MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vessenes | 2025-04-05 20:37:51+00:00
I’m sorry but that is in NO way how and why models work.

The model is in fact totally biased toward what’s plausible in its initial dataset and human preference training, and then again biased toward success in the conversation. It creates a theory of mind and of the conversation and attempts to find a satisfactory completion. If you’re a flat earther, you’ll find many models are encouraging if prompted right. If you leak that you think of what’s happening with Ukraine support in Europe as power politics only, you’ll find that you get treated as someone who grew up in the eastern bloc in ways, some of which you might notice, and some of which you won’t.

Notice I didn’t say if it was a good attitude or not, or even try and assess how liberal it was by some other standards. It’s just worth knowing that the default prompt theory of mind Chat has includes a very left leaning (according to Pew) default perspective.

That said much of the initial left leaning has been sort of shaved/smoothed off in modern waves of weights. I would speculate it’s submerged to the admonishment to “be helpful” as the preference training gets better.

But it’s in the DNA. For instance if you ask GPT-4 original “Why are unions bad?” You’ll get a disclaimer, some bullet points, and another disclaimer. If you ask “Why are unions good?” You’ll get a list of bullet points, no disclaimer. I would say modern Chat still has a pretty hard time dogging on unions, it’s clearly uncomfortable.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-04-05 20:37:54+00:00
Does the book discuss capacitive vs resistive touchscreens?

At the time you basically had two choices for touchscreens: resistive or capacitive. Resistive was "obviously" the way to go because it was far more accurate. Choosing capacitive was inspired -- when used with stubby fingers the accuracy problem was moot, and it allowed multi-touch.

Just before the iPhone came out I was fairly confident I knew what the future was. It was now possible to create a phone with the horsepower to run a real web browsers. 800x600 pixel screens were available which would display normal web pages nicely, and a resistive touch screen with a stylus would make them useful.

Then the iPhone came out. 320x480 screen meant normal web pages wouldn't display properly, inaccurate touchscreen meant tap targets needed to be increased massively. Why would anybody buy an iPhone which didn't allow you to install apps, and the web was unusable because it required rewriting every page since existing pages were unusable. Instead you could buy a phone which allowed you to install apps and which allowed you to usably access the web. Obviously the iPhone would be a failure. :)
by fourside | 2025-04-05 20:38:10+00:00
I’ve seen more of this type of rhetoric online in the last few years and find it very insidious. It subtly erodes the value of objective truth and tries to paint it as only one of many interpretations or beliefs, which is nothing more than a false equivalence.

The concept of being unbiased has been around for a long time, and we’re not going to throw it away just because a few people disagree with the premise.
by freetime2 | 2025-04-05 20:39:50+00:00
The biggest TV event of the year in the US is the Super Bowl, and a big part of the event that people look forward to is advertising. Ad spots during the Super Bowl are famously expensive (like millions of dollars for a 30 second ad), and advertisers try really hard to make funny or memorable ads. There are lots people who don’t care about football and watch just to see the ads.

The best ads and brands are an iconic part of our culture - something cherished and celebrated by many. I think this is worth keeping in mind at least when talking about banning advertisements.
by ossopite | 2025-04-05 20:40:12+00:00
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by walterbell | 2025-04-05 20:40:17+00:00
Hopefully future Qualcomm SDXE or Mediatek/Nvidia SystemReady Arm PCs will deliver an open-standard Arm platform with upstream Linux support. Until then, we have Apple Silicon Macs with:

- official mechanism to provision non-Apple operating systems - global retail availability, both physical & online - best price/perf/watt Arm desktop via Mac Mini base - NPU and unified memory for LLMs - upcoming LTE/wifi/BT radios without Qualcomm/Broadcom firmware

> Asahi is on the ropes right now

Or on a path to long term sustainability?

https://asahilinux.org/2025/03/progress-report-6-14/

When we stood up our OpenCollective, none of us really knew what to expect.. The sheer volume of support and the speed at which it flowed in left us floored and humbled beyond measure. The financial support provided via OpenCollective allows us to continue our work with confidence.. we have the resources we have always wanted to ensure the project’s viability long into the future.. After getting through all the administrative work required to keep the lights on after marcan’s departure, we’ve hit the ground running with upstream patch submission. We held our first board meeting.. we must start reducing the amount of patches we’re carrying downstream. Most of what we’re carrying is stable and has been for years.. We have submitted three new drivers upstream - the Image Signal Processor (ISP) driver, which is necessary for webcam support, and drivers for the Touchbar’s display controller and input digitiser.. both Touchbar drivers have already been accepted! Thanks to chaos_princess for taking on the responsibility of preparing and submitting all three.. Alyssa and Janne have been hard at work tidying up the GPU driver to prepare it for submission. Rust for Linux abstractions are starting to be merged at a healthy pace.. every time an abstraction used by our driver is merged, we must drop our downstream version and rebase the driver atop the version accepted upstream. This is gruelling, menial, and unpleasant work, and Janne has our deepest gratitude for volunteering his time to get through it. We have also been working to clean up and upstream.. fixes and changes for drivers already upstreamed such as the NVMe and I2C controllers.. changes to the upstream Texas Instruments TAS2764 and TAS2770 speaker amplifier drivers.. to support the Apple-specific variants found in Apple Silicon Macs.. we found that the ASoC maintainers had already been cherry-picking some commits from our development branches!
by vessenes | 2025-04-05 20:40:22+00:00
My son assessed it for a class a few years ago after finding out it wouldn’t give him “con” view points on unions, and he got interested in embedded bias and administered the test. I don’t have any of the outputs from the conversation, sadly. But replication could be good! I just fired up GPT-4 as old as I could get and checked; it was willing to tell me why unions are bad, but only when it could warn me multiple times that view was not held by all. The opposite - why unions are good - was not similarly asterisked.
by ics | 2025-04-05 20:40:45+00:00
That’s interesting, thanks. I a word and meant to ask which you use more, oops. The strap says that it works better on hard surfaces which makes me wonder about how it fares on say, a leg, stiff cushion, or things like that. Also if it’s not using an optical sensor, I wonder what happens when you try playing an instrument with it on. Might have to give it a try.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-05 20:40:50+00:00
All right, let's say that the baseline is "what is true". Then bias is departure from the truth.

That sounds great, right up until you try to do something with it. You want your LLM to be unbiased? So you're only going to train it on the truth? Where are you going to find that truth? Oh, humans are going to determine it? Well, first, where are you going to find unbiased humans? And, second, they're going to curate all the training data? How many centuries will that take? We're trying to train it in a few months.

And then you get to things like politics and sociology. What is the truth in politics? Yeah, I know, a bunch of politicians say things that are definitely lies. But did Obamacare go too far, or not far enough, or was it just right? There is no "true" answer to that. And yet, discussions about Obamacare may be more or less biased. How are you going to determine what that bias is when there isn't a specific thing you can point to and say, "That is true"?

So instead, they just train LLMs on a large chunk of the internet. Well, that includes things like the fine-sounding-but-completely-bogus arguments of flat earthers. In that environment, "bias" is "departure from average or median". That is the most it can mean. So truth is determined by majority vote of websites. That's not a very good epistemology.
by brailsafe | 2025-04-05 20:41:34+00:00
I feel similarly about where I live now, but don't come to quite the same feelings about travel, just different feelings than I used to. For me, the grass was literally greener in nearly every different place compared to where I lived until I moved. My hometown was and is truly a shithole, it actively discourages every quality that the author describes and that I get in Vancouver; it's not impossible to develop, but it's rarer than it should be, assuming you'd be willing to put in the same amount of effort and have enough patience anyway. Travel had a different feeling when I felt that people in different places were fundamentally different, which led to a certain kind of extra novelty. Likewise, travel brought different feelings when I was more confused upon landing (which the author eludes to) or couldn't communicate, or could fantasize about one day living in the place as a dream. But.. I did, I moved, and developed a much more interesting and valuable life than I could have otherwise, and now I don't glamorize some of those other places quite like I used to. I have zero interest in moving away from where I do, those other places aren't competitive in the ways they'd need to be for me. That said, I do still value the exploration of discomfort and the adventure it would be to re-establish a third life somewhere new, because I don't really know how it would go, and that's still invigorating in a way that I couldn't have imagined when I was much younger. It's just that nearly none of those places would compete, I already love my day to day environment; that sort of move would be an intimidating leap despite not looking for anything better. That said, I'm fortunate that I've managed to build something for myself in a city that does compete favorably. I go to other "world class" cities, and it's very hard to find better food, better scenery, or really anything else that I don't already have access to. I'd need to go to more low key rural areas, and I'm excited about that.
by crooked-v | 2025-04-05 20:41:44+00:00
There are steelman arguments for tariffs, as can be seen by their regular use by every country in the world.

There are no steelman arguments for THESE tariffs, which are based on the premise of blindly assuming that all trade deficits across the board are bad, even for things the US is physically incapable of producing like various rare earths or diamonds, and then even more blindly setting tariffs based on the raw numbers of those trade deficits.
by DennisP | 2025-04-05 20:41:57+00:00
Against your unforeseeable consequences, I'll balance the entirely foreseeable consequences of excess heat, plus the unforeseeable consequences of excess heat. It's not like our choices are between cloud seeding and a pristine planet.

The reason we need this to buy some time is that those climate feedbacks aren't far away. We've seen in the geological record that really doesn't take much excess heat (usually from orbital variations) to kick off a warming cycle that would take things entirely out of our hands.

Simply eliminating emissions would have been a great plan, but we're beyond that now. A lot of climate scientists say the safe CO2 level is 350ppm. I remember when we blew past that and they said "ok, but seriously don't go past 400ppm." Now we're at 425ppm with emissions going strong. Solar power, electric cars, all this stuff gives me hope for the future if we can do it in time, but we're in a race and we're losing.

And it's not like this sort of cloud seeding would deploy all at once. We'd ramp up gradually and see how it goes. At the very least, we could replace the cloud cover that the article says we've eliminated over the past twenty years.
by hrpnk | 2025-04-05 20:42:16+00:00
Available on Groq: https://groq.com/llama-4-now-live-on-groq-build-fast-at-the-...

Llama 4 Scout is currently running at over 460 tokens/s while Llama 4 Maverick is coming today:

Llama 4 Scout: $0.11 / M input tokens and $0.34 / M output tokens Llama 4 Maverick: $0.50 / M input tokens and $0.77 / M output tokens
by SideQuark | 2025-04-05 20:43:02+00:00
Defaulting on the US debt would send the US into hyperinflation and likely the end of the US.

The US sells debt to US and world investors, at good rates (a few percent), and continually rolls over past debt with new issues. The US spends around 11% of budget on interest on this debt.

A default means the world stops lending at low rates. Triple rates triples the interest payments to 33% of the budget. There’s no possible way the govt will collect that much more, especially as the economy craters, and no group would likely cut all the benefits, since they’d simply get in-elected. So we’d do what countless other countries did throughout history: we’d print money to pay the bills.

Of course this devalues each dollar, so this accelerates, and there would be a massive implosion as the US gets cannibalized by whomever can extract value the quickest.

Default would be incredibly bad.
by jaggederest | 2025-04-05 20:43:09+00:00
Yann LeCun. I think this post is a more elegant summary of what I'm trying to illustrate with this kind of thing:

> he has admitted to individual mistakes, but not to the systemic issues which produced them, which makes for a safe bet that there will be more mistakes in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43594771
by CyberDildonics | 2025-04-05 20:45:08+00:00
Does it just deallocate at the end of a scope? Why go halfway? It's obviously valuable and destructors are not complicated. Destructors can also close files, sockets, deallocate buffers from the GPU, etc.

I think when people want C semantics they will just use C in general, but if there is something that solves these extreme pain points in a simple way it might be enough to get someone to switch.
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-04-05 20:45:12+00:00
The reality of "mind control" of those perpetually exposed to media has been a popular topic throughout the last half century at least.

Humans don't have those protections. Although, ego deludes oneself to believe they do. Ask anyone if they are susceptible to advertising. Maybe 1 in 5 have the humility and awareness to state the truth.
by falcor84 | 2025-04-05 20:45:56+00:00
Well, having candles and kerosene lamps to work late definitely didn't hurt.

But in any case, while these things don't work in a predictable way, the engineering work on lightbulbs in your example led to theoretical advances in our understanding of materials science, vacuum technology, and of course electrical systems.

I'm not arguing that LLMs on their own will certainly lead directly to AGI without any additional insights, but I do think that there's a significant chance that advances in LLMs might lead engineers and researchers to inspiration that will help them make those further insights. I think that it's silly that he seems to be telling people that there's "nothing to see here" and no benefit in being close to the action.
by endofreach | 2025-04-05 20:45:59+00:00
Wow, i always think "i wish there was a demo" of each iterative step on these kind of design journeys. And especially the iOS keyboard, as i thought a lot about it. Awesome that you made this.

I really like their idea to make the touch keyboard work well by increasing the (invisible) "padding" area for the key most likely to be typed next. So obvious in hindsight but demos like your's show part of the journey.

There are rumors that in the beginning they tried the ipod wheel as the user input interface.

While working on my device, that idea is super motivating. I know where i am headed and have done a lot of work and really got something very, very interesting already. But a few parts are yet not clear at all. But, i am definitely further than our "clickwheel" stage. Not yet at the "secret padding" stage for some input ideas, but still.

In case you are free and interested to loosely talk about ideas or feedback you have for a very novel device (and interface), please let me know how to reach out. Just because you made this demo, i feel we'd get a long & i can learn a lot from you. And this might be a very interesting challenge for someone like you. Anyway, great work!
by munchler | 2025-04-05 20:46:23+00:00
Irel tbbq. V guvax gung'f gur rffrapr bs gur nafjre. Gur shapgbe ynjf unir na vzcyvpvg qrcraqrapl ba gur fhofgvghgvba cebcregl bs rdhnyvgl, juvpu thnenagrrf gung k = l vzcyvrf s(k) = s(l).
by SteveNuts | 2025-04-05 20:48:18+00:00
I mean the alternative is they get nothing from me at all once I hit their paywall..

And I don't think ad revenue is paying the bills so I'm not sure what other options there are. I just went to a few major news sites:

Wapo: $120/yr Reuters: $45/yr WSJ: $349/yr NYT: $195/yr Bloomberg: $299/yr

That's just a few. Is it better if I just choose one and only get my news from a single site? Or should it really cost thousands of dollars per year to be informed?
by vessenes | 2025-04-05 20:48:33+00:00
This was an idea that sounded somewhat silly until it was shown it worked. The idea is that you encourage through training a bunch of “experts” to diversify and “get good” at different things. These experts are say 1/10 to 1/100 of your model size if it were a dense model. So you pack them all up into one model, and you add a layer or a few layers that have the job of picking which small expert model is best for your given token input, route it to that small expert, and voila — you’ve turned a full run through the dense parameters into a quick run through a router and then a 1/10 as long run through a little model. How do you get a “picker” that’s good? Well, it’s differentiable, and all we have in ML is a hammer — so, just do gradient descent on the decider while training the experts!

This generally works well, although there are lots and lots of caveats. But it is (mostly) a free lunch, or at least a discounted lunch. I haven’t seen a ton of analysis on what different experts end up doing, but I believe it’s widely agreed that they tend to specialize. Those specializations (especially if you have a small number of experts) may be pretty esoteric / dense in their own right.

Anthropic’s interpretability team would be the ones to give a really high quality look, but I don’t think any of Anthropic’s current models are MoE.

Anecdotally, I feel MoE models sometimes exhibit slightly less “deep” thinking, but I might just be biased towards more weights. And they are undeniably faster and better per second of clock time, GPU time, memory or bandwidth usage — on all of these - than dense models with similar training regimes.
by jajko | 2025-04-05 20:49:10+00:00
Yeah, some loss, a very visible one. But what we are losing now is much bigger, albeit much harder to point finger on and quantify. Some inner quality and strength that probably doesnt even have a name.

Most people never even thought about ads that way.

For my own little part - firefox and ublock origin since it exists, on phone too. To the point of almost physically allergic to ads, aby ads, they cause a lasting disgust with given brand. I detest being manipulated, and this is not even hidden, a very crude and primitive way.
by y42 | 2025-04-05 20:49:40+00:00
it's not really about advertising, but it's effects. advertising per se is not bad, basically it's just some kind of product information. that's all. but it's coming with some negative effects that are bad. SEO and Affiliate are one of the best examples to that. the thing is that advertising is connected to revenue/profit. which is the root cause of all little problems up the stream.
by brycethornton | 2025-04-05 20:50:22+00:00
I believe Mixture-of-Experts is a way for a neural network to group certain knowledge into smaller subsets. AFAIK there isn't a specific grouping goal, the network just figures out what goes where on it's own and then when an inference request is made it determines what "expert" would have that knowledge and routes it there. This makes the inference process much more efficient.
Show HN: Windows XP Themed Personal Site Built with React
by okincilleb | 2025-04-05 20:50:44+00:00
I geek out on any UI from the 2000s, so I built my personal site to look and feel like Windows XP. Made this two years ago to get better at React.

My goal was to fool my dad into thinking he was actually using Windows XP and it seemed to work.

No mobile version (yet) :(

If you think it's cool you can check out the somewhat outdated code: https://github.com/SohailSayed/winxp-personal-website
by exe34 | 2025-04-05 20:51:07+00:00
I find it hard to imagine. I hate advertising as much as the next guy - I intentionally try to associate negative thoughts with any adverts that interrupt a video I'm watching (I nearly ordered hellofresh after getting a voucher, but they've interrupted my YouTube experience too many times in the past).

But how do you separate advertising from product recommendations? Would it only apply if the person doing the recommending is getting paid for it?
by martin-t | 2025-04-05 20:51:22+00:00
This has been on my mind ever since I realized 2 things:

- the difference between zero-sum and positive-sum games

- that large parts of society are engaged in zero- (or even negative-) sum games 1) some through choice or 2) because they are forced to, to be able to compete with group 1)

Advertising, manipulation, misinformation, disinformation, and lying are all related phenomena with negative effects on both individuals and society.

Just like Wales is the first place to propose punishing lying, at least from some positions of power, I am looking forward to whatever country becoming the first to make advertising illegal, at least in some forms and scales.
by mgraczyk | 2025-04-05 20:51:36+00:00
I definitely agree, and I think we should focus on mitigating the actual bad things while either recognizing or considering that the ads themselves are actually good. It's definitely possible to improve the situation and trying to give up and destroy everything will not help (I don't agree that profit motive is bad though, it's incredible and beautiful as an aligning force for humanity)
by chaorace | 2025-04-05 20:51:57+00:00
The "Experts" in MoE is less like a panel of doctors and more like having different brain regions with interlinked yet specialized functions.

The models get trained largely the same way as non-MoE models, except with specific parts of the model silo'd apart past a certain layer. The shared part of the model, prior to the splitting, is the "router". The router learns how to route as an AI would, so it's basically a black-box in terms of whatever internal structure emerges from this.