repo command?
by genewitch | 2025-04-24 08:00:19+00:00
> so your are forced to connect with your Google account

Slight adjustment to your verbiage: you are forced to interact with Google, but I don't recall having to give a phone number for emulators. Then again, one didn't need a microsofr account to use windows until recently, so I might be wrong.

Tablets and things like x86 android exist so I don't know that Google can enforce phone numbers anyhow, if you want a separate login for each device...
by dale_glass | 2025-04-24 08:00:40+00:00
I find that ChatGPT o3 (and the other advanced reasoning models) are decently good at answering questions with a "but".

Google is great at things like "Top 10 best rated movies of 2024", because people make lists of that sort of thing obsessively.

But Google is far less good at queries like "Which movies look visually beautiful but have been critically panned?". For that sort of thing I have far more luck with chatgpt because it's much less of a standard "top 10" list.
by jychang | 2025-04-24 08:00:58+00:00
8b params is a reasonable estimate.

As a sanity check, we can look at scores for how it performs. On livebench, GPT-4o-mini scores 37.63, right next to Gemini 1.5 Flash 8B at 34.37, and above Qwen2.5 7B Instruct Turbo/Gemma 3 4B at 29.22/30.13. And it's below Phi-4 14b at 40.68, and Gemma 3 12B at 41.25.
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-24 08:01:08+00:00
IDK if it belongs here, but Aella is well-known in rationalist circles, and in this article, she is trying to "hack" dating for herself - not very successfully, though. I can almost see my former colleagues from the Mathematics and Physics Faculty in throes of similar desperation.

One of the guys in the comments estimates her requirements down to 5.7 acceptable men in a million people, which aren't great odds.

If you are interested, I would love for this discussion to develop in the "dating online" direction as well. I am almost 47 and most of my dating life happened before smartphones. It is my impression that in the smartphone era, everything became quite a bit more frustrating, not less.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-04-24 08:03:16+00:00
I flagged it for these reasons as well. It's just a bad article. Shows very poor understanding of the basics of LLM workings, and the field in general.

Lingers on the "cheated" benchmark (lmsys) but never mentions all the other 3rd party benchmarks performed after the inference fixes, which are in line with what Meta originally published. To be clear, submitting a different fine-tuned model to one arena and releasing the untuned model without clearly mentioning this, is bad. But conflating the "human prefference" bench with the others and not mentioning the models capabilities on other benchmarks is also bad writing.

The MoE paragraphs are bad, and the writer never explains why the copy 17B vs VRAM size is bad, they just leave it there unexplained.

Poor form, I was expecting better from someone working in this field.
by varjag | 2025-04-24 08:04:16+00:00
> Russia had how many hundreds? And how much time to prepare how to neutralise them?

Few dozen fighters on alert in a heavy AD environment is objectively a lot. Most of Ukrainian early AD losses happened in the south and were the outcome of treason by the regional command.

> No. If Russia attacks the Baltics, it's guaranteed that Poland will join (with at least some NATO support).

I feel you're talking past me. Yes Poland will join, absolutely: the battle for Suwalki/Kaliningrad will affect it directly if anything. But without the US commitment (which I hope you realize is not happening) there is a 1 in 3 chance of Putin's substantial success.

> Years of preparation and conscious arming with a real budget? Ukraine had to go from a small and under equipped (mostly with obsolete Soviet era stuff) army to a total war in mere days.

Ukraine was waging a war with Russia for 8 years by the day of the full scale invasion. It was prepared about as much as a country in its circumstances could be. Had this invasion happened in 2014 that really would have been the touted 3-day operation.

> Why on earth do you think it could handle more fronts, especially against better equipped and prepared enemies? Nobody is saying Putin is rational, but even he has to know that.

Every serious European government is gearing up for the war now, so it's clearly not just me alone. The mode of fighting had changed substantially. F-35s a great for cooking off tank waves (that mostly don't exist anymore) but are not very useful against waves of meat sweeping through the forests and millions of attack drones.

NATO is still a formidable force even without the US component but coordinated action would be critical and it's a huge question still. Poland and Finland alone will not be enough to blunt the attack on the Baltic states which are very logistically vulnerable. So Putin has a fair, largely consequence free shot at it but the window of opportunity will close within a year or two.
by acyou | 2025-04-24 08:06:04+00:00
I think if you could directly tokenize 3D geometry and train an LLM on 3D models directly, you might get somewhere. In order to prompt it, you would need to feed it a 3D model(s), and prompts and it could give you back a different 3D model. This has been done to some extent with generative modeling pre-LLM, but I don't know of any work that takes LLM techniques applied to language and applies them to "tokenizing" 3D geometry. I suspect NVIDIA is probably working very hard on this exact problem for graphics applications.

For mechanical design, 3D modeling is highly integrative, inputs are from a vast array of poorly specified inputs with a high amount of unspecified and fluid contextual knowledge, and outputs are not well defined either. I'm not convinced that mechanical design is particularly well suited to pairing with LLM workflow. Certain aspects, sure. But 3D models and drawings that we consider "well-defined" are still usually quite poorly defined, and from necessity rely heavily on implicit assumptions.

The geometry of machine threads, for example. Are you going to have a big computer specify the position of each of the atoms in the machine thread? Even the most detailed CAD/CAM packages have thread geometry extremely loosely defined, to the point of listing the callout, and not modeling any geometry at all in many cases.

It would just be very difficult to feed enough contextual knowledge into an LLM to have the knowledge it needs to do mechanical design. Therein lies the main problem. And I will stress that it's not a training problem, it's a prompt problem, if that makes sense.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-24 08:06:44+00:00
Water on ships wasn't that clean to begin with. And things were made worse by people maybe not observing good hygiene. Think sharing cups, dipping those in the water, not washing their hands, etc. Imagine that, stored in a poorly sealed barrel on a ship with rats and other pests. Water was pretty bad on ships. People would get sick and weak on longer journeys (malnutrition, contaminated water, rotting food, etc.). A lot of their diseases would spread via water.

Beer had a head start on water because part of the process of making it involves boiling the water and the alcohol slows the growth of most of the pathogens. And it has some nutritional value.
by sReinwald | 2025-04-24 08:07:30+00:00
While blocking before authentication seems intuitive for efficiency, checking after provides crucial context that's missing if you block pre-auth: you know which specific user account just authenticated successfully.

This context enables two important things:

- Granular exceptions: If Alice is attending a conference in Toronto, you can say "Allow Alice to log in from Canada next week" without opening Canada-wide logins for everyone. Pre-auth geo-blocking forces you into an all-or-nothing stance.

- Better threat intelligence: A valid login from an unexpected region (e.g. Moscow when Alice is normally in D.C.) is a far stronger signal of compromise than a failed attempt. Capturing "successful login + wrong location" helps you prioritize real threats. If you block pre-auth, you'd never know Alice's account was compromised.

Putting geo-checks after authentication gives you precise control over whom, exactly, is logging in from where, and offers richer data for your security monitoring.
by Ntrails | 2025-04-24 08:07:37+00:00
> Auto completing a sentence for the next word in Gmail/iMessage is one example

Interestingly, I despise that feature. It breaks the flow of what is actually a very simple task. Now I'm reading, reconsidering if the offered thing is the same thing I wanted over and over again.

The fact that I know this and spend time repeatedly disabling the damned things is awfully tiresome (but my fault for not paying for my own email etc etc)
by Piraty | 2025-04-24 08:08:00+00:00
I do use a Pinephone (not pro) for 5y now. I switched to the "stable" branch of pmos 2y ago which made my life siginicantly more hassle free. Note that pmos support for pinephone (not pro) degraded in recent stable release, so i recommend to not run 24.12 but the prior version. you will still get occasional updates from the stable alpine branch it's based on (which makes 99% of available packages anyway).

VoLTE works fine (phosh with gnome-calls)

feel free to ask questions you may have
by flimflamm | 2025-04-24 08:08:25+00:00
It would be interesting to see how far one could get with fine tuning and RL. One could for example take free scad models, give 2D pictures from different angles and ask LLM to recreate the 3D design in scad language. Then compare volumetrically how close they are and provide feedback.

Once that is done then ask LLM to create a prompt and compare outputs etc..
by vjerancrnjak | 2025-04-24 08:09:16+00:00
2-opt: [a, b, ..., d, e]

reversing subarray from b to d is a 2-opt move.

3-opt (1 particular move):

a b c d e f

a e d c b f -- reversal from b to e

a e d b c f -- reversal from c to b

LK heuristic is a bit more involved, but focuses on continuing to reverse the subarray on the [b, ..., d] segment, with search and backtracking involved. (I think that's refered to as sequential k-opt moves, but I think it's already quite hard to know what exactly LK is, and LKH does much more)

By focusing on the subarray, assuming distance symmetry (length from b to e is same as length from e to b, but there are correct workarounds if this does not hold), you can evaluate the cost of the new route in constant time (but with bigger k there's more moves to evaluate https://oeis.org/A001171)
by ang_cire | 2025-04-24 08:09:20+00:00
Why is a mom and pop ceramics business violating consumer privacy laws?

Shopify is trying to avoid California having jurisdiction (to try them for privacy violations), because Shopify *knows* they're violating California consumer privacy laws.

The idea that enforcing consumer protection laws will somehow result in an explosion of frivolous lawsuits, or the death of business confidence, or will chill business development, is just a lie that companies push to fearmonger away consumer protections.
by freetonik | 2025-04-24 08:10:30+00:00
>I’ve been looking to switch over to something else. But I’ve been actively blogging since 2006 and I haven’t found a good enough way and platform to switch over to.

Would you consider participating in a private beta of https://exotext.com/, a simple blogging platform I'm building? (example blog: https://rakhim.exotext.com/)

If so, please send me an email: hello at rakhim.org
by Uptrenda | 2025-04-24 08:10:48+00:00
Good luck. Almost every service you need for a smart phone to be "smart" anything requires being part of the Google or Apple botnet. Yeah, you can install whatever crap you like on your phone. Maybe it will do SMS? Kewl. Want maps, mobile banking, 2-factor auth, different password managers, music streaming, and so on... good luck without one of the app stores. Also, being unplugged sometimes means your phone won't even work for calling beyond SMS. Since its baked into the ROM image and you have to hope that the devs have added support for your hardware. So you trade a smart phone (a useful device for the modern world) for a goofy neckbeard terminal in your pocket (too small to be used for any complex input.)
by nsonha | 2025-04-24 08:10:57+00:00
So? Who even wants it? Whatever the definition is, sounds like AGI and sentient AI are really close concepts. Sentient AI is like a can of worms for ethics.

On the other hands, while definitely not having AGI, we have all these building blocks for AI tools for decades to come, to build on top. We've only barely scratched the surface of it.
by kimi | 2025-04-24 08:10:58+00:00
Related: Retrocampus BBS is a dial-up BBS you can call with your Videotel terminal in Italy... or access with your browser right now - https://bbs.retrocampus.com/

Of course I'm not suggesting at all that you waste an otherwise perfectly productive day playing Zork I-II-III or Hitchhiker's on it... ;-)
by wavefrontbakc | 2025-04-24 08:11:16+00:00
I think the cost of mistakes is the major driving force behind where you can adopt tools like these. Generating a picture of a chair with five legs? No big deal. Generating supports for a bridge that'll collapse next week? Big problem.

> It will point out things that are unclear, etc. You can go far beyond just micro managing incremental edits to some thing.

When prompted an LLM will also point it out when it's perfectly clear. LLM is just text prediction, not magic