MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-04-21 20:56:31+00:00
There's a pretty common misconception that training LLMs is about loading in as much data as possible no matter the source.

That might have been true a few years ago but today the top AI labs are all focusing on quality: they're trying to find the best possible sources of high quality tokens, not randomly dumping in anything they can obtain.

Andrej Karpathy said this last year: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1797313173449764933

> Turns out that LLMs learn a lot better and faster from educational content as well. This is partly because the average Common Crawl article (internet pages) is not of very high value and distracts the training, packing in too much irrelevant information. The average webpage on the internet is so random and terrible it's not even clear how prior LLMs learn anything at all.
by johnea | 2025-04-21 20:57:24+00:00
> Fetishisation of markets is the issue.

Well said.

It should also be pointed out, that the regulatory laws are what _defines_ the market. They are even more fundamental to a market's existence than the companies producing goods and services, or the consumers buying them.

Without regulatory law, the "market" devolves to a relapse into the warring states era. Why shouldn't amazone hire a mercenary force to blow the vault doors off of Ft. Knox and carry all the gold home to Bozo?

Because there are laws against it! And that would render the action unprofitable. Bozo sure as sh1t doesn't care about stealing from anyone, or even someone getting killed, if it means he gets a bunch more shekels.

The regulatory law is more than just inherent, it's a mandatory component of anything that's going to have more resemblance to a "market" than to Mad Max...

So, the profiting companies actually _require_ a regulatory structure, to prevent the most wealthy and powerful from just taking whatever they have.

The question is in also making these regulations benefit the consumer as well as the supply side.

In the US this part is currently in rather complete failure...
by EA-3167 | 2025-04-21 20:57:59+00:00
Another article that amounts to, "Here is an observed trend. Let us assume this trend continues uninterrupted and unmodified by feedback, changing circumstances, and other factors."

I believe that alcohol consumption is down, I don't believe that implies that it's going to essentially vanish. The PRESSURE to consume alcohol as part of social routine, at least in the US and some parts of the world, has definitely been greatly reduced. The increasing focus on health, quality of life, and longevity also clashes pretty strongly with significant consumption of alcohol. It's probably also worth noting that in a world where your drunken indiscretions may well be immortalized in 4K for the rest of your life, the stakes are a bit higher than they used to be.

Having said that the notion that this indicates some move away from vice seems unfounded, and there are plenty of external factors that could make obliterating yourself with alcohol a more tempting prospect than it is today.
by mrandish | 2025-04-21 20:58:02+00:00
That 400mm f2.8 is a nice lens. I ended up buying a Tamron 70-300mm f2.8 for around $400 to shoot volleyball. It's one step down from top tier premium level but got good reviews and worked well enough. The zoom and constant aperture helped for v-ball. Another upside is that it wasn't as large or heavy as the top premium glass. Another tip for shooting anything like v-ball is to get a good carbon fiber monopod and pair it with an Arca Swiss quick release. Flexible and very fast.

I think to really shoot indoor v-ball well requires a specialized high-end sports camera like the Sony A9-II matched with a 300-600mm f2.8 premium lens. I was shooting with a Sony A1 which is a great all-around top pro camera with fantastic auto-focus ($6k when new) but the A1 was the generation before the flagship cameras came with buffer pre-record which is the killer feature for v-ball. That feature loop records a second or so of full res frames at >20fps so that when you press the shutter button it saves frames up to a second back in time. V-ball evolves so fast it's basically impossible to anticipate the moment of the hit (hitters change up their swing timing on purpose to fake out blockers (and photographers)). Pro sports shooters must develop inhumanely fast twitch reflexes. The new A9-II has that buffer pre-record feature. Having neither pro-level reflexes or the pre-record feature, I was left with "spraying and praying" (and then reviewing for hours).
by reaperducer | 2025-04-21 20:58:07+00:00
They should have embraced the internet and apps.

In some cities, they did, even before Uber existed.

But they still had to pay their drivers a living wage. Uber didn't, and people went with the cheaper fares.

Then there were no more taxis, and all the taxi drivers were making a third the money driving for Uber.
by ramesh31 | 2025-04-21 20:58:37+00:00
As a daily full time Windsurf user, I can emphatically state that it is strictly inferior to multiple free/open source tools like Cline and Claude Code that work directly with Anthropic/OpenAI keys, no "flow credits" involved.

Good on them for catching the enterprise market, but that's about all it is; an enterprise friendly wrapper for a second-rate VSCode extension.
by kmoser | 2025-04-21 20:58:49+00:00
> Am I missing something?

The ability to put fake blue checks on your website isn't the point.

Bluesky (and the web at large) is slowly becoming filled with spam and AI-generated content. Even if you're OK with more spam (not sure why you would be but you do you), why would you be OK with more content generated by non-humans (the vast majority of which attempts to pass as human)? This just makes it harder to find needles of authentic human content in a haystack of slop.

Various levels of verification make it easier to distinguish what's real from not real, for whatever definition of "real" you prefer. Without any such verification, the web just becomes a bigger wasteland.
by tw04 | 2025-04-21 20:58:56+00:00
>Despite all the data about climate change, the thing that is actually shifting us away from fossil fuels is that solar panels are cheap.

It also requires the political will. Texas is showing us that the market is in fact not rational, and will absolutely do something that's universally contrary to everyone's best interests for the sake of grandstanding.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-markets/texas-bi...
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-04-21 20:59:06+00:00
> oh, corporate wording. so you do not really care :D

Better do care a lot about it, and use every syllable of the corporate statement against Microsoft. :-)

I.e. the principle of some martial arts: use the force that the opponent applies against himself/herself.

Addendum: In this particular case

> We hear you loud and clear ..

can be considered as a very official statement from Microsoft that from now on, they cannot claim anymore that they didn't know of something ..., i.e. the hangman's noose is slowly closing. :-)
by Hizonner | 2025-04-21 20:59:19+00:00
OK, but what model would you suggest?

Apple has no adequate way to actually verify who anybody is without (a) forcing them to physically visit one of a small number of offices (it can't be every store), and (b) probably charging a significant fee to cover the cost of doing real verification.

And even that demands assuming that the identifying information on the account is right.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-04-21 20:59:19+00:00
What is the problem this is solving?

The vast majority of abortions are performed because the pregnancy was unwanted, not because the mother’s life was in danger or what have you. But why was the pregnancy unwanted in the first place?

This is the question you must begin with, because the answer cuts to the psychological heart of the matter. The reason is that we have redefined sexual intercourse in terms of sexual pleasure first. We’ve demoted procreation to secondary status instead of recognizing it as the primary reason for sexual intercourse with pleasure characterizing it rather than defining its function. The absurdity of it is apparent given the anatomical, physiological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of sex. All of that for pleasure? This is like claiming the digestive system exists and the act of eating exist for pleasure. We would typically associate with such things gluttony, bulimia, and other eating disorders.

Historically, sexual self-restraint has always been a problem for some more than others, of course. Some have more trouble with restraint with respect to food or drink or whatever. Addictions have always existed. However, the cultural norms surrounding such questions have varied. Some cultures have been puritanical. Some have been depraved. Others have managed to channel sexual appetite in healthy ways that respect the dignity of those involved (which, given its nature, aims toward spousal love and the flourishing of the family, including the parents as parents). Ours is not the latter. In the 1930s, we saw the beginning of the normalization of contraception, and this normalization had the effect of splitting the pleasure of sex from the entirety of the act and promoted it to the status of primary end. This opened the door to the sexual revolution and the sexual exploitation of others, especially women. Abortion, paradoxically, only becomes relevant in this context, because only in a contraceptive context is pregnancy conceived as aberrant and contrary to the nature of the sexual act. So contrary to a successfully waged misinformation campaign by people like Margaret Sanger, abortion rates only rise in a society with a culture that normalizes contraception where it becomes a “solution” for the failure rate of contraception.

Is that what we want? Do we wish to continue to dehumanize ourselves by by outsourcing our humanity? Technology extends human ability or fixes broken human function. Do we want to put the cart before the horse and reinforce that error by building a culture and a technological ecosystem around error instead, and in doing so, entrench ourselves in that error? Instead of technology truly serving the human good, do we want instead to abolish the human in service to a dystopian ideology? This is what addicts do. They serve their addictions and build their lives around them.
by feoren | 2025-04-21 20:59:38+00:00
All models are wrong, but some models are useful. It's not useful to consider 1 prime, so we don't. You're free to invent a new model of math where 1 is prime and see where it takes you; nobody will be offended. This happens all the time: "but what if we could take the square root of a negative number? What then?", etc. 99% of the time, this leads to a theory that is provably inconsistent and therefore useless. Out of the remaining 1%, about 99% of the time it leads to a mathematics that is simply less useful than what we have now. So it goes with making 1 prime. Out of the remaining cases, about 99% of those turn out to be identical to an already existing mathematical theory, which is interesting (and possibly publishable), but not hugely useful. But about 1% of 1% of 1% of the time, these exercises result in actual new math that can tell us new things about reality and solve problems we couldn't solve before.

This is not one of those times.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-21 20:59:44+00:00
I'm curious why Apple has let it get this far that court cases are underway and WaPo is writing an article about it.

What's in it for Apple? Surely it's easy enough to define some kind of verification process based on various pieces -- phone number, credit card, purchase receipt, etc. -- and requiring a police report to be filed or something.

And this isn't like Google or Facebook where accounts are free, preventing manual account recovery from being scalable. People spend thousands of dollars on Apple devices across phones and laptops and more. People who don't spend money on Apple generally aren't keeping their data in iCloud.

I'm confused because it seems like the rational, profitable thing for Apple to do here is to have these procedures for account recovery. So what's stopping them? Is there some kind of huge liability question if they ever facilitate giving access to the wrong person?
by Gibbon1 | 2025-04-21 20:59:54+00:00
For #3 on that list C has that too. And I often use it.

printf( "thing1=%u\n" "thing2=%u\n" "thing3=%u\n" "thing4=%u\n" "thing5=%u\n", thing1, thing2, thing3, thing4, thing5);
by bogtog | 2025-04-21 21:00:03+00:00
> I spent about an hour using Cursor Pro and had used up over 30% of my monthly credits

Sorry, but how is this possible? They give 500 credits in a month for the "premium" queries. I don't even think I'd be able to ask more than one question per minute even with tiny requests. I haven't tried the Agent mode. Does that burn through queries?
by bogwog | 2025-04-21 21:00:19+00:00
What a terrible take. This is the kind of "social pressure" I was talking about.

Open source licensing isn't a party, it's a business decision you make as a participant in the intellectual property economy. If you make a stupid and/or uninformed decision, you're opening yourself up to exploitation. It is victim blaming because this situation is entirely the victim's fault.

I don't even know what you mean by "horizontal aggression", and your comment about peasants makes no sense in this context. How does advocating that people be informed and use appropriate licenses count as in-fighting, or beneficial to big tech companies? If anything it's literally the opposite.
by btilly | 2025-04-21 21:00:26+00:00
Excellent question.

Gravity pulls things in by causing space-time to accelerate in a particular direction. In other words we accelerate towards the Earth at 9.8 meters per second per second because that is what space-time itself does. The space-time that is in our frame of reference accelerates down, carrying us with it. The floor pushes up on us, causing us to accelerate up. Balancing things out so that we remain where we are.

A dense mass will cause flat space-time to start falling in. Enough mass, densely enough, will cause it to fall in so fast that not even light can escape. This is a black hole.

However the Big Bang wasn't a flat space-time. The space-time that was the structure of the universe was moving apart extremely quickly. There was more than enough mass around to create a black hole today. But what it did is cause the expansion rate to slow. Not to stop, reverse, and fall back in on itself into a giant black hole.
by simonw | 2025-04-21 21:00:32+00:00
Right, it's the free Gemini that has this: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#unpaid-services

> When you use Unpaid Services, including, for example, Google AI Studio and the unpaid quota on Gemini API, Google uses the content you submit to the Services and any generated responses to provide, improve, and develop Google products and services and machine learning technologies, including Google's enterprise features, products, and services, consistent with our Privacy Policy.
by rawgabbit | 2025-04-21 21:00:46+00:00
OTOH. The blog mentions that humans excel at novel situations. Such as when there is little training data, when envisioning alternate outcomes, or when recognizing the data is wrong.

The most recent example I can think of is "Frank". In 2021, JPMorgan Chase acquired Frank, a startup founded by Charlie Javice, for $175 million. Frank claimed to simplify the FAFSA process for students. Javice asserted the platform had over 4 million users, but in reality, it had fewer than 300,000. To support her claim, she allegedly hired a data science professor to generate synthetic data, creating fake user profiles. JPMorgan later discovered the discrepancy when a marketing campaign revealed a high rate of undeliverable emails. In March 2025, Javice was convicted of defrauding JPMorgan.

IMO an data expert could have recognized the fake user profiles through the fact he has seen e.g., how messy real data is, know the demographics of would be users of a service like Frank (wealthy, time stressed families), know tell tale signs of fake data (clusters of data that follow obvious "first principles").
by alganet | 2025-04-21 21:01:14+00:00
"Only divisible by itself and 1" is a darn elegant definition.

1, 2 and 3 are kind of special to me. In prime distribution studies, I discovered that they are special. It gets easier for some things if you consider primes only higher or equal to 5. Explaining distribution gets easier, some proofs become more obvious if you do that (tiny example: draw a ulam-like spiral around the numbers of an analog clock. 2 and 3 will become outliers and a distribution will reveal itself along the 1, 5, 7 and 11 diagonals).

Anyways, "only divisible by itself and 1" is a darn elegant definition.
by e-topy | 2025-04-21 21:01:21+00:00
Damn, someone actually read the thing! How rare. All of what you say does make sense, I'll ponder about it, maybe we can have an actual discussion sometime.

I think if you were serious about something like this, you would go and sell to businesses first: productivity would be at an all-time high. But yeah, in today's world, AI everything everywhere. But I'd argue that makes an even bigger point for an item based OS, as everything is equally accessible for agents.

On (6), Plan 9 had a solution to a similar problem in file system mounts. All FS mounts were in a per-process namespace. Mounting file systems does not require special permissions like on Unix, because these mounts only exist within the process tree that creates them, rather than modifying global state.

Anyway, I'll think about this later, it's 11pm here.
by codingmoh | 2025-04-21 21:01:31+00:00
Thanks so much!

Was the model too big to run locally?

That’s one of the reasons I went with phi-4-mini - surprisingly high quality for its size and speed. It handled multi-step reasoning, math, structured data extraction, and code pretty well, all on modest hardware. Phi-1.5 / Phi-2 (quantized versions) also run on raspberry pi as others have demonstrated.
by tromp | 2025-04-21 21:02:04+00:00
Haskell is relatively WTF free as a language, behaving pretty much like the lambda calculus, but the standard libraries have their share of WTFs, such as the Enum instance for Double:

ghci> [0, 0.3 .. 2.0] [0.0,0.3,0.6,0.8999999999999999,1.2,1.5,1.7999999999999998,2.1]

I'd rather not see 2.1 in a range up to 2.0
by dimonomid | 2025-04-21 21:02:39+00:00
That's good news that we have /var/log/socklog/everything/current, but I'm also trying to figure the format. Is it like this? (sourced from chatgpt)

2025-04-21 12:34:56 myhostname myservice: Something happened

If so, then yeah it's totally doable to make this format supported.

Re: config.yaml, yeah I thought of that, but in the long term I rather wanted it to be nerdlogrc.lua, so a Lua script which nerdlog executes on startup. Similar to vim (or rather, more like neovim in this case since it's Lua). Certainly having config.yaml is easier to implement, but in the longer term it may make things more confusing if we also introduce the Lua scripting.
Do countries with denser social graphs have better outcomes?
by 0xWTF | 2025-04-21 21:02:59+00:00
So, this article (1) has an interesting quote: “Our ultimate goal is not just more babies but more families formed.”

Ok, that would tend to suggest stronger nuclear families, which would tend to suggest a stronger aggregate social graph. Is that measurably good? Can adtech companies measure this objectively?

(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/us/politics/trump-birthrate-proposals.html
by florianmartens | 2025-04-21 21:03:04+00:00
The value of clay is is not its code base IMO. Clay connects many providers that each have licenses starting around $100-150/mo. Even if you open source your solution, users would still have to purchase subscriptions individually, manage their usage, etc. This can get expensive quickly. On top, it takes time and is annoying. Lastly, there's complexity to self-hosting the AI and web scraping stuff. I'm unsure if there are many GTM teams willing to put up with hosting this themselves.

Fun fact, you can actually rebuild the entire core functionality of clay using https://pipe0.com with ~1000 lines of code.
The Art of Vanilla Code: Line by Line Control
by 01-_- | 2025-04-21 21:03:31+00:00
There’s something deeply personal about writing code from scratch no frameworks, no bloated dependencies, just pure logic flowing from your fingertips into the editor. When you control every line, the software becomes an extension of your mind. Every decision, every optimization, every quirk is yours. It’s not just about building something that works; it’s about understanding why it works.

In a world where developers increasingly rely on pre-packaged solutions, vanilla coding feels almost rebellious. Why import an entire library for a function you can write in ten lines? Why let a framework dictate your project’s structure when you can shape it organically? The trade-off is time, of course. But the reward is precision—no hidden behaviors, no unexpected updates breaking your work, just clean, intentional execution.

Take my website, (https://chat-to.dev), for example. It’s built with nothing but PHP and vanilla JavaScript. No React, no Laravel, no jQuery—just the raw languages doing exactly what they were designed to do. The backend processes requests in straightforward PHP scripts, handling logic without layers of abstraction. The frontend responds with lean JavaScript, manipulating the DOM directly instead of waiting for a virtual one to reconcile. The result? A site that loads instantly, behaves predictably, and remains entirely within my control.

This approach isn’t for everyone. It demands patience, a willingness to debug without the safety net of stack overflow threads for obscure framework errors. But there’s a clarity to it, a satisfaction in knowing that if something breaks, you’ll trace it back to your own code—not some distant maintainer’s decisions.

Programming this way keeps the craft alive. It’s not just about what the computer understands; it’s about what you understand. And in a landscape where convenience often overshadows mastery, that understanding is becoming rare. Maybe that’s why holding onto it feels so important.
by akra | 2025-04-21 21:04:19+00:00
That's kinda obvious that's their goal especially with the current focus on coding of most of the AI labs in most announcements - it may be augmentation now but that isn't the end game. Everything else these AI labs do, while fun seems like at most a "meme" to most people in relative terms.

Most Copilot style setup's (not just in this domain) are designed to gather data and train/gather feedback before full automation or downsizing. If they outright said it they may not have got the initial usage needed to do so from developers. Even if it is augmentation it feels like at least to me the other IT roles (e.g. BA's, Solution Engineers maybe?) are safer than SWE's going forward. Maybe its because dev's have a skin in the game and without AI its not that easy of a job over time makes it harder for them to see. Respect for SWE as a job in general has fallen in at least my anecdotal conversations mainly due to AI - after all long term career prospects are a major factor in career value, social status and personal goals for most people.

Their end goal is to democratize/commoditize programming with AI as low hanging fruit which by definition reduces its value per unit of output. The fact that there is so much discussion on this IMO shows that many even if they don't want to admit it there is a decent chance that they will succeed at this goal.