MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cstrahan | 2025-04-27 00:07:45+00:00
People share negative sentiments for a number of reasons. Sometimes it’s emotionally motivated (like venting), sometimes it’s because you want to see less hype and more realistic discourse are about the deficiencies in our industry. There simply isn’t enough time to fix all the things that are problematic or completely broken, so naturally some things are only going to be talked about, rather than worked on.

And, I’ll point out the irony in your directive: you take issue with people expressing criticism without taking action to completely resolve the respective issue, and then you come along to express criticism by tell people to not complain but instead offer up free labor, when you could go and solve the problem that resulted in the original complaint.
by dlcarrier | 2025-04-27 00:08:46+00:00
>All products are defective. Full stop.

Nothing can be made to work over an infinite temperature range, or for an infinite period of time, but a product that can meet its specifications, for its design life, is in no way defective. That happens all the time, for example with electronics:

Every component in your computer or phone, down to the smallest resistor and capacitor, has multiple pages of documentation characterizing it's performance, and is individually tested to ensure it meets the stated capabilities. Each trace on the circuit board is tested to make sure it is complete and not shorted to any other trace, and once assembled every component is verified to be correctly installed. This means designs can be proven to always operate within the specifications of every component.

This isn't some fancy military-spec process; it's standard operating procedure for petty much every electronics component or assemblies manufacturer. At the volume manufacturing equipment handles, it's much cheaper and easier to automate qualifying and testing everything, at every step, than dealing with the ramifications of manufacturing a bad batch.

There are occasional bad parts that do get into the mix, but it's usually a pretty big scandal. From botched industrial espionage leading to a plague of defective electrolytic capacitors in the early 2000's to management pressure at Samsung leading to the release of a defective battery design on Note7 phones, there are occasionally products that should be recalled for defective hardware, but with a design consisting of hundreds to thousands of parts, on almost every phone or laptop ever produced, every component has lasted past the useful life of the product and, except for ware items like batteries and displays, would continue working past the useful life of the human using it.

If kept simple, as is doable with an electric drive train, and especially if devoid of non-embedded software (a field which seems to have no interest in error-free designs: https://xkcd.com/2030/) a recall-free and provably capable vehicle is completely doable.
by stavros | 2025-04-27 00:09:25+00:00
Agreed, and I think this is a good thing. The Internet was already full of shills, sockpuppets, propaganda, etc, but now it's really really cheap for anyone to do this, and now it's finally getting to a place where the average person can understand that what they're reading is most likely fake.

I hope this will lead to people being more critical, less credulous, and more open to debate, but realistically I think we'll just switch to assuming that everything we like the sound of is written by real people, and everything opposing is all AI.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-27 00:09:26+00:00
There is a real security problem here and it is insidiously dangerous.

Some prominent academics are stating that this type of thing is creating real civil and geopolitical implications that are generally responsible for the global rise of authoritarianism.

In security, when a company has a vulnerability, this community generally considers it both ethical and appropriate to practice responsible disclosure where a company is warned of a vulnerability and given a period to fix it before their vulnerability is published with a strong implication that bad actors would then be free to abuse it after it is published. This creates a strong incentive for the company to spend resources that they otherwise have no desire to spend on security.

I think there is potentially real value in an organization effectively using "force," in a very similar way to this to get these platforms to spend resources preventing abuse by posting AI generated content and then publishing the content they succeeded in posting 2 weeks later.

Practically, what I think we will see is the end of anonymization for public discourse on the internet, I don't think there is any way to protect against AI generated content other than to use stronger forms of authentication/provenance. Perhaps vouching systems could be used to create social graphs that could turn any one account determined to be creating AI generated content into contagion for any others in it's circle of trust. That clearly weakens anonymity, but doesn't abandon it entirely.
by wat10000 | 2025-04-27 00:09:42+00:00
I agree. It has a great parallel to the debate over mental imagery. There was a big debate over whether it’s real, with one group saying of course it’s real, and the other saying it’s obviously just a metaphor. Turns out some people can visualize stuff and some can’t. Maybe some people are conscious and some aren’t. It would explain why so many people argue weird things about consciousness.
by lud_lite | 2025-04-27 00:12:37+00:00
Writing. As in paid to do it, with briefs, deadlines and editors. From this comment I probably look like a crap writer! I do need to focus alot to write well.

I don't use AI except for checking for basic mistakes. I may start using AI for research but I refuse to use it for generating a word of content.

I am thinking of writing a book. I have a rough idea of my rate 100 words per hour (including edits, research) so a 50k word book would take 500 hours or about a year of consistent grind. I'd probably blog the book content allowing for a win even if I abort early.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-04-27 00:13:32+00:00
When it finally got through, were they nice to you at least? (They'd better have been!)

And, it probably wasn't administrators, unless you specifically looked. You do sometimes have to be a bit insistent, you're quite right. If someone reverts you, it's often not personal. Ask on the talk page why they reverted, and if no one says anything for 24 hours (definitely wait this long), just try your edit (or a better one!) again.

I wrote an essay on this once that still gets used a lot on wiki (misquoted even more often). The original version of the essay had a few more tricks up its sleeve -but- if you do it this way you're not likely to get in trouble at least. And otherwise now you know someone you can ask for help.
by timnetworks | 2025-04-27 00:13:43+00:00
> Let’s use 192.168.140.255 as an example. That’s an IPv4 address that people would look at and go “yes, that sure is an IPv4 address.” How else can we write that exact same address?

> This is the same IP address: 3232271615. You get that by interpreting the 4 bytes of the IP address as a big-endian unsigned 32-bit integer, and print that. This leads to a classic parlor trick: if you try to visit http://3232271615 , Chrome will load http://192.168.140.255.

murkans have been using ten digits as phone numbers for some decades now (no country code), I'm kinda bummed there isn't some saudi royalty paying four billion for a set of matching ip address and phone number.
by hodder | 2025-04-27 00:14:28+00:00
The street parlance in commodity trading tends to be more about where you are trading on the (time) curve on what is called “spot”. Ie. if you are buying near delivery (prompt month or inline) that’s often referred to as spot.

But I’m trading physical forward contracts technically and it depends on the specific grade how far forward that is.

The physical oil market trades in monthly cycles. On May 1 I’ll be trading forward contracts for physical oil to inject in June (which will transit for about month and land in July). For a liquid grade like WCS (Canadian heavy) I could technically buy phys “injectors” down the curve a good ways. Monthly, quarterly out about year.

Once a barrel is injected, schedulers manage swaps around physical ops with counterparties to ensure our tanks don’t overflow and we have a nice rateable supply. If a swap won’t cut it at that point, and I’m physically short to refinery demand or longer than I can hold, I can buy or sell distressed inline barrels (already in transit) with lower liquidity.

These aren’t futures though. Futures are standard volumes and typically settled financially. WTI futures for instance are typically not held to delivery, though you can deliver it into Cush if you have tankage. The paper market vastly, vastly exceeds the physical real barrels flowing though, so most of these are simply closed out bets/hedges.
by viraptor | 2025-04-27 00:14:43+00:00
And yet, when people invent sockpuppets to convince others that being extremely tough on immigration is good actually, it's never a generic white guy, but a first generation legal immigrant persona. Or some kind of invented groups like "X for Trump", where X is the group with very low approval ratings in reality.

It's like the identity actually matters a lot in real world, including lived experience.
by kortilla | 2025-04-27 00:18:07+00:00
This is unrelated to individualism. Individualists still can have strong communities and lots of friendships. Collectivists can just as easily be extremely anti-social.

The examples you gave of grocery delivery and overnight prime delivery are things that city people have, who generally vote against individualism and for collectivist policies.

Even in some socialist utopia where the community provides everything and individualism has been snuffed out entirely, that wouldn’t force more or less human interaction to create friends.
by coffeemug | 2025-04-27 00:18:53+00:00
I don’t understand this (or all the AI “skills” discourse). This is the most intuitive technology in the history of the world. You literally talk to it in your language and it does what you want! What is there to learn?

(You do need to adjust your communication a little. But you’ve got to do it with every human too. I don’t see how AI is any different.)
by HocusLocus | 2025-04-27 00:19:05+00:00
For a whole year ~2016 I put a version of this Adventure on my unused Telnet and FTP ports. I allowed only a single thread, and any human could play the game to its conclusion. I logged all keystrokes and point in the game where they exited, and the 'signon banner' was the whole introductory paragraph of the game. "Would you like instructions+Yes" so there would have been no confusion about what someone had connected to. I limited output to 30CPS to slow things down to the vintage BBS speed I used once.

After a year of logs, lots and lots of logs: ALL bots and login probes, ZERO humans. Even the humans who examined log entries may have been enticed to try it. So only the bots are poking, and the humans operating them are not paying attention. It left me with a sense of sadness and dread.
by AlienRobot | 2025-04-27 00:19:48+00:00
Flooding human forums with AI steals real state from actual humans.

Reddit is already flooded with bots. That was already a problem.

The actual problem is people thinking that because a system used by many isn't perfect that gives them permission to destroy the existing system. Don't like Reddit? Just don't go to Reddit. Go to fanclubs.org or something.
by fefe23 | 2025-04-27 00:20:07+00:00
This is an astonishingly bad idea. Don't do this.

Use HTTP server-sent events instead. Those can keep the connection open so you don't have to poll to get real-time updates and they will also let you resume from the last entry you saw previously.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server-sent...
by dlcarrier | 2025-04-27 00:20:32+00:00
HD Radio tuning is built into the FM tuner, but was disabled in software. It's patents are still in effect, until 2030, so your wife's car manufacturer likely recently obtained a patent license to tune into HD Radio stations. Why they didn't negotiate a license from the get go may be a mystery, but there's no development reason it wasn't capable on day one.

Tesla, on the other hand, has promised capabilities that haven't been developed yet, something they wouldn't be able to do without OTA updates, which is a sensible reason to feel animosity toward their reliance on them.
by sherdil2022 | 2025-04-27 00:21:00+00:00
Let me ChatGPT for you:

Good question. Let’s break it down carefully.

When you hear about a single LLM instance serving multiple clients at the same time, it usually works like this: • The LLM instance is stateless: Each client sends a request (prompt + settings), the model processes that one request independently, and returns the response. The LLM doesn’t “remember” between requests unless you explicitly include conversation history in the prompt. • Concurrency is handled by infrastructure: Even though the LLM is “one model,” it can handle many incoming requests because the backend (server) wraps the model with techniques like: • Asynchronous request handling (e.g., using async/await patterns) • Batching: multiple prompts are packed together into a single forward pass through the model (very common in high-traffic servers) • Parallelism: the server could have multiple workers/replicas of the model (copies or shared GPUs) running side-by-side. • Queueing: if too many clients at once, requests are queued and processed in order. • Memory isolation: Each request is kept separate in memory. No client’s data leaks into another client’s conversation unless you (the app developer) accidentally introduce a bug.

So:

It’s not that one model is “locked” into serving only one person at a time. It’s more like the model is a very fast function being called many times in parallel.

⸻
by numeri | 2025-04-27 00:21:09+00:00
It makes quite a lot of sense juxtaposed with "train time compute". The point being made is that a set budget can be split between paying for more training or more inference _at test time_ or rather _at the time of testing_ the model. The word "time" in "inference time" plays a slightly different role grammatically (noun, not part of an adverbial phrase), but comes out to mean the same thing.
by wsintra2022 | 2025-04-27 00:21:24+00:00
I’ve said it before and will reinforce it cause once again no one brings it up in the comments. People report the phone is listening to them because they talked about <insert> and now they are seeing ads for it. What they may not realise is they are talking about <insert> because subliminally the ad worked they just never noticed it. Now they have. The ad was there first like a little virus worming in your brain and then you bring it up with friends thinking it an original thought.
by Aloisius | 2025-04-27 00:22:47+00:00
> The number of units per household is near the historical highs, and it dwarfs the numbers seen in the 80-s and 90-s

Your link appears to only goes back to 2001.

Looking at Census data, it appears the reverse is true. Every year from 1984 to 1999 had a higher units/household than today, for the bulk of the 90s, dramatically higher, with it peaking in 1998 at 1.61 units/household compared to 1.11 today.
by butterlettuce | 2025-04-27 00:23:52+00:00
I’m all for the federal government to completely ban student loans. You can either go to college out of pocket or with merit-based scholarships. And also place a federal ban on HR departments requiring degrees for clerical work. Such a stupid requirement is a form of discriminatory class warfare.

Inequality would fall substantially and many universities will be forced to drop prices down to around 10-20k.
by BlueTemplar | 2025-04-27 00:24:52+00:00
Reddit is cancer. Discord is a cancerous black hole. (Platforms are evil.)

The issue is not so much discoverability as scale (as you hinted at), as well as some social media aspects.

PhpBB-style forums are both discoverable, rarely grow large enough to become toxic, can be 'owned', and the exit option is much more viable.
by glaucon | 2025-04-27 00:26:38+00:00
I was curious what sort of remedies that legislation might offer to an individual who wanted to pursue. Page 22 of the linked document summarises that and they are, at least at face value, satisfyingly real.

Having said that I'm not sure how this would work if an Australian bought the camera online from a business based outside of Australia, I'm guessing the answer is "not at all".
by koolba | 2025-04-27 00:26:53+00:00
> Here's an interesting question: are undocumented immigrants actually stopping non-citizens from becoming citizens? These two things are actually quite independent, yes? You're building a very similar argument to "piracy is bad because it takes money out of the hands of the RIAA."

So in your analogy the RIAA are the huddled masses yearning to breathe free that respect immigration laws?
by keyle | 2025-04-27 00:27:01+00:00
I'd like to second the mention of plan vs. no plan.

Having no plan is often better when you're facing a deep pit of work, pick at it every now and again, whatever you feel like working on that day.

vs. having a clear Todo list that is longer than a DNA chain and just giving on it after item 5 because 6 is boring.

Oh, and congrats, looks great.
by MobileVet | 2025-04-27 00:27:33+00:00
Apple settled a lawsuit about Siri ‘unintentionally’ listening. [1] So, yes, they also can likely predict what you want based on all they do openly track… but we can no longer claim that they aren’t listening.

Based on the lawsuit and other sources, my guess is the phones build a word cloud that is then used for targeted advertising. Apple at el aren’t recording and selling the actual audio… but they are listening.

(1) https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-si...
Path is a utility for working with paths
by spyrja | 2025-04-27 00:27:50+00:00
A recent post here got me thinking about my own personal gripes with OS path handling offerings. So I've basically spent the passed couple of days working on a little project in an attempt to rectify the situation somewhat (in the spirit of cross-platform development). It should also work pretty well with existing tools. Let me know what you think, and feel free to open an issue or a pull-request if you have any problems getting it running it on your system. Enjoy!

Github link: https://github.com/SpyrjaGaldr/path

https://simonsafar.com/2025/path_as_system_call/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788728
by AlienRobot | 2025-04-27 00:27:51+00:00
This is why I dislike how the Internet has become increasingly about politics and drama and less about memes.

It's not a system that can support serious debates without immense restrictions on anonymity, and those restrictions in turn become immense privacy issues 10 years later.

People really need to understand that you're supposed to have fun on the Internet, and if you aren't having fun, why be there at all?

Most importantly, I don't like how the criticism on the situation, specially some seen here, push for abdication of either privacy or of debates. There is more than one website on the Internet! You can have a website that requires ID to post, and another website that is run by an LLM that censors all political content. Those two ideas can co-exist in the vastness of the web and people are free to choose which website to visit.
by marcosdumay | 2025-04-27 00:29:02+00:00
> basically has painstakingly listed every possible road obstacle, has coded every possible driving logic to it, and ... addressed every edge case

Removed that "manually" world so now it describes exactly what you would have to do to train an end to end neural network.

NNs don't get information from nothing, you would have to subject them to the exact same obstacles, geometries and behaviors you coded on the manual version.
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-27 00:29:22+00:00
NB: If you have substantiated concerns, the correct course is to email mods. They are responsive to this. <hn@ycombinator.com>

The problem with in-thread accusations isn't so much the lack of legitimacy but the deletrious effect on discussion quality, which is fragile at best:

On shilling generally: <https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=true&page=0&dateR...>

On HN's fragility: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23047709>
by codys | 2025-04-27 00:29:27+00:00
True. That isn't something the compiler can do.

That said, that (determining the c flags and ld flags for dependencies) is something that might be able to be mixed into compilation a bit more than it is now. Could imagine that if we annotate which compilation units need a particular system library, we could start building code that doesn't depend on that library while determining the library location/flags (ie: running pkg-config or doing other funny business) at the same time.

Or since we're in the connected era, perhaps we're downloading the library we require if it's not found and building it as an embedded component.

With that type of design, it becomes more clear why moving as much to the build stage (where we can better parallelize work because most of the work is in that stage) and more accurately describing dependencies (so we don't block work that could run sooner) can be helpful in builds.

Doing that type of thing requires a build system that is more flexible though: we really would need to have the pieces of "work" run by the build system be able to add additional work that is scheduled by the build system dynamically. I'm not sure there are many build systems that support this.
by PeterZaitsev | 2025-04-27 00:31:01+00:00
I'm not sure whole "Observability 2.0" focuses on the most pressing problem, which is complexity, both in deployment and usage. At Coroot we focus not on the format of the data and whenever it should be one thing or several "pillars" but rather how easy is it to install it and get the value of resolving issues quickly and easily when you need to. https://coroot.com/
by robocat | 2025-04-27 00:32:20+00:00
Our human systems are too complex for us to comprehend. So everybody's internal models of the world are often radically/tragically incorrect.

And our words are necessarily poor at defining an abstract conceptual system that defies our comprehension. The definition of emergent as apples to an economy is hard to grok. And hard to communicate, even when the two communicators have a common mental model (sometimes education, sometimes acquired via social media or propoganda).

You can see politicians on the receiving end of systemic forces - where it seems like the politician doesn't comprehend what is happening because their model is wrong. We then create stories about their incentives - layering unintended misdirection on top of our collective ignorance.
by MichaelNolan | 2025-04-27 00:32:36+00:00
I used to be a big fan of cmv. But after a few years of actively using it I've completely stopped posting there or even browsing. Mostly because the majority of topics are already talked to death. The mods do a pretty good job considering the size of that sub, but there is only so much they can do. While I stopped going there before chatGPT4 was released, the rise of AI bots makes it even less likely that I would return.

I do still love the concept though. I think it could be really cool to see such a forum in real life.