MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ramoz | 2025-04-26 23:00:41+00:00
I wasn't so impressed the other day.

It failed to locate the image I provided. It got caught in a loop of cropping the image and presumably running some multi-approach to similarly search with images. If you use their image gen it is quite clear that they must've amassed a large image database at this point that they use for reference material pre-gen.

https://i.redd.it/ddscx4zibpme1.jpeg

I was intrigued because it looked much like Charleston SC. O3 didn't consider that and had to keep reminding itself that it couldn't possibly be the African flat bridge it kept determining it was (as the crop image analysis could recognize the suspension/cable structure).
by susiecambria | 2025-04-26 23:01:32+00:00
This. And only this.

My social studies teacher in 8th grade throughout the year would give us a list of things and phrases by decade. Loved these assignments. Totally threw myself into them. Years later, I was working at a prep school and wanted the students to be assigned Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire as a similar assignment (competition?). Teachers thought it was stupid, that the kids wouldn't like it (um, who cares?), and that it was too hard. Teacher's responses only confirmed what I thought about the school (meh) and that it was a sad day that curiosity was a bad thing. (I was the fundraiser for the school so I didn't really interact with the kids a lot but ones I knew would have had fun with such a project).

Anyway, the Lindell lawyers must have gone to this school, or one like it. How is it ever okay to do this and think it's a good idea? And, how the heck did these people pass the Bar?

Edit: List of references in We Didn't Start the Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_references_in_We_Didn%.... Gonna blog the references and this post on my little policy blog this week :-)
by ben_w | 2025-04-26 23:01:36+00:00
> The only thing I can see scale to that level is reform of behaviour. If people respond to abuse of authority with these kinds of tools then the only viable method of prevention is to stop abusing authority.

I think that presumes that only "good" people will use drones (etc) that way.

You've got a bunch of people who you see as* "openly corrupt … with impunity", and a new tech that lets people attack with impunity. The result is that the same cops you're paying attention to* just change from wearing a badge to controlling a joystick.

* I'm phrasing it like this because while I know what 1312 means, I don't buy the "all" part.
by bentt | 2025-04-26 23:01:50+00:00
One time my wife and I had a random conversation, utterly random, about cat hamster wheels. Like, why doesn't that exist? I got an ad for it the next day (it exists).

I don't believe that my phone is not listening to me and I challenge you to choose a random word out of the dictionary and say it 100 times in front of your phone.
by perching_aix | 2025-04-26 23:03:00+00:00
> I even worry that in trying to diagnose some of the alienation, boredom and despair that people in the UK were starting to feel, I actually might have added to the malaise.

That's usually how it goes with personal scale self-deprecating humor too. It was instrumental to my own misery, and I didn't quite notice this until I've let go of it for a while.

Another thing to ponder is the second hand effects. For the one making the joke it's a very different headspace to someone who sees it from the outside, and internalizes it as some sort of style. I'm fairly sure this kind of "saying a body, hearing a skeleton" game is how the author got to the point of seeing that site carrying the torch, but not really appreciating what he sees there. It's a kind of effect people making humorous content always seem to learn the hard way, like it was the case for e.g. idubbz, and countless others. Or like weakly racist jokes are to any odd fellow European.

Not to pass judgement though, I can see how overcorrections and the "puritanism" are definitely not any good either. But yeah, that's how these things tend to go.

I'd be vary of the author really hopping on that "they're cancelling us" bus. If he doesn't appreciate what he sees on that site, he's in for a world of hurt when he realizes where people who constantly play around with this topic right now will get him to. This is all a setup to the next chapter, where humorists will actually get unfairly censored, but then they won't be able to properly reach audiences with it anymore, as the memetic background for that has been appropriated and spent by then, by those actually malicious, a long time ago.
by cryptoz | 2025-04-26 23:03:02+00:00
I’m also reminded of the experiment that Facebook ran on its users to try to make them depressed. Modifying the news feed algorithm in a controlled way to figure out if they could make users fall into a depression or not.

Not disclosed to those users of course! But for anybody out there that thinks corporations are not actively trying to manipulate your emotions and mental health in a way that would benefit the corporation but not you - there’s the proof!

They don’t care about you, in fact sometimes big social media corporations will try really hard to target you specifically to make you feel sad.
by jpiech | 2025-04-26 23:03:51+00:00
This is a potentially interesting feature - it probably could be relatively easily extended to the shared environment in GS-Calc as there are already separate passwords to protect files, the sheet/view structures and cell ranges and optional sha256 checksums for all the data categories, but there no plans as such. At the moment you can just use two script commands to release the opened file, periodically check whether it's modified, report it and automatically reload the file.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-26 23:03:59+00:00
Rights imply an obligation.

What we're doing right now isn't working, isn't sustainable, and ignores several realities of how we interact with our neighboring nations (and, indeed, is a new problem... The current tight-border regime isn't even half a century old).

At what point do we decide that if the laws are broken that often, perhaps it's because they're bad laws that are too incompatible with reality to be practically enforced successfully? We could pass a law that requires you to hover three inches off the ground; do we blame you if you don't start levitating?
by telotortium | 2025-04-26 23:04:54+00:00
It's really pretty easy to at least get an ID card in the US. Taking a deep red state's requirements (Mississippi) [0]:

"""

Any persons six (6) years of age or older may apply to the Department of Public Safety for an identification card.

All applicants must provide the following:

- A completed and signed Application.

-Original Birth Certificate or any acceptable document. (No Photocopies Accepted)

- SSN Card or an official government correspondence displaying full 9 digits. (click here)

- Two proofs of Residency.

- Legal Documents are required if going by new name.

"""

These are all very standard. The only ones I could see people having trouble with is proof of residency, but the accepted forms[1] are very numerous (over 20). Anyone that isn't intentionally trying to stay off-grid should be able to provide at least two, especially because you're allowed to use proof for a parent, legal guardian, or spouse as long as you can establish your relationship to them. You can even get your roommates to attest that you live with them to use their proofs of residency.

[0] https://www.driverservicebureau.dps.ms.gov/Drivers/Identific...

[1] https://www.driverservicebureau.dps.ms.gov/node/303
by cyanydeez | 2025-04-26 23:05:16+00:00
Isn't the problem that education is a public good and therefore shouldn't cost anything special, and a system to sort prospective students into correct tiers based on honest merits would be better, but because rich people, it's what we have?

Seems like you haven't even gone down the path most of the world operates on and just assume the system as it exists can't be modified.
by dkh | 2025-04-26 23:05:32+00:00
> I don't understand the expectations of reddit CMV users when they engage in anonymous online debates.

Considering the great and growing percentage of a person’s communications, interactions, discussions, and debates that take place online, I think we have little choice but to try to facilitate doing this as safely, constructively, and with as much integrity as possible. The assumptions and expectations of CMV might seem naive given the current state of A.I. and whatnot, but this was less of a problem in previous years and it has been a more controlled environment than the internet at large. And commendable to attempt
by smackeyacky | 2025-04-26 23:05:37+00:00
Has anybody played with newlib, but grown the complexity as the system came together?

It seems like one thing to get a bare-bones printf() working to get you started on a bit of hardware, but as the complexity of the system grows you might want to move on from (say) pushing characters out of a serial interface onto pushing them onto a bitmapped display.

Does newlib allow you to put different hooks in there as the complexity of the system increases?
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-26 23:06:04+00:00
In a debate between the concrete reality of US children being kicked out of the country and hypothetical potential non-citizens not being able to become a citizen, I will side with the child every time. I don't think that's a radical position.

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."
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-26 23:06:10+00:00
> you're well beyond the forces of natural selection

Are you? By all appearances this is a direct result of it. Visual indicators of age haven't been selected against in and of themselves as strongly with regards to men but a great many related things have been.

Arguably your specific example might constitute an edge case that historically didn't occur with enough frequency to be selected against. Seems like little more than a curiosity to me.

> why not make an effort to combat it?

I don't follow. What are you arguing for here?
by Animats | 2025-04-26 23:06:21+00:00
Only towards the end. By the time the CVAX microprocessor inside the VaxStation 3100 shipped in 1988, it was too late for the VAX line.[1] Other microprocessors already dominated. The VAX 11/780 came out in 1977. It was a long time until a faster model.

There were rumors of a VAX 11/790, and it eventually came out as the VAX 8000 family in 1984. That had about 4x the performance of the 11/780. It was not a microprocessor; the CPU still took up several large boards. The VAX 8000 had to compete with all the M680x0 machines, and soon, the Intel 386 machines. It was worse on price/performance. DEC had to go back and make a fast VAX microprocessor, which they did. But it was too late.
by lionkor | 2025-04-26 23:06:38+00:00
They might be trying to do another C, that is so simple that it will be ubiquitous? They're failing to understand that C would never take off it invented today. Go is nowhere on my list of languages I would use - there is simply nothing it's great at. Serialization/deserialization? Rust. Multithreading? Rust. Low level high performance stuff? C, Zig. Quick scripts? Bash, python, JavaScript, Rust. Really fast concurrency? C++ or Rust. Web servers and services? Either nodejs, something static on an existing webserver, or rust for backends.

I completely fail to see where Go excels. Large, statically linked binaries that aren't even concurrency safe...? Really? No enums? Odd syntax (I like Rust, C++ and Haskell, I find Go's syntax odd still).

Like so many Google products, it solves a problem that nobody I know has. And I guess they can afford concurrency bugs, who cares, its only a language primarily for concurrency.
by jltsiren | 2025-04-26 23:08:01+00:00
If people are allowed to make their own life choices, you are unlikely to get equal representation of various demographic groups.

For example, conservatives tend to prioritize wages and stability when making career choices. Liberals are more likely to choose jobs that are inherently interesting but don't pay that well relative to the risk. If you let people make their own choices, liberals are more likely to try to become professors. And once a profession becomes associated with a particular group, people outside the dominant group may be reluctant to enter it, as they may be afraid they wouldn't fit in.

If you find that problematic, you could try to fight it with regulation. For example, you could institute quotas. Maybe 40% of all software engineers in every company must be female and 40% of all nurses in every hospital must be male. That may even work if there are enough qualified candidates available. But if the pool of candidates is already skewed, quotas can be a recipe for disaster.

If regulation is a too blunt tool, you may get better results with programs that encourage underrepresented groups to enter a field. You could have support networks for conservative professors, female software engineers and male nurses. You could have outreach programs targeting kids in those groups. And you could prioritize them in education and recruitment.
by nitwit005 | 2025-04-26 23:10:15+00:00
Unless you happen to be the most evil person on the planet, someone else is always behaving worse. It's meaningless to bring up.

Even the most benign form of this sort of study is wasting people's time. Bots clearly got detected and reported, which presumably means humans are busy expending effort dealing with this study, without agreeing to it or being compensated.

Sure, maybe this was small scale, but the next researchers may not care about other people wasting a few man years of effort dealing with their research. It's better to nip this nonsense in the bud.
by tonyarkles | 2025-04-26 23:10:21+00:00
(Not the person you replied to)

While I don't generally agree with the ethics of how the research was done, I do, personally, think the research and the data could be enlightening. Reddit, X, Facebook, and other platforms might be overflowing with bots that are already doing this but we (the general public) don't generally have clear data on how much this is happening, how effective it is, things to watch out for, etc. It's definitely an arms race but I do think that a paper which clearly communicates "in our study these specific things were the most effective way to change peoples' opinions with bots" serves as valuable input for knowing what to look out for.

I'm torn on it, to be honest.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-26 23:10:33+00:00
This echos the Minnesota professor who introduced security vulnerabilities into the Linux Kernel for a paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670

I am honestly not really sure I strongly agree or disagree with either. I see the argument for why it is unethical. These are trust based systems and that trust is being abused without consent. It takes time/mental well being away from those who are victims who now must process their abused trust with actual physical time costs.

On the flip side, these same techniques are almost certainly being actively used today by both corporations and revolutionaries. Cambridge Analytica and Palantir are almost certainly doing these types of things or working with companies that are.

The logical extreme of this experiment is testing live weapons on living human bodies to know how much damage they cause, which is clearly abhorrently unethical. I am not sure what distinction makes me see this as less unethical under conditions of philosophical rigor. "AI assisted astroturfing" is probably the most appropriate name for this and that is a weapon. It is a tool capable of force or coercion.

I think actively doing this type of thing on purpose to show it can be done, how grotesquely it can be done, and how it's not even particularly hard to do is a public service. While the ethical implications can be debated, I hope the greater lesson that we are trusting systems that have no guarantee or expectation of trust and that they are easy to manipulate in ways we don't notice is the lesson people take.

Is the wake up call worth the ethical quagmire? I lean towards yes.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-26 23:11:56+00:00
yes, I would expect the quality or quantity to be vastly greater. Ultimately, 10x the utility in one form or another.

I dont think the changes in military or interstate justify a 1,000% higher taxes on an ongoing basis.

with respect to 40+%, property tax would be an easy way to eat up an arbitrarily large portion of income. Similarly, fixed fees and fines can eat up a lot for low earners.
by JackYoustra | 2025-04-26 23:12:07+00:00
The free market will determine the best place for these people without arbitrary categories that you've given, we should let in basically anyone who wants to come. NGOs are good. They should stay, it helps with integration and placement.

I don't see why you create random liberalization rules and call it free market, those are as arbitrary as the ones we currently have. People should be free to move where they want with only the same small checks we have in place for visitor visas.

> I don't know I'm not an economist but, my gut tells me not a whole lot.

please read the literature, it's now easier than ever with gpt web + most researchers pitching their work on twitter
by ytjohn | 2025-04-26 23:12:31+00:00
I started off on mailing lists (openldap was a big one for me). And my first pleas for help were often met with some pretty brutal scathing replies. I learned to really write up the problem, reduce it to its point. Go back to it so I could find the most concrete path to either reproduce it, or isolate it. This often led to the solution, or it led to getting some confirmation of bugs. Granted I definitely ended up making some verbose emails and then I would get frustrated with people asking me to try things I detailed in my email.

But that was my "rubber duck debugging". Start by writing an email to to an imagined hostile support group. In the process of explaining the problem, it turns into a research project where I have to defend my claims. The sheer act of writing it out forces me to isolate the issue and keep troubleshooting. I can anticipate the bulk of the things they would have me try and I'd try them ahead of time.

People encountered similiar pushback with stack overflow, but I think the stack sites were much more lenient than some of those early mailing lists were.
by duskwuff | 2025-04-26 23:12:42+00:00
You're right; this study would be equally unethical without AI in the loop. At the same time, the use of AI probably allowed the authors to generate a lot more comments than they would have been able to manually, and allowed them to psychologically distance themselves from the generated content. (Or, to put it another way: if they'd had to write these comments themselves, they might have stopped sooner, either because they got tired, or because they realized just how gross what they were doing was.)
by chromanoid | 2025-04-26 23:13:28+00:00
Sure, but it is dangerous to expect anything else than what the study makes clear. LLMs make manipulation just cheaper and more scalable. There are so many rumors about state sponsored troll farms that I guess this study was a good wake-up call for anyone who is upset now. It's like acting surprised that somebody can send you a computer virus or that the email is not from an African prince who has to get rid of money.
by gruez | 2025-04-26 23:14:20+00:00
>- Pixel on GrapheneOS

>- Any Android smartphone on Lineage or /e/OS

None of those operating systems does anything for tracking/advertising SDKs in apps, which is most of where the data leaks are coming from, not google/apple. Moreover unless you're willing to go no proprietary apps (ie. most apps people actually use), you'll need google play services, which means google can still collect data on you.
by merksoftworks | 2025-04-26 23:15:39+00:00
In the long run %100. comparing the lowest quartile of high school grads to the lowest quartile of college grads, the college grad makes about $30k more. So without accounting for interest on the loans (if they were needed) it would take about ~13 years to pay for itself, 17 if you count the four years it took to get the degree. At the upper quartile it looks more like five or six years to pay for itself. Please correct my napkin math or my napkin source if this seems shaky: https://www.ppic.org/publication/is-college-worth-it/
by tim333 | 2025-04-26 23:17:22+00:00
>Scientists have built the first-ever thorium reactor

is not really true. The Shippingport Atomic Power Station produced power:

>The thorium core was rated at 60 MW(e), produced power from 1977 through 1982 (producing over 2.1 billion kilowatt hours of electricity) and converted enough thorium-232 into uranium-233 to achieve a 1.014 breeding ratio. (wikipedia)

Thorium has been around for ages but never seemed profitable which is why the Chinese made a 2MW research reactor rather than a 1GW production one. For comparison they have 57GW of uranium plants working and another 100GW or so planned.
by mubou | 2025-04-26 23:18:20+00:00
Can I ask what you find tiresome, specifically? If it's because you have tons of repos, there's a little-known git feature where you can set the config for all repos in a directory, so that e.g. ~/work/* uses your work name & email, without having to `git config` every new repo you create or clone. https://alysivji.github.io/multiple-gitconfig-files.html
Ask HN: How the same LLM "instance" serve multiple clients?
by BiraIgnacio | 2025-04-26 23:19:39+00:00
I've been playing with running LLMs locally and only then realized I have no idea how to scale it (I don't really know how LLMs work internally).

I'm assuming context is everything but if the same LLM process can serve multiple clients, aren't there risks of mixing contexts? Does anyone have any ideas?
by joexbayer | 2025-04-26 23:19:48+00:00
There is no magic interaction between the compiler and OS. It simples compiles to the same machine code (i386) and uses interrupts for system calls. Structs are handled as a memory region with a size based on its members, and the member access is simply an offset into that region.

Current it has lots of limitations such as only int and char, no switch statements etc. The biggest change from default C, is allowing functions in structs and implicit passing a struct to a function if it’s a struct function. You can read more here:

https://github.com/joexbayer/C-Compiler
by kurtreed2 | 2025-04-26 23:20:05+00:00
I think the goalpost is being moved. Your initial criteria was all about the resilency against state-sponsored disinformation attempts and the gaming of systems. For that criteria we don't have a comparable sample to look into when evaluating Wikipedia's.

By comparable, I'm meaning an alternative or competitor that had gained equal prominence as Wikipedia, in terms of Google search results, and the eyes of the whole world, again like what Pepsi is to Coca-Cola and vice versa. We would have something to compare to in terms of the criteria if Google has given their favoritism to one or more other platforms, instead of just Wikipedia.
by mr_toad | 2025-04-26 23:20:52+00:00
The energy involved is enough to turn the both projectile and the armour to liquid.

Once the projectile penetrates the armour it sprays out aa a jet of hot metal and solidifies as dust. (Depleted uranium also burns at high temperatures, so the liquified projectile is also on fire).

Penetration depth (hydrodynamic penetration) is a function of the relative density of the liquids and the length of the projectile, which is why DU is favoured.