MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HFguy | 2025-04-16 16:00:27+00:00
"And as for your second paragraph, it has that thing I don't understand that so many people seem to have in their brains that if you explain why a thing is true, it is no longer true. I do not understand it."

This is an interesting observation. I've seen the same thing.

I think the clue is in the "it is a choice"...perhaps they are perceiving seeing some sort of judgement being made of Atari implicit in your argument???

In other words, it can be true at the same time that (1) The are not moving on and (2) It is a choice.

And #2 does not invalidate #1.
by giardini | 2025-04-16 16:01:22+00:00
It isn't strong vs weak. But the lack of such experiences sets you apart from others and marks you as literally inexperienced. It does not mark you as smarter or stronger, but as one who simply "has no idea!" You'll never know (until you do!8-))

I revisited the "stove experience" several weeks ago. While at a convenience store I entered the restroom to find the sink water running full blast. This only increased my urgency and aided the process (as flowing, dripping, or running water often does). Once relieved, I walked over to the sink and plunged both hands into the cold whirling water in the basin. At once I was caught between my (vividly-imagined) thought of cool swirling relief and the sensory reality of boiling hot water - the former wished to enjoy the pleasant ice-cold flowing water in the sink and the latter could not withdraw fast enough.

Life provides you with a sequence of such experiences:

- a pre-adolescent viewing with puzzlement his older siblings as they mature and begin to participate in courtship,

- falling in love,

- making love, etc.

Some people never have certain experiences. We're all different to some degree b/c of that.

Go ahead, put your hand on the stove. But be careful about touching that woman!8-))

P.S. Yes, I turned the sink off, depriving the next poor soul of my worldly experience.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-16 16:01:36+00:00
> When Trump said that new manufacturing facilities would be fast-tracked to being able to build their own on-site power plants because the grid is "at risk of bombing", I've come to think that the whole political debate is really about: What the hell are we going to do if WWIII happens?

I'm not buying that whole argument. At all. Because this looks too much like a "lets find favorable talking points for the middling plans we already put in motion"-exercise.

Can you honestly argue that current economic policy and decisionmaking was mainly driven by strategic military interests and planning, as opposed to Trump being a big fan of tariffs as a concept?

Because I don't think you can. And I think we don't need more than a glance at the liberation day proposals to identify this; if the aim was to war-proof US supply chains, then you would expect a big focus on military relevance of tariffed goods, coupled with long term investments into defense-relevant local industry and a glut of defense-spending in general.

Instead we got blanket tariffs that were so ill-conceived, they mostly had to be rolled back/suspended the next day, and generally pretty much no apparent guiding focus or much thought at all.

Concerning possible war: Russia is not a credible military opponent to the US and is not gonna be one within decades, either. Their land army basically got stopped by a country a fifth of their size on mainly donated (and frequently old) western equipment, and the Russian Navy embarassed itself even worse.

China is a somewhat credible opponent, but what would they even go to war over that would actually affect the US? Panama? They might be more serious about taking Taiwan back, but I honestly doubt that the US would involve itself in that business too much anyway; considering how the whole support for the Ukraine, whose territorial integrity it formally agreed on to protect, amounted to some military hand-me-downs and a bit of intel sharing (no longer even that from what I know?), I would NOT hold my breath waiting for US carriers in a Taiwan invasion...
by mcbuilder | 2025-04-16 16:01:41+00:00
How many students rely on AI, is that number really going up?

My son is 14 and knows about AI (I'm a researcher in the space, so I've been mentioning advances in it for years). He seems to code with some of his peers, and it seems like normal to me (python scripts, HTML, js type stuff written the old fasioned way [written by hand or copy pasting into a notebook.exe equivalent :P]). I try to be super honest with him, and I tell him AI is incredible, but we also joke about it and I explain the incredible drawbacks of vibe coding, especially while learning.

I wonder overall though how LLMs are going to effect CS education. Will students avoid using the tools, or will they be accepted? CS homework projects were always easier to cheat on vs say fine art, since of the ease one can copy and paste code, but AI tools makes trivial work of many homework exercises that would in theory be harder to implicate someone.
by nkrisc | 2025-04-16 16:01:41+00:00
Relevant only by virtue of also being about historical children’s drawings, but it reminds of another example of a child’s drawings preserved for us to see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim

> … Onfim, was a boy who lived in Novgorod (now Veliky Novgorod, Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark, which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod.

I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial or surprising, but it’s easy to forget that people who came long before us were really no different from us (or put differently, were no different than them), and it helps to better understand history if you think of them that way.
by function_seven | 2025-04-16 16:01:52+00:00
My brother and I bought the same album back in 1994. Stone Temple Pilots—Purple.

I had it on CD, he bought the tape.

The CD sounded (obviously) so much better than his tape. But a little while later I made my own tape copy of the CD, and my copy sounded really close to the CD! Way better than his store-bought copy.

Those bastards didn't even have the decency to use Type II cassettes for the released album.

A Type II (or even better, Type IV-Metal) tape could sound pretty damn good. Still sucked to have to rewind or fast-forward, though.

(Also, Dolby NR was terrible. I'd rather have the hiss than have the muted highs)
by peeters | 2025-04-16 16:01:56+00:00
Is there a way to do non-scalar multiplication? E.g if I want to say "what is the sum of three dice rolls" (ignoring the fact that that's not a normal distro) I want to do 1~6 * 3 = 1~6 + 1~6 + 1~6 = 6~15. But instead it does 1~6 * 3 = 3~18. It makes it really difficult to do something like "how long will it take to complete 1000 tasks that each take 10-100 days?"
by Dumblydorr | 2025-04-16 16:02:17+00:00
Michelson and his experiments on the aether not existing were enormously influential to theoretical physics. “No notion” is incorrect, they had numerous home grown talents in physics, on top of the huge influx of talent from 1930s immigration of European scientists.

The USA being a beacon of hope and enlightenment in those days stands in stark contrast to the isolationist, anti-intellectual, anti-research, and frankly xenophobic policies pursued by the current admin, courts, and congress.
by masto | 2025-04-16 16:02:27+00:00
The C64 starts up straight into BASIC from ROM. Unlike some other contemporary computers, it doesn't attempt to boot from any external devices (except the cartridge port). There isn't really a DOS in the usual sense. Apart from simple support for loading and saving programs, and a very basic channel I/O facility, everything else is handled by the firmware in the disk drive, which has its own 6502 and operating system.

For example, there's no command for getting a directory listing. You type `LOAD "$",8` (8 being the disk drive), and the drive pretends there's a BASIC program called `$` that happens to contain a directory listing you can then look at with `LIST`. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_DOS#/media/File:Comm...)

By default, LOAD loads tokenized BASIC programs, but if you add an extra `,1` to the command, the file can contain arbitrary data starting at any location in memory. You could use this to load a machine language program and then run it with `SYS <location>`. Clever programmers figured out they could skip this step by having their file overwrite a vector that gets called after the load completes and jump right into their code, resulting in every Commodore kid having being able to type `LOAD"*",8,1` on autopilot.

I got distracted by other trivia (I grew up with this computer and it was hugely influential and I will adore it forever) from getting to the actual point: The C64 uses a variant of the 6502, the 6510. It has a special register for swapping out any combination of the three ROMs (BASIC, KERNAL (sic), and the character ROM) plus I/O registers that overlay portions of the 64 address space. If your code doesn't use those, you can access the RAM they are hiding by turning them off.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-16 16:02:30+00:00
If you want to do document similarity ranking in general it works to find nearby points in word frequency space but not as well as: (1) applying an autoencoder or another dimensional reduction technique to the vectors or (2) running a BERT-like model and pooling over the documents [1].

I worked on a search engine for patents that used the first, our evaluations showed it was much better than other patent search engines and we had no trouble selling it because customers could feel the difference in demos.

I tried dimensional reduction on the BERT vectors and in all cases I tried I found this made relevance worse. (BERT has learned a lot already which is being thrown away, there isn't more to learn from my particular documents)

I don't think either of these helps with the "finding articles authored by the same person" because one assumes the same person always uses the same words whereas documents about the topic use synonyms that will be turned up by (1) and (2). There is a big literature on the topic of determining authorship based on style

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry

[1] With https://sbert.net/ this is so easy.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-04-16 16:02:41+00:00
Oh, fun! These came up on HN a few years ago[0]. Recycling some of comment from then:

The "Tower Sound and Communications" (TSC) company that recorded many of these was located a few miles up the road from my home town. The booming male voice on the recordings also sounded familiar to me, too. I'm fairly certain I heard him on the local radio station that my father played over the PA system in our family grocery store when I was growing up.

Turns out that Cecil "Lee" Rutherford, the voice on the recordings, did VO work for local radio stations near my home town, too. He died in November, 2020.

He was involved in some ventures that persist today. His company EchoSat[1] (which I'd heard of because I had some involvement in the convenience store / retail petroleum industry) merged with an IT security firm to become "ControlScan", doing PCI testing stuff because gas stations and credit cards.

Quoting the obituary[2]:

He started Tower Sound and Communications while in Greenville to pursue a venture that would eventually spearhead "in store" broadcasting for companies such as Kmart (he became the voice of Kmart) and Jamesway which evolved into another corporation in KY called EchoSat that would use satellite technology in helping with multiple stores for POS processing and security.

There's an interview with Lee Rutherford in 2011.[3] He absolutely still has that "radio voice".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25271464

[1] https://www.dandb.com/businessdirectory/towercommunicationsg...

[2] https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailyadvocate/obituary.asp...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQqoQL3pkyI
by Topfi | 2025-04-16 16:02:57+00:00
I tentatively agree that LLMs have reached somewhat of a ceiling at this stage and diversifying would make sense at this stage, in any other industry. But as others pointed out, OAI and others have attached their valuation directly to their definition of achieving “AGI”. Any pivot from that, if it were realistic in the coming years (my opinion: it isn’t), would be foolhardy and go against investors, so in turn, this is clearly admitting that even sama doesn’t see AGI as possible in the near term.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-16 16:03:06+00:00
yes. cassette tape was a shit format. the longer the cassette, the thinner the tape itself was. the type of tape formulation also played into this. the more brown the tape was, the lower quality. higher end tapes were much darker nearly black.

tapes could also stretch which would give you some of that wow. the tape duplicators motors/belts could wear out so that even if the original tape used to make the dubs was solid, the dubs would have that wow when played back in other cassette players that turned at a more consistent speed than the recorder. dirty heads on the dubbers would also lower the overall sound quality.

I used to make cassette dubs with professional dubbers for years. We'd clean the heads after every X number of passes. The value of X changed depending on the length of the tapes used. I'd check for loose belts at the beginning of any dub order. For primarily talking content, we'd use the more brown colored tape. For music content, we'd use the darker tapes. At least that's what we'd recommend, but plenty of people would choose the cheaper tape regardless.
by waffletower | 2025-04-16 16:03:22+00:00
And Gemini gave the Yes-man treatment to my statement here :D "In summary: Your assessment aligns well with the technical realities of diffusion models and the practical, legal, and safety considerations large companies face when deploying powerful generative AI tools publicly. It's entirely feasible that Imagen 3's underlying architecture could support image inputs, but Google has chosen not to expose this capability publicly due to the associated risks and complexities."
by roughly | 2025-04-16 16:03:23+00:00
I think the point is to create uncertainty, though, or to at least capture it. You mention tacking a plus/minus range to $50, but my suspicion is that people's expected plus/minus would be narrower than the actual - I think the primary value of the example is that it makes it clear there's a very real possibility of the outcome being negative, which I don't think most people would acknowledge when they got the initial positive result. The increased uncertainty and the decreased confidence in the result is a feature, not a bug.
by zdragnar | 2025-04-16 16:04:10+00:00
> Knowing how to use it, what to rely upon, what to verify and building in effective processes is the key. But today AI is at its worst and it already exceeds human performance in many areas.. it's only going in one direction.

I suppose this is the difference between an optimist and a pessimist. No matter how much better the tool gets, I don't see people getting better, and so I don't see the addition of LLM chatbots as ever improving things on the whole.

Yes, expert users get expert results. There's a reason why I use a chainsaw to buck logs instead of a hand saw, and it's also much the same reason that my wife won't touch it.
by mbesto | 2025-04-16 16:05:00+00:00
> The historical reality is the more free a free market is, the better it performs.

Performs for whom? The central idea of a free market is that is provides better goods and services and thus better outcomes for civilization. We have countless examples of innovations that have come through government intervention (internet, space grade goods and services, GPS, etc. just to name a few), so you simply cannot say in a deterministic way that a free market "performs better". This is simply NOT true.

FWIW - I'm a free market advocate, but I recognize markets and areas where externalities cannot be controlled for and thus require a centralized body to regulate.
by the__alchemist | 2025-04-16 16:05:13+00:00
This checks out. If y'all haven't specced a modern PC: Coolers for GPU and CPU are huge, watercooling is now officially recommended for new CPUs, and cases are ventilated on all sides. Disk bays are moved out of the main chamber to improve airflow. Fans everywhere. Front panels surface areas are completely covered in fans.
by dmonitor | 2025-04-16 16:05:32+00:00
The nature of 4chan makes it more difficult to distinguish from just normal posting. There's not any kind of paper trail to look at and potentially ID the posters.

It's also somewhat expected on the site from a cultural standpoint? Having a recognizable posting pattern gives flavor to a system that is otherwise composed of completely interchangeable posters. Like /v/ has one guy that constantly makes threads that are designed to devolve as quickly as possible into posting images of anthropomorphic lizards. It's not much of a nuisance so much as it makes the place feel comprised of genuine people.
by 9rx | 2025-04-16 16:05:58+00:00
> Can you honestly argue that current economic policy and decisionmaking was mainly driven by strategic military interests and planning, as opposed to Trump being a big fan of tariffs as a concept?

Well, like we established in a discussion here yesterday, argument only takes place if you don't know. It is the mind's way to explore and learn. So, yes, obviously I could as I don't have enough information to know for sure. If I did, there would be nothing argue about, now would there? I'd already know everything there is to know. It would be a pointless endeavour.

But I don't think an argument is what you are actually looking for. It seems you're simply looking for someone to do free work for you. As great as that may sound to you, there is no reason for anyone else to cater to that. For the sake of good faith, I'll spare you anything more that would be serving to me.
by delichon | 2025-04-16 16:07:42+00:00
I got 3 correct matches out of 20, and I've had about 6 accounts total (using one at a time), with at least a fair number of comments in each. I guess that means that my word choices are more outliers than yours or there is just more to match. So it's not really good enough to reliably identify alt accounts, but it is quite suggestive.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-16 16:08:00+00:00
Personally I like this approach a lot

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.ma...

I think other methods are more fashionable today

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/manifold.html

particularly multi-dimension scaling, but personally I think tSNE plots are less pathological (they don't have as many of these crazy cusps that make me think it's projecting down from a higher-dimensional surface which is near-parallel to the page)

After processing documents with BERT I really like the clusters generated by the simple and old k-Means algorithm

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.cl...

It has the problem that it always finds 20 clusters if you set k=20 and a cluster which really oughta be one big cluster might get treated as three little clusters but the clusters I get from it reflect the way I see things.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-16 16:08:09+00:00
> you're an "avid user" now, but "I saw plenty of content from Tumblr in 2014 despite not actively using it," you said upthread just a little while ago.

I was an avid user of 4chan, not Tumblr.

> I'm speaking of what I have observed among a cohort in which you have, I repeat, affirmatively disclaimed membership, rendering your observations of your own behavior moot in this context.

You wrote:

>in that the deepest and most shameful secret of both websites' most avid users is that they have always been both websites' most avid users.

The plain reading of this claim is that the power users of both websites used both websites. I have no reason to think that this is true, and you haven’t made any argument as to why you think it is true. The way you are reading what you have written would make your claim tautological: i.e. “The users who used both websites used both websites.”
by antirez | 2025-04-16 16:08:11+00:00
Indeed, but my problem is: all those vector databases (including Redis!) are always thought as useful in the context of learned embeddings, BERT, Clip, ... But I really wanted to show that vectors are very useful and interesting outside that space. Now, I also like encoders very well, but I have the feeling that the Vector Sets, as a data structure, needs to be presented as a general tool. So I really cherry picked a use case that I liked and where neural networks were not present. Btw, Redis Vector Sets support dimensionality reduction by random projection natively in the case the vector is too redundant. Yet, in my experiments, I found that using binary quantization (also supported) is a better way to save CPU/space compared to RP.
by amiga386 | 2025-04-16 16:08:33+00:00
From "The music theory of V A P O R W A V E" where Adam Neely not only explains and critiques Vaporwave but takes a big steaming dump on it by creating the track that captures and parodies its entire aesthetic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s

He got his source material directly from this archive.org collection, as it says in the opening titles:

"On October 2, 2015, Mark Davis posted his prized collection of digitized K-mart elevator music cassette tapes to archive.org, free for anybody to use.

Vaporwave producers rejoiced."
by 3dsnano | 2025-04-16 16:09:22+00:00
> AI is an amplifier of what you are

reading this made me go back to a Douglas Englebart line that has been deep in my head: these tools are for "augmenting human intellect." i think it still holds water in my experience with LLMs. i searched it up and found his paper on the subject (what a surprise, i had no idea this existed).

https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engel...
by swdev281634 | 2025-04-16 16:10:27+00:00
I downloaded and extracted the files in a fresh Linux virtual machine with tools for viewing Word, Excel, and PDF documents. After reviewing the contents for about 30 minutes, the data appears technically authentic—not AI-generated—but nothing particularly noteworthy stood out.

The files "Vulnerabilities/Fetched Data.txt" appear to be output from an automated security scanner that targeted public-facing web servers. Some directory labels are inaccurate. For instance, a company listed as a crypto exchange—Cryptopro—is actually an IT consulting firm focused on cryptography and PKI.

A number of Word, Excel, and PDF files containing corporate reports and similar materials appear to be publicly accessible online and even indexed by search engines. I was able to locate several by searching their titles.

One file, "Part 1/Report those Russian ringleaders/russRingleadersPerDFUNAFO.txt", seems to be the likely source of the "Kremlin Assets in the West" mention. It’s a brief list of Twitter accounts and may have been assembled through open-source intelligence methods.

While the leak might contain some mistakenly published or sensitive material, I didn’t come across anything as significant or dramatic as implied by the article linked.