MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bob1029 | 2025-04-03 23:23:10+00:00
> Automation has “tells” - little things they do differently from what humans would do

This tends to stand out like a sore thumb once you start looking at things from the perspective of the frequency domain. Even if you use an RNG to delay activity, the properties of the RNG itself can be leveraged against it. You may think taping a pencil to a desk fan and having that click the mouse button is being clever wrt undetectable RNG, but you must realize that the power grid runs at 50/60hz and induction motors are ~fixed to this frequency.

There is also the entire space of correlation. A bot running on random pixel events with perfectly human response times, while appearing "random", is not correlated with anything meaningful outside that one pixel being monitored. You could check for what are effectively [near] causality violations to determine the probability that the player is actually human.
by jw_cook | 2025-04-03 23:23:11+00:00
I also assumed those were going to be links, but after a second of confusion I really liked the side pane with animations. It adds a lot to the article and it's more pleasant than the usual alternatives (lightbox on top of the text, or opening a bunch of tabs).

Off the top of my head, I'm not sure how else you'd visually communicate "this bit is interactive on click/hover but isn't a link." Maybe a different text color (without underline), background color, outline (replaced by the colored highlight bar on hover), or a slightly larger and more distinct icon to replace the generic 'image' icon?
by eaglelamp | 2025-04-03 23:24:27+00:00
If we are going to have a general discussion about copyright reform at a national level, I'm all for it. If we are going to let billion dollar corporations break the law to make even more money and invent legal fictions after the fact to protect them, I'm completely against it.

Training a model is not equivalent to training a human. Freedom of information for a mountain of graphics cards in a privately owned data center is not the same as freedom of information for flesh and blood human beings.
by jaredsilver | 2025-04-03 23:24:35+00:00
Correct, we're a lean team that moves very quickly, so availability for synchronous communication is important to us.

That said, the expectation is not that you're sitting idly at your computer for an extra 15 minutes at the end of the day if you've knocked out your work and are at a good stopping point. We hire adults and treat them as such :)

Also, many folks on the team have familial and other responsibilities that they need to tackle during this window, and the team is very flexible about scheduling around these (especially given advance notice when possible).
by throwanem | 2025-04-03 23:24:41+00:00
All else equal, I wouldn't find it cause for concern. In a discussion where being able to keep the distinction clear in mind at all times absolutely is table stakes, though? I could be fairly blamed for a sprinkle of hyperbole perhaps, but surely you see how an error that is trivial in many contexts would prove so uncommonly severe a flaw in this one, alongside which I reiterate the unusually obtuse nature of the error in this example.

(For those no longer able to follow complex English grammar: Yeah, I exaggerate, but there is no point trying to participate in this kind of discussion if that's the sort of basic error one has to start from, and the especially weird nature of this example of the mistake also points to LLMs synthesizing the result of consciousness rather than experiencing it.)
by dmamills | 2025-04-03 23:25:16+00:00
I can echo your sentiment. Art is the manifestation of creativity, and to create any good art you need to train in whatever medium you choose. For the decade I've been a professional programmer, I've always argued that writing code was a creative job.

It's been depressing to listen to people pretend that LLM generated code is "the same thing". To trivialize the thoughtful lessons one has learned honing their craft. It's the same reason the Studio Ghilbi AI image trend gives me the ick.
by varenc | 2025-04-03 23:25:49+00:00
I turned this into a greasemonkey script: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/531780-universal-video-fix...

That can be configured to run automatically on every site, and it uses the MutationObserver API to automatically fix any newly added/modified <video> elements on the page. Seems to work on Snapchat and Instagram so far, but breaks some functionality. Op's chrome extension, with bespoke support for Instagram, likely offers a much better experience. This is just more universal.
by Johanx64 | 2025-04-03 23:25:53+00:00
>Base evolutionary instincts to survive don't translate to humans living in complex modern societies acting in their self-interest.

What are you talking about?

Base evolutionary pressures and instincts have translated in exactly that.

Complex modern societies, and emergent behaviors and strategies arise from agents acting in their own self-interest (organizing in groups or otherwise to further their goals).

The idea that not only people don't act in their self-interest, but you - in fact - know better what's in their best interest is truly some mid-tier thinking. Or that you have some unique ability to know what's in their best self-interest, but they... for some reason... don't.

Now it doesn't mean that acting in self-interest doesn't sometimes result in ruin, because it surely can! That however doesn't mean that all these choices weren't made with self-interest in mind, front and center, despite people claiming otherwise.

The groups and societies that enact the winning, most sensible strategy, economic and industrial policy will win out. Those individually or in groups that don't, will go to shitter and or be selected out. It's that simple.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-03 23:25:55+00:00
Agree. The base claims about LLMs getting bigger, more popular, and capturing people's imagination are right. Those claims are as easy as it gets, though.

Look into the specific claims and it's not as amazing. Like the claim that models will require an entire year to train, when in reality it's on the order of weeks.

The societal claims also fall apart quickly:

> Censorship is widespread and increasing, as it has for the last decade or two. Big neural nets read posts and view memes, scanning for toxicity and hate speech and a few other things. (More things keep getting added to the list.) Someone had the bright idea of making the newsfeed recommendation algorithm gently ‘nudge’ people towards spewing less hate speech; now a component of its reward function is minimizing the probability that the user will say something worthy of censorship in the next 48 hours.

This is a common trend in rationalist and "X-risk" writers: Write a big article with mostly safe claims (LLMs will get bigger and perform better!) and a lot of hedging, then people will always see the article as primarily correct. When you extract out the easy claims and look at the specifics, it's not as impressive.

This article also shows some major signs that the author is deeply embedded in specific online bubbles, like this:

> Most of America gets their news from Twitter, Reddit, etc.

Sites like Reddit and Twitter feel like the entire universe when you're embedded in them, but when you step back and look at the numbers only a fraction of the US population are active users.
by DennisP | 2025-04-03 23:26:54+00:00
It's not just about what Trump wants. Most Republicans in Congress would like to get reelected.

In the comment above you suggested there's nothing congressional Democrats can do. That is incorrect. Any time the Republicans don't have unanimity, and any time they need sixty votes in the Senate, the Democrats have leverage. They need the guts, and/or the understanding of basic game theory, to use it.

Calling me an "armchair expert" and waving your hands about how things are complicated is not a counterargument.
by exoverito | 2025-04-03 23:27:17+00:00
Read the Twitter files. The government was actively involved in censorship. Zuckerberg has also stated the FBI was demanding certain posts be removed / demoted, users shadow banned, etc. The CIA also infiltrates and subverts many organizations and platforms. Wouldn't be surprised if they operate here, they've definitely been manipulating Reddit for at least the past decade.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-03 23:27:34+00:00
> He has a point that in a society with strong legal protections on freedom of expression, copyright is one of the main tools the state has to stop expression that is deleterious to the ruling class.

If the State wishes to prevent expression that is deleterious to the ruling class, it will simply not strongly protect freedom of expression. "Legal protection" isn't an exogenous factor that the State responds to, it is a description of the actions of the State.
by tialaramex | 2025-04-03 23:27:46+00:00
Election is a bad way to choose almost anything. The enthusiasm of Americans for adding yet more elected roles rather than, say, having anything done by anybody competent is part of how they got here. The only place elections are even a plausible choice is political office - with an election and as close as you can to universal suffrage now the idiots running things are everybody's fault, although Americans even managed to screw that up pretty good. Sortition would probably be cheaper, but elections are fine for this purpose.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-04-03 23:28:38+00:00
I've only read the marketing materials of closed models. So they could be lying, too. But I don't think CoT is something you can do with pre-CoT models via prompting and context manipulation. You can do something that looks a little like CoT, but the model won't have been trained specifically on how to make good use of it and will treat it like Q&A context.
by femto | 2025-04-03 23:28:48+00:00
Norfolk Island is part of Australia. Logically it would be swept up in the 10% tariff on Australia. It has no exports to the US, that being the US government's justification for tariffs over 10%, let alone an individual 29% tariff.

A comparison would be another country putting a 10% tariff on the US, but singling out Rhode Island for its own 29% tariff.
by timacles | 2025-04-03 23:29:16+00:00
I will read into it thank you.

Yes current crops of billionaires aren’t particularly different, but the methods they have access to are increasingly detached from any real world value. And due to the overall wealth of the US and money in the world in general, their ability to create capital out of nothing is on the very extreme end of the spectrum.

They are driven by tunnel vision and are distorting the very concept of money and the purpose it has to serve in society
by s09dfhks | 2025-04-03 23:29:20+00:00
> present the players with a bot who's purpose is to be un-hitt-able unless the player is cheating

Escape from Tarkov had/has something vaguely similar to this. They'll put a very valuable piece of loot in an inaccessible room under the map or inside a locked car and monitor which accounts pick it up. I think Call of Duty warzone did it as well with the fake enemies that only accounts suspected of cheating will see
by EvanAnderson | 2025-04-03 23:29:50+00:00
For me the frustrations with NT 4.0 are all the reboots associated with changing settings, and the lack of plug 'n play (for USB devices). Those things aside it runs well.

Windows 2000 gets you a lot of quality-of-life improvements w/ a tremendous amount of bloat.

re: uptime - I've seen NT 4.0 machines w/ multi-year uptimes. I actually saw one running Microsoft Exchange w/ a >2 year uptime. I was shocked.
by rglullis | 2025-04-03 23:30:16+00:00
> It seems most people have fully assimilated the idea that information itself must be entirely subsumed into an oppressive, proprietary, commercial apparatus.

No, the idea is that rules needed to be changed in a way that can are valid for everyone, not just for mega corporations who are trying to exploit other's works and gatekeep the it behind "AI".
by bawolff | 2025-04-03 23:32:12+00:00
Keep in mind that wikimedia takes a rather strict view. In real life the edge cases of copyright tend to be a bit risk-based - what is the chance someone sues you? What is the chance the judge agrees with them?

Not to mention that wikimedia commons, which tries to be a globally reusable repository ignores fair use (which is context dependent), which covers a lot of the cases where copyright law is just being reduculous.
by ifyouknewone | 2025-04-03 23:32:27+00:00
fairly certain I dethroned all content tools.

What started as a meme has unexpectedly turned into a project worth sharing. After showing it around to a few people, I’ve gained some users, and I’m beginning to believe I might be on to something here.

I’m a marketer with 20 years of experience, highly tech-enabled but not a coder by any stretch of the imagination. While I can’t write a single line of code, I deeply understand how applications work and the challenges involved in building them. Likely thanks to my ADHD and some advanced pattern recognition skills.

One thing I’ve always hated is trying to create good content or blog copy using traditional big LLMs. Yes, they’ve come a long way, but the output always feels too "annunciated" and "exaggerated.” Even when you use brand voice documents to guide them, the result is rarely closer than 65% to something actually shippable. That still leaves a ton of manual editing on my end.

So naturally, I started asking myself: "What if I built my own solution?"
by EvanAnderson | 2025-04-03 23:32:28+00:00
The shop I worked for, back in the day, got some of the technicians parallel ZIP drives. It was a godsend to copy the Windows 95 CAB files to the hard disk drive from the ZIP drive and run the upgrade from there, versus feeding the machine floppies.

If you were really luck you were working in a site w/ Novell Netware and you could just copy the CAB files down from the Netware server. >smile<
by layoric | 2025-04-03 23:34:02+00:00
Also somewhat strangely, I've found Python output has remained bad, especially for me with dataframe tasks/data analysis. For remembering matplotlib syntax I still find most of them pretty good, but for handling datagframes, very bad and extremely counter productive.

Saying that, for typed languages like TypeScript and C#, they have gotten very good. I suspect this might be related to the semantic information can be found in typed languages, and hard to follow unstructured blobs like dataframes, and there for, not well repeated by LLMs.
by card_zero | 2025-04-03 23:34:15+00:00
The point is that Japanese has some word for kabuki, while English would have to borrow the word, or coin a new one, or indeed repurpose a word. Without a word, an English speaker would have to resort to a short essay every time the concept was needed, though in practice of course would coin a word quickly.

Hence jargon and formal logic, or something. And surfer slang and txtspk.
by jacobgkau | 2025-04-03 23:36:18+00:00
I did a Google search because a wife not being allowed to have her husband present during childbirth sounded too egregious to be true. I found a single Today article about one specific hospital in New York enacting that policiy (NewYork-Presbyterian). That's not nearly widespread enough to apply to any story of a COVID-era childbirth you hear about, FYI.
by ryandamm | 2025-04-03 23:36:31+00:00
This may not be a particularly popular opinion, but current copyright laws in the US are pretty clearly in favor of training an AI as a transformative act, and covered by fair use. (I did confirm this belief in conversation with an IP attorney earlier this week, by the way, though I myself am not a lawyer.)

The best-positioned lawsuits to win, like NYTimes vs. OpenAI/MS, is actually based on violating terms of use, rather than infringing at training time.

Emitting works that violate copyright is certainly possible, but you could argue that the additional entropy required to pass into the model (the text prompt, or the random seed in a diffusion model) is necessary for the infringement. Regardless, the current law would suggest that the infringing action happens at inference time, not training.

I'm not making a claim that the copyright should work that way, merely that it does today.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-03 23:36:56+00:00
So I'm fascinated with military culture and how systems work on this scale (ie millions of employees). And one interesting aspect is the E4 Mafia [1].

For those that don't know, you're generally either a commissioned officer (with ranks from 0-1 and up) or enlisted (E-1 to E-9). Some branches have warrant officers too but let's ignore that.

So if you join as an enlisted you start off as a private in the Army (it's called something else in different branches). By the time you finish bootcamp you're an E-2 private, possibly an E-3 (Private First Class). If you're not an E-3 it's automatic promotion after ~6 months assumpting you don't have any red flags AFAIK.

By the time you make it to E-4 (Corporal in the Army) you kinda know how things work BUT you're also in the last rank before you're in a leadership position. The next position (E-5, Sergeant in the Army) is a noncomissioned officer ("NCO"). Some people want to avoid that so they kinda hang around E-4 far longer than they should and they build up a body of knowledge on how to get things done. Or they may have been a higher rank and get busted down from an Article 15 (or NJP or whatever the specific branch calls it).

Requisitions can be a huge issue in the military, evne for simple things like office supplies. So you may find that E-4s can "acquire" needed supplies from other units. NCOs, Staff NCOs and command tend to be aware of it but will ignore it because it kinda needs to happen. And those E-4s are called the "E4 Mafia".

This, I believe, is the kind of "rule breaker" this post is referring to.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEgh-w4FIFc
by pmags | 2025-04-03 23:37:02+00:00
A subset of HN contributors continuously object to (and flag) any post suggesting that current US federal policy is destroying our scientific and technological infrastucture.

NOAA, USAID, USDA, CDC, NASA, NIH, etc. all represents hundred of millions of dollars and millions of person years of scientific effort.

The DOGE-ies and their ilk are flushing that all down the toilet. The notion that they're saving the US any money would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-03 23:38:07+00:00
" Our costs go up as they need to rent and make purchases too." Would you support planned population control when it comes to births as well? 2 child policies? Are you pro-abortion because it means less competition for housing/jobs?

Are you for government controlled population resettlement of American citizens within the United States to level out where housing demand is high versus low?

My family all spoke German and lived in a german speaking town in Iowa (a state that 'their people' flooded with their immigration without asking the American's that lived there) up until WW2, they are American and American culture, but your proposal would have deported them because they didn't speak English/were changing the culture in ways that can't be managed and banned them from moving there. My mom a descendant of 'non-assimulatable Germans corrupting culture in America' was a controller at multiple software companies in the Bay Area. Sun-bleached blond blue eyed me played high school football (a sport of immigrant kids arguing over rules of the british sports it ended up springing from), surfed (why are Americans importing polynesian culture and ruining America?), restored muscle cars (America is polluting it's culture popularizing the GTO, it doesn't even have an English language name), and wrote software in Santa Cruz (Bay Area software owes hugely to immigrants).

The amount of AMAZING people, the ginormous amount of talent capital the Bay Area gained when Tiananmen happened causing a huge portion of the Chinese students in the US to want to/be allowed to stay makes me call BS on whatever fear mongering you are putting in your China argument that you think can't be addressed by standard laws. I love chinese people. Heck I love China, have you been there? Yeah there are differences that need to be addressed, but how about we address them instead of using those issues/differences to delegitimize an entire population of people?

Immigration is HUGELY beneficials to the US. Do you care about money? It costs minimum $250,000 to the parents to have a child. Another $10-20,000 per year in schooling costs to the government Added insurance cost to businesses when children are born/added to the plan. Instead of more housing like you would like, families tend to prefer larger, more suburban homes, reducing housing density and therefor reducing supply and raising costs. To get a wholy formed new worker for free is a huge boost to the country.

There is a town in Santa Cruz called Watsonville. I'm pretty sure it would meet your culture whatever BS because it is heavily latino so wrongculture. Guess what, before that when you probably would have given it a pass in your 'culture' test, it was Polish. And guess what, it didn't meet the THEN culture America First test of being American because it was filled with eastern Europeans poles.
by overfeed | 2025-04-03 23:38:17+00:00
> That is true, but it does not prove that capital has no borders ( original point of contention ).

Which is easier to execute: legally investing on a goat project on Mongolia or Djibouti over 2 years vs legally living there for 2 years?

It's self evident that there are far fewer hurdles for capital to transcend national borders than people. I am not certain if your argument is that the existence of minimal friction proves that there are borders for capital. If so, I'll concede that capital crossing market and judicial boundaries will encounter some minor bumps - typically from the country of origin. This heavily contrasts with labor, which faces significantly more resistance, and the resistance is from the destination country/market/juridiction. Would you agree with "Countries bend over backwards for capital inflows, including from individual investors"? It's a mouthful, but perhaps expresses the same sentiment.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-03 23:38:32+00:00
I followed a lot of Twitter people who were vibecoding their way to SaaS platforms because I thought it would be interesting to follow.

So far none of them are having a great time after their initial enthusiasm. A lot of it is people discovering that there’s far more to a business than whipping up a SaaS app that does something. I’m also seeing a big increase in venting about how their progress is slowing to a crawl as the codebase gets larger. It’s interesting to see the complaints about losing days or weeks to bugs that the LLM introduced that they didn’t understand.

I still follow because it’s interesting, but I’m starting to think 90% of the benefit is convincing people that it’s going to be easy and therefore luring them into working on ideas they’d normally not want to start.
by agnishom | 2025-04-03 23:38:57+00:00
> I'm out of the gaming platform loop but assume the timing of this post is related to the Switch 2 announcement?

Author here. Not really, it was a coincidence. I wrote this post around 8 months ago, and posted it on HN before but people didn't notice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41151392