MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-04-20 18:22:50+00:00
You can argue that everything output by an LLM is hallucinated, since there's no difference under-the-hood between outputting useful information and outputting hallucinations.

The quality of the LLM then becomes how often it produces useful information. That score has gone up a lot in the past 18 months.

(Sometimes hallucinations are what you want: "Tell me a fun story about a dog learning calculus" is a valid prompt which mostly isn't meant to produce real facts about the world")
by alganet | 2025-04-20 18:23:09+00:00
Using aimbot in Gunbound didn't make players better. Yes, it changed everything: it destroyed the game ecosystem.

Can humanity use "literacy aimbot" responsibly? I don't know.

It's just a cautionary tale. I'm not expecting to win an argument. I could come up with counter anectdotes myself:

ABS made breaking in slippery conditions easier and safer. People didn't learned to brake better, they still pushed the pedal harder thinking it would make it stop faster, not realizing the complex dynamics of "making a car stop". That changed everything. It made cars safer.

Also, just an anecdote.

Sure, a lot of people need focus. Some people don't, they need to branch out. Some systems need aimbot (like ABS), some don't (like Gunbound).

The future should be home to all kinds of skills.
by nickjj | 2025-04-20 18:23:19+00:00
Regular containers also happen to work great for testing dotfiles.

Many years ago I added an install script to https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles to get set up in basically 1 command because I wanted a quick way to bootstrap my own system. I used the official Debian and Ubuntu images to test things.

Over the last few days I refactored things further to support Arch Linux which has an official Docker image too.

This enables being able to do full end to end tests in about 5 minutes. The container spins up in 1 second, the rest is the script running its course. Since it's just a container you can also use volume mounts and leave the container running in case you want to incrementally test things without wiping the environment.

Additionally it lets folks test it out without modifying their system in 1 command. Docker has enabled so many good things over the last 10+ years.
by 1024core | 2025-04-20 18:24:06+00:00
> Both mice and non-human primates fully regained fertility after stopping the drug. Mice regained fertility within six weeks, and non-human primates fully recovered their sperm count in 10-15 weeks.

Great recurring source of revenue for the drug company!

Though I'm more interested in feral animals like dogs. It looks like this drug may work on dogs too? If so, it would be a huge boon for cities and villages in India.
by sebastiennight | 2025-04-20 18:24:11+00:00
> Almost everything I've seen achieved with vibe coding so far has been long since achievable with low / no code platforms.

I tried showing someone Bubble as a solution to a fairly simple workflow (one form input, a few LLM calls, an output) that they should have been able to build in minutes.

It was a horrific experience, as Bubble can't find the right balance between being "no-code" (simple) and "powerful enough" with customizations. The end result is that in my experience a non-technical person just can't get workflows to work in Bubble without investing a massive number of hours.

In comparison, getting this done with either vanilla Claude.ai or Lovable is a *single* prompt. Just one!

I think you are deeply underestimating the difference for true non-technical users. Or even bored/overwhelmed technical users who need something done that's non-mission-critical and would just never get done if it took hours of messing with a no-code GUI, vs. dictating it through whisper and letting the AI agent go at it.
by Borealid | 2025-04-20 18:24:35+00:00
Imagine a Rorschach Test of language, where a certain set of non-recognizable-language tokens invariably causes an LLM to talk about flowers. These strings exist by necessity due to how the LLM's layers are formed.

There exists no similar set of tokens for humans, because our process is to parse the incoming sounds into words, use grammar to extract conceptual meaning from those words, and then shape a response from that conceptual meaning.

Artists like Lewis Carrol and Stanislaw Lem play with this by inserting non-words at certain points in sentences to get humans to infer the meaning of those words from surrounding context, but the truth remains that an LLM will gladly convolute a wholly non-language input into a response as if it were well-formed, but a human can't/won't do that.

I know this is hard to understand, but the current generation of LLMs are working directly with language. Their "brains" are built on language. Some day we might have some kind of AI system that's built on some kind of meaning divorced from language, but that's not what's happening here. They're engineering matrixes that repeatedly perform "context window times model => one more token" operations.
by mbessey | 2025-04-20 18:25:08+00:00
When I get around to analyzing the p-code instruction set, the code-compression aspect will definitely get a mention.

Stack-based vs register-based instruction sets are a very clear size vs speed tradeoff. That's also one reason that the Java VM was designed with a stack architecture, though in that case, it was download time they wanted to minimize.

The whole thing with UCSD having to essentially "give away" the p-System to a separate commercial entity is a sad part of the history, for sure.
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-04-20 18:25:08+00:00
Are you sure? I would be very surprised if a human could build a nest that a crow would accept unaltered.

Most birds’ nests are built much more intricately than just a pile of sticks thrown together! Usually built from layers of different materials, sometimes weaved or plastered with mud/clay/bird-spit.

E.g. sparrows pick up lavender in my garden, because the oils repel some pests etc.
by foobazgt | 2025-04-20 18:25:38+00:00
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of annotation processing either. It's simultaneously heavyweight and unwieldy, and yet doesn't do enough. You get all the annoyance of working with a full-blown AST, and none of the power that comes with being able to manipulate an AST.

Annotations themselves are pretty great, and AFAIK, they are most widely used with reflection or bytecode rewriting instead. I get that the maintainers dislike macro-like capabilities, but the reality is that many of the nice libraries/facilities Java has (e.g. transparent spans), just aren't possible without AST-like modifications. So, the maintainers don't provide 1st class support for rewriting, and they hold their noses as popular libraries do it.

Closely related, I'm pretty excited to muck with the new class file API that just went GA in 24 (https://openjdk.org/jeps/484). I don't have experience with it yet, but I have high hopes.
by the_af | 2025-04-20 18:26:14+00:00
> I don't think there was any malfunction. The conflicting parameters implicitly contained permission to lie to the crew.

The malfunction I mentioned happened earlier in the movie, when HAL incorrectly predicts a failure in a ship module (a communications antenna if I remember correctly), but when one of the astronauts checks it out and finds no hardware fault, HAL recants. After this incident the crew, knowing HAL claims to never make mistakes, start considering it unreliable and make plans for its shutdown. It was by its own actions that HAL triggered the crew's "mutiny" and, by its own logic, jeopardized the mission.

It's likely HAL's incorrect prediction was caused by a case of cyber-psychosis due to having to lie, but this still classifies as a malfunction in my opinion (what is a malfunction if not an unforeseen result or behavior due to incorrect programming/specs? Aren't many bugs in actual software of this kind?).

> Less a poor prompt and more two incompatible prompts both labeled top priority.

This is equivalent to a poor prompt, it feels like splitting hairs.
by boulos | 2025-04-20 18:26:15+00:00
Most discussion of employment is for the San Francisco metro area, but I think the county level statistics at https://data.census.gov/profile/San_Francisco_County,_Califo... are actually specific to people who live in San Francisco.

I never know what business codes / job codes get included in "Professional, scientific, and management, and administrative and waste management" but there's an explicit separate one for Information that is only 6.3% (https://data.census.gov/vizwidget?g=050XX00US06075&infoSecti...)

People write about tech jobs because they're highly paid (on average) and highly visible. But it's not the case that the city is entirely dependent on technology. You wouldn't say the same thing about the equally large segment of "Finance and insurance, and real estate and rental and leasing".
by simonw | 2025-04-20 18:26:18+00:00
Hah, yeah that still catches out o4-mini and o3 too. Amusingly, adding "It's not the riddle." to the end fixes that.

(o4-mini high thought for 52 seconds and even cheated and looked up the answer on Hacker News: https://chatgpt.com/share/68053c9a-51c0-8006-a7fc-75edb734c2...)
by FiberBundle | 2025-04-20 18:26:20+00:00
I'm not a lawyer, but my interpretation of the lawsuit based on the Wikipedia article is that game results/scores are public facts and hence not copyrightable data. I don't see how the method by which that public data is collected changes anything materially about that case. Are you saying that inferring the score based on the scoreboard is what makes this illegal (why?)? What if they would infer the score using motion/ball tracking instead?
by rc00 | 2025-04-20 18:26:23+00:00
Open source or not isn't the point. The point is the mission and the ecosystem. Some of the Zig proponents laud the C compatibility. Others are seeking out the "pure Zig" ecosystem. Curious onlookers want to know if the Zig ecosystem and community will be as hostile to the decades of C libraries as the Rust zealots have been.

To be fair, I don't believe there is a centralized and stated mission with Zig but it does feel like the story has moved beyond the "Incrementally improve your C/C++/Zig codebase" moniker.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-04-20 18:26:43+00:00
Chasing after The Year of Linux on the Desktop is the community's great white whale. The thinking seems to be that if Linux can be made to look enough like the major mainstream OSes, the masses will flood into Linux and the people who lead them there will get to be the heroes of the day. Problem is the mainstream OSes make UI decisions for many reasons, and the end user often isn't the main concern. Linux could, and in the past did, make itself the OS of user empowerment and choice instead of being a watered down version of whatever is in fashion with the PMs at Microsoft, Apple, and Google.
by blahaj | 2025-04-20 18:26:54+00:00
With the female contraceptive pill 0.3% of women get pregnant within a year if taken perfectly (which is rarely the case, but the figure here is also from lab conditions). This drug leads to 1% pregnancies in 4 weaks, which is much worse.

That said this is still great news especially as the condom is also much less safe then the female contraceptive pill.
by simonw | 2025-04-20 18:29:33+00:00
Quoting the linked story:

> Last month, we launched Gemma 3, our latest generation of open models. Delivering state-of-the-art performance, Gemma 3 quickly established itself as a leading model capable of running on a single high-end GPU like the NVIDIA H100 using its native BFloat16 (BF16) precision.

> To make Gemma 3 even more accessible, we are announcing new versions optimized with Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) that dramatically reduces memory requirements while maintaining high quality.

The thing that's new, and that is clearly resonating with people, is the "To make Gemma 3 even more accessible..." bit.
by solardev | 2025-04-20 18:30:41+00:00
Don't post online. Just live your life as locally as possible and talk to your IRL friends. There's no privacy against the state online. All your devices are made by companies that care about profit more than privacy and any service will hand over your details if asked.

While there are more private options for communicating with a small group, good luck convincing anyone else to use them. The average person gives no fucks and isn't going to bother decrypting what you send them.
by aerhardt | 2025-04-20 18:30:42+00:00
I work in Enterprise IT, I'm the CTO of a small business. People executing small scripts all over the place sounds to me like the stuff of nightmares. Especially locally, but even if it's run online in a safer environment, as long as it causes side effects in other systems, the risk is massive. And if it doesn't cause side effects, well, chances are the program is worthless.

Also, I've already seen this story play out with low-code. The pitch was the same, nearly line by line: "citizen developers will be able to solve so many problems by themselves at the edges of enterprise". It didn't take. Most users could not learn the technologies, but much more importantly: they did not even know how to verbalize their requirements. Take my word for it, most people do not want to design solutions, and of those that are willing, only a small subset is able.
by LandOfMightDev | 2025-04-20 18:30:47+00:00
You can look at the Repo and the actual game to see how it works in real time. https://landofmight.alwaysdata.net/

Before, there was no way to track the the state of the world after all player's logged off. Since i am using peer to peer (master - peer), there is no dedicated server, thus, no way to keep the game's state after the players leave. So i had this idea Friday evening. Basically, all i really needed was to record the NPCs stats (level, might, health), and their location. then every so many seconds, i needed to update it. When the first player joins, they will be the master client, and they will be the one keeping the server up to date & loading the world's state initially.

For example, player 1 joins, they are the master client now. Then, they play for a while, every 5 seconds the game does inventory and gives back all of the NPC's and their stats as a 2d text string array. This string array is encoded into a text file and sent to the github repo. 10 other players join (then due to other syncing I set up), they do not need to reload the world from the file, nor do they need to keep it updated (only one client needs to handle this).

Github allows 50,000 actions per hour, given that in order to update a file, you need to first pull the repo to see if a file exists & then get the file's sha. Essentially, you can have about 7.5 commits per second or about 133ms latency. Since only one client in the game is doing all of this, (updating the world's state, loading the world), there is no chance of exceeding the limit. Also, the latency for actually putting the file is normally around 400-800ms...

Yeah, also, the CDN will try to have give you the cashed version of the file, so make sure you force a new request each time you upload or the sha will mismatch. Also, when pulling the file, you may think that you can just use the raw url (atleast since it is a public repo), however, the CDN will just give you a shit copy of an older cached version.

So apart from all this, the hardest part is integrating it with webgl and unity. Unity is a piece of shit when it comes to networking, it does not support Asyn, so you need to use enumerators for everything.. Also, you cannot use any non-native networking modules. So everything must be done using UnityEngine.Networking. Lastly, headers are a joke in webgl, do not even try to use any headers other than Authorization and Content-Type or CORS will fuck you.

Now, the fact that you can do this is pretty cool. There are a ton of services that offer the same functions, yet charge alot. Even more, if you were developing a game that isn't super high-paced / a strategy game etc. Or you dont care about having potentially terrible latency (50,000 requests (2 requests per put), 133ms minimum delay, more users, less requests etc.etc.), so if your users can go with a 5000ms latency, this could be used for other multiplayer scenarios.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-20 18:31:26+00:00
Fair, and it needs clarification to avoid conflating pre-ejaculate, seminal plasma, and sperm emission.

It may be confusing, so to clarify: "seminal fluids" is a term typically used to refer to the fluid released during ejaculation, not throughout the arousal phase. The idea that sperm would be in the mix before the emission phase goes against standard reproductive physiology.

Sperm are only actively introduced into seminal fluid during the emission phase of ejaculation; the so-called "grand finale." :D. Before that, in the arousal phase, the fluids released (like pre-ejaculate) typically contain no sperm unless there's residual contamination from a previous ejaculation.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-20 18:32:06+00:00
I understand your point and it's good advice. Typos and documentation though? That's boring... I want to do interesting things. Ever wondered why some program can't do something? Surely someone much smarter would have thought of it, right? And then you code it up and it actually works? That's the kind of thing I like to do.

I once tried to retrofit a library system into GNU bash of all things. Let's just say it didn't go well.
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-20 18:32:10+00:00
I appreciate you feel attacked but the content of the repositories are suspicious. Zip files, executables missing source, readmes that are clearly incorrect (eg giving Windows install instructions for a macOS binary) and this particularly plugin is minified.

I could tell that this was due to lack of experience because there were other obvious mistakes you’d made which were harmless.

What you need to appreciate is that you’re asking people to install untrusted software on their computers. So while you might feel attacked, the burden of proof is actually with you to demonstrate that you are trustworthy.

And that means eating some humble pie here. Learning from the feedback you’re receiving and grow from it. Rather than demanding that the community fix your shortcomings. We don’t owe you our time any more than we owe you our devices to beta test your software projects.
Show HN: JuryNow – Get an anonymous instant verdict from 12 real people
by sarah-brussels | 2025-04-20 18:32:29+00:00
After 16 years, I have just launched my game JuryNow. Imagine having a truly diverse panel of 12 real people of all ages, far removed from your peer group, around the world who will be able to give you an instant decision on your question 24/7. No commentary, just a verdict between two choices. You can ask a moral dilemma, or a fashion dilemma (you can upload 2 images), you can use JuryNow to give you an independent perspective on a family argument, or a workplace problem, or even a trivial thought. You can also ask a mini political poll and receive global verdict in real time.

It’s anonymous, fast (under 3 minutes), and...when there are more than 13 people playing simultaneously, completely AI-free.

How do you pay for this priceless fun? With JuryDuty. While you wait 3 minutes for your verdict, You answer other people’s questions. There is no commentary, just a binary choice.

You can ask things like:

“Do I have a moral duty to go to my brother’s third wedding? We have no parents?”

“Do you feel guilty when you kill mosquitoes?”

"Should I take away my mother's car keys? She is 84 and had two near misses this month."

As a 58F, I built JuryNow because I wanted to create a truly objective place to get outside opinions that were not from my peer group, but from 12 people in 12 different countries, different ages, professions, cultures, a truly diverse global objective jury with no algorithms.

Would love your feedback! It’s totally free, no sign-up needed for a first play. https://jurynow.app/

if there are fewer than 13 people playing (and it only just launched last week and that was just on Reddit!) then a popup will appear saying your verdict is simulated by AI. But this is just a TEMPORARY feature with the MVP. As soon as there are regular players, it will be permanently dismantled and we will celebrate the power of collective human intelligence!
by ksec | 2025-04-20 18:32:53+00:00
>Even HN has fingerprinting to identify who said what independent of accounts.

What?

>WhatsApp communication is considered public in court and is credibly being monitored

I think, unless I misunderstood. Is that those records are not stored on Meta's server but could be subjected to usage in court with minimal work. Cant you have disappearing message so they self delete ?

I am also unaware of they could see my Whatsapp messages without getting me to unblock my phone as the content of the message are encrypted. But they do have some metadata. So on a threat level that depends on people's risk appetite.

I know people in US loathe Meta but generally speaking I think Whatsapp is pretty damn good.
by quesomaster9000 | 2025-04-20 18:33:02+00:00
Well, I've tried manually verifying the curve parameters and I don't trust this.

* The generator isn't selected deterministically

* The BLAKE3(seed) in the OpenFrogget code doesn't match what I get with Python & Javascript implementation of Blake3, the index & seed aren't specified in the paper

* The paper doesn't provide a reference for why `a=-7` was chosen (presumably because of the GLV endomorphism)

* the various parameters differ between the reference implementation and the paper and the spec...

There are enough many holes in this that I wouldn't touch it yet, as a very quick glance into the spec & the code leaves me wondering why their claims of reproducibility & determinism re: the constants aren't true, and the documentation & code don't match what I can reproduce locally.

So uhh yea... No
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-20 18:33:11+00:00
That's a much simpler problem to solve than the current one. One attack vector to cover, one set of organizations, one trust list. It's definitely no worse than our current predicament.

Basic math shows how much safer the new model would be:

- Assume there are 350 CAs, 3 validation methods, and 12 kinds of exploit per validation method (there are more in some combinations but for simplicity I'll say 12). (350 x 3 x 12) leaves *12,600* possible attack vectors. - Now assume there's 2,650 domain registrars, 1 validation method, and 1 kind of exploit. (2650 * 1 * 1) leaves *2,650* possible attack vectors.

So 4.75x fewer possible attack vectors.

Add to this that with only 1 validation method and 1 feature to support, that's way less code, which means much fewer bugs.

Add to that a cryptographic chain of proof that the key of the domain owner was used to sign the request all the way, which we don't have today.
by sanderjd | 2025-04-20 18:33:25+00:00
Nations being unwilling to allow their rivals to own their domestic media has literally nothing to do with that. The UN and is state diplomacy, not media policy. One has nothing to do with the other.

Also:

> They weren't trying to propagandise children, they targeted adults.

I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.
by gwern | 2025-04-20 18:33:28+00:00
> I don't know what the rest of your comment is talking about. Googling "Yirgacheffe" shows it's a real thing. The Safavid coffee/Qajar tea claims seem accurate as well. So you at least learned something from the article.

No, I didn't learn anything from the article (except how susceptible HN has become to even 4o-level LLM outputs, of course). I learned something from your comment, and you learned that from a Google search. Do you see the difference?

> So the actual content of the article is perfectly plausible.

So in other words... it added nothing to even a superficial familiarity with the topic.