MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9dev | 2025-04-20 23:18:07+00:00
> how competent can AI get before it's too dangerous to be in the hands of flakey tech companies?

Ever heard of Pandora's Box? Yeah. That ship has sailed. No moratorium you could enact would, at this point, stop the innovation from happening, possibly even independently by multiple teams globally. Economic incentives are stacked in such a way that flakey tech companies will prioritise shareholder value over anything else. Whatever comes next will come, and all we can do is lean back and enjoy the show.
by pavlov | 2025-04-20 23:21:06+00:00
Seeing the original live action footage reminds how challenging these productions must have been for the actors. There's nothing around you but green screen and a stunt rigger. The dialog sucks and you're little more than a puppet in these action sequences, week after week of shoots.

Lucas wanted to push the digital envelope, but the contemporary Harry Potter films also by ILM have aged much better because they relied on physical sets and practical effects as much as possible. You can tell the actors are actually within a world.
by fouc | 2025-04-20 23:21:40+00:00
Given that you've spent some time thinking about this, perhaps you should spend time thinking about the ethics of it, and write a full report AGAINST your idea from the ethics point of view, and then see if you can address all those concerns in a second report.

Some key ethics concerns to consider:

* creating brainless clones is almost like creating a sub-species of humans that we're going to farm like cattle.

* given that many people consider embryos & fetuses have certain rights, can we find a way to create brain-less clones without killing viable embryos?

In reality, most of the work done in this area is going to be focused on growing organs, rather than entire bodies. This lets us sidestep most of the ethical concerns.
by tnvisafyi | 2025-04-20 23:22:03+00:00
I built https://tnvisa.fyi to bring more transparency to the TN visa process for Canadians working in the U.S.

The TN process can feel opaque — people often rely on Reddit threads, scattered blog posts, or anecdotes. This site lets users browse real TN application experiences by job title, port of entry, and outcome. You can also see common rejection reasons, how people framed their job duties, and tips that helped others get approved.

It's fully free and open to the community. I'm hoping it can become a useful resource for both first-time applicants and repeat renewals.

Feedback, questions, and ideas for improvement are very welcome!
Show HN: Genomic Jamba – Hybrid Mamba2/FlashAttention Model for Genomics
by ss-13 | 2025-04-20 23:22:15+00:00
We’re sharing Genomic Jamba, a small research project combining Mamba2 and FlashAttention2 for DNA sequence modeling. It uses a 75:25 mix of Mamba and attention blocks to balance efficiency and expressiveness.

The model is pretrained on a plant genomics corpus and available on Hugging Face. We’d be grateful for any feedback or suggestions.

GitHub: https://github.com/suzuki-2001/genomic-jamba Model: https://huggingface.co/suzuki-2001/plant-genomic-jamba

Thank you!
by quantumHazer | 2025-04-20 23:22:45+00:00
Why not use a blog dot google dot com domain or whatever? Why choose a format that resembles a published article instead?

As for the graph, it’s too generic, it doesn’t provide any real value, other than a certain pseudo-appeal reminiscent of paper-style visuals. In my humble opinion, it’s designed to mislead people who fall for hype, much like some of Google’s recent pseudo-scientific blog posts on machine learning.

I have deep respect for Sutton and his work, but this kind of things are a hard pass for me.
by hammock | 2025-04-20 23:23:10+00:00
You ought to visit Iceland. Knowing that the entire island went from 30-40% woodland to being basically 100% deforested in a span of 100 years (the first 100 years following the Vikings arrival), and with the bare ground being fields of barren volcanic rock, to see all the sheep grazing pasture that exists today, gives you great appreciation for the amount of terraforming that was required to get even 1% of the land into that state.
by Lerc | 2025-04-20 23:23:16+00:00
This (along with ibniz) was one of my inspirations for https://c50.fingswotidun.com/

Using a stack based expression approach makes it easier to design images at the cost of being less flexible computationally. I have often pondered enhancements to make it more capable,and indeed Turing complete. Forth style word definition would work, but I also have a soft spot for state machines.

Little toys like these are things I would recommend everyone have a go at. I have quite enjoyed https://tixy.land/ and https://www.dwitter.net
by like_any_other | 2025-04-20 23:24:13+00:00
It's a conservative cause the same way that tightening IP laws and bank bailouts are a liberal cause - something politicians do regardless of what their voters want. I hang around a few conservative forums, and have seen zero (literal zero, not hyperbole) child labor advocacy.

It's possible some exists, the way that any cause will have some proponents, but not nearly enough to be the reason laws are getting changed, especially while other far more strongly championed causes get ignored. It's corporations buying laws, and (in this case conservative) voters getting the blame.
by calmoo | 2025-04-20 23:24:50+00:00
I would bet it would still do well. You can give a frontier LLM photos that it has never seen before and it will reason about them incredibly accurately, since is is trained on, well, a lot of other similar photos. You can easily try it yourself, give o3 a photo you have taken yourself of a random place, it will crop, zoom and analyze different sections of the photo until it gets most of the time the exact coordinates of where the photo was taken.
by sentimentscan | 2025-04-20 23:24:51+00:00
A year ago, I bought a brand-new EVGA hybrid-cooled 3090 Ti for 700 euros. I'm still astonished at how good of a decision it was, especially considering the scarcity of 24GB cards available for a similar price. For pure gaming, many cards perform better, but they mostly come with 12 to 16GB of VRAM.
by _bin_ | 2025-04-20 23:25:07+00:00
I have no particular love for the nazis. As I’ve said multiple times, I am against the state deciding this, which means I am against the top of the slide down.

I disagree; I think some were morally worse. The transatlantic slave trade, the holodomor, leopold’s congo, and the khmer rouge all rank worse, as far as I’m concerned. Not in terms of numbers, in terms of horror factor.

Refusing to engage because “oh the nazis said something” is intellectually chickenshit. The core difference is some things which are reprehensible when backed by state violence are fine when chosen individually or encouraged by social pressures.
by jeremyw | 2025-04-20 23:25:07+00:00
And continuing up: o3 was both correct and playful.

> In literal, physical terms, a pound of courage would—by definition—tip the scales at one avoirdupois pound (≈ 454 g). A modern UK £1 coin, on the other hand, weighs only 8.75 g. So if you could bottle bravery, the jar marked “1 lb Courage” would outweigh the coin by a factor of about 52 to 1.

> (Of course, measured in sheer impact, courage can feel far heavier than anything money can buy!)

https://chatgpt.com/share/68057dbc-2ff4-8010-ac30-b404135200...
by Veserv | 2025-04-20 23:26:10+00:00
You do not need to assume, here is Elon Musk talking about his lawsuit philosophy:

"My commitment:

- We will never seek victory in a just case against us, even if we will probably win.

- We will never surrender/settle an unjust case against us, even if we will probably lose."[1]

[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1527749734668050433
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-04-20 23:26:10+00:00
>> if there are fewer than 13 people playing (and it only just launched last week and that was just on Reddit!) then a popup will appear saying your verdict is simulated by AI. But this is just a TEMPORARY feature with the MVP. As soon as there are regular players, it will be permanently dismantled and we will celebrate the power of collective human intelligence!

Congratulations for a great idea and a fun game, but AFAICT there is no way to stop participants from plugging in an LLM to your site and having the LLM read questions and make decisions. For example, someone might do this to cheat their jury duty and get decisions from others without having to personally invest time and effort.

I don't know what you can do about this. Do you have any ideas?
by ramesh31 | 2025-04-20 23:26:23+00:00
>”Although, I could be argued into calling what we have already ASI - take a human and Gemini 2.5, and put them through a barrage of omni-disciplinary questions and situations and problems. Gemini 2.5 will win, but not absolutely.”

Except for writing a joke that will make you laugh, a poem that will make you cry, or a work of art that evokes deep introspection.

Intelligence is much deeper and more nuanced than answering questions of rote knowledge. LLMs are fantastic “reasoning engines”, but the soul is simply not there yet.
by HachiWari8 | 2025-04-20 23:27:26+00:00
I tried the 27B QAT model and it hallucinates like crazy. When I ask it for information about some made up person, restaurant, place name, etc., it never says "I don't know about that" and instead seems eager to just make up details. The larger local models like the older Llama 3.3 70B seem better at this, but are also too big to fit on a 24GB GPU.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-20 23:28:18+00:00
It's never going to be perfect or identical. Actors' #1 job is to give an emotionally believable, powerful performance. A thousand little details are different in every take, and your movements will change to reflect what is authentic in the moment. In fact, editors want emotional variety so that they have more options in assembling the scene.

Yes, things are blocked ahead of time. You'll stand up at the same moment, you'll stop walking at a particular mark. But there are limits, especially with things like hands and cigarettes. If you look for continuity errors around those, you'll find them everywhere. Actors, directors and editors have more important things to worry about.
by 9dev | 2025-04-20 23:29:17+00:00
Eh, I am torn on this. I had some great conversations on random questions or conceptual ideas, but also some where the models instructions shone through way too clearly. Like, when you ask something like "I’m working on the architecture of this system, can you let me know what you think and if there’s anything obvious to improve on?"—the model will always a) flatter me for my amazing concept, b) point out the especially laudable parts of it, and c) name a few obvious but not-really-relevant parts (e.g. "always be careful with secrets and passwords"). However, it will not actually point out higher level design improvements, or alternative solutions. It’s always just regurgitating what I’ve told it about. That is semi-useful, most of the time.
by scubbo | 2025-04-20 23:29:44+00:00
I don't agree that "If we could not fuck with accessibility devices which disabled people rely on, that'd be great. Thanks." can be classified as "broad outrage".

---

It can be simultaneously true that "this particular incident resulted in no actual harm (because the prank messages still usefully conveyed the required information)" and "messing with accessibility devices has the potential to cause harm, and it would be preferable for well-intentioned pranksters to direct their efforts elsewhere".

In particular, I'd still push back on a claim that these messages were still useful because they conveyed the same instruction. Someone relying solely on this announcement (without the ability to visually verify the situation) might have reasonable cause to doubt whether the announcement is still trustworthy. After all, they might reason, if a prankster is able to change the message, might they also able to change the playback conditions? Or might they be able to switch the "don't walk" and "walk" announcements? Anything which causes the UX to deviate from the known, reliable, trustworthy pattern introduces significant trust-costs.
by ivanjermakov | 2025-04-20 23:30:11+00:00
Errors as values approach suffers similar problem as async/await - it's leaky. Once the function is altered to possibly return an error, its signature changes and every caller needs to be updated (potentially all the way to the main(), if error is not handled before that).

This approach is great when:

* program requirements are clear

* correctness is more important than prototyping speed, because every error has to be handled

* no need for concise stack trace, which would require additional layer above simple tuples

* language itself has a great support for binding and mapping values, e.g. first class monads or a bind operator

Good job by the author on acknowledging that this error handling approach is not a solver bullet and has tradeoffs.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-20 23:30:51+00:00
My son read some of these books about a year ago. I'm sure a lot of the content was over his head, but he enjoyed the books enough to continue reading.

I'm expecting him to re-read the whole set at least twice.

(BTW if you're in the UK, you can often find the complete set of 10 books on eBay for £12 including delivery.)
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-20 23:30:58+00:00
> the holidays have nothing to do with each other

Well, if the holidays had nothing to do with each other, then the Early Christians reading the Gospels were all severely misled by the quite obvious references to Jesus as the Paschal Lamb, such as the Last Supper with no mention of a lamb on the table [because it was Jesus, the Lamb Himself, living among them]

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/exodus/12?3

and the very specific mention of Nisan and the 10th day, upon which to "take an unblemished lamb from teh flock"

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/mark/14?12

https://sjvlaydivision.org/new-paschal-lamb/#:~:text=Jesus%2...

was the day Pilate said "I find no fault [blemish] in this man [Jesus]"

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/john/18?38

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/luke/23?4

And scholars for the last 2,000 years have colossally wasted their time, right up to and including Dr. Scott Hahn, who has staked his entire career on Jesus as the Paschal Lamb,

https://paschallamb.com/products/the-fourth-cup?pr_prod_stra...

And priests and bishops and cardinals and popes have been super-wrong about relating the Passion, Death, and Resurrection to the Passover feast, or the little bit about Egypt and the first-born sons and the blood on the lintels of their doors, or the incident with Moses and the Hebrews escaping Pharaoh during the Parting of the Red Sea (which is sung liturgically with psalms for the Easter Vigil as folks are being literally baptized)

Man we've been wrong about all this stuff. Thank you, Horus, and thank you, Ishtar, for dispelling those silly myths about Oestre which is a pagan festival that also has nothing to do with Jews or Hebrew religion.
by idonotknowwhy | 2025-04-20 23:31:06+00:00
I didn't realise the 5070 is slower than the 3090. Thanks.

If you want a bit more context, try -ctv q8 -ctk q8 (from memory so look it up) to quant the kv cache.

Also an imatrix gguf like iq4xs might be smaller with better quality
by zeroq | 2025-04-20 23:32:34+00:00
JS aside, I recently tried my very best to introduce proper logging and error handling to otherwise "look ma, no handlebars" codebase.

Call it a thought experiment. We start with a clean implementation that satisfies requirements. It makes a bold assumption that every star in the universe will align to help us achieve to goal.

Now we add logging and error handling.

Despite my best intentions and years of experience, starting with clean code, the outcome was a complete mess.

It brings back memories when in 2006 I was implementing deep linking for Wikia. I started with a "true to the documention" implemention which was roughly 10 lines of code. After handling all edge cases and browser incompatibilites I ended up with a whooping 400 lines.

Doing exactly the same as the original lines did, but cross compatible.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-04-20 23:32:53+00:00
> My vision for my app might conflict with your vision for your desktop. Maybe I want this button to be a light blue because it meshes well with some other elements in the app, but you want it to be a darker blue because it fits with your desktop's color scheme. What happens then?

Probably something similar to how Apple platforms handle colors. Instead of providing a single static light blue, you have a couple options:

1. Use a “system color”, which is pre-tuned for optimal contrast, appearance, and usability and adjusts automatically when e.g. the user switches between light/dark mode or enables an accessibility setting related to color or vision

2. Define a light blue that’s actually multiple variants of the color bundled together, with each being optimal to various environments, with the UI framework choosing the right one depending on the situation

Arguably developers should be doing these things anyway for accessibility reasons. It’s not been good practice to use e.g. bare color hexes for quite some time now.
by rietta | 2025-04-20 23:33:05+00:00
Wine has been very useful for a few decades now. I got to admit though, I seldom find myself running serious software with it. I end up with Windows itself running in a virtual machine. I remember that it actually ran my VB6 applications like Whois Web (https://rietta.com/whoisweb) and RoboGen (https://rietta.com/robogen) very, very well twenty years ago!
by aaron695 | 2025-04-20 23:33:11+00:00
>> Terra Preta - literally "black soil"

Terra Preta is noble savage fiction [1] created because charcoal stains the soil quite deep. (Similar to how the OP 'spotlight' is mostly fiction)

Biochar enthusiasts show the staining in soil cutouts after a few years.

I do a lot of biochar (100+ liters a week) but it has mixed results in the scientific journals, meta studies don't show a lot of improvement.

[1] The Amazonian cutting down of forests and burning it for quick release of nutrients works, but unless a third of your babies die you will run out of forest.
by furyofantares | 2025-04-20 23:33:49+00:00
I don't really mind using analogies for LLMs "assuming" things or being "confused" too much. I think there really is _some_ value to such analogies.

However I gotta take issue with using those analogies when "it's trained for text completion and the punchline to this riddle is surely in its training data a lot" is a perfectly good explanation. I guess I would also add that the answer is well-aligned with RLHF-values. I wouldn't go for an explanation that requires squishy analogies when the stuff we know about these things seems completely adequate.
by choilive | 2025-04-20 23:35:58+00:00
Also unfortunate that SK seems to have gone overnight from a generational family unit to the western style nuclear family. All of those elderly living in poverty despite modern SK built on their backs.. I am sure they would love to contribute to raising the next generation of children.

There are so many cultural factors in SK that might take generations to reverse without being "forced" by the government (which is also wary to enforce). Of course, by then its too late per the video.
by dzaima | 2025-04-20 23:36:34+00:00
I imagine a large part is just how one is used to doing stuff. Not being forced to be explicit about mutability and lifetimes allows a bunch of neat stuff that does not translate well to Rust, even if the desired thing in question might not be hard to do in another way. (but that other way might involve more copies / indirections, which users of manually-memory langs would (perhaps rightfully, perhaps pointlessly) desire to avoid if possible, but Rust users might just be comfortable with)

This separation is also why it is basically impossible to make apples-to-apples comparisons between languages.

Messy things I've hit (from ~5KLoC of Rust; I'm a Rust beginner, I primarily do C) are: cyclical references; a large structure that needs efficient single-threaded mutation while referenced from multiple places (i.e. must use some form of cell) at first, but needs to be sharable multithreaded after all the mutating is done; self-referential structures are roughly impossible to move around (namely, an object holding &-s to objects allocated by a bump allocator, movable around as a pair, but that's not a thing (without libraries that I couldn't figure out at least)); and refactoring mutability/lifetimes is also rather messy.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-04-20 23:37:36+00:00
> Personally, I find the idea that a compiler might be able to reach outside itself completely terrifying (Access the network or a database? Are you nuts?).

It’s not the compiler per se.

Let’s say you want a build system that is capable of generating code. Ok we can all agree that’s super common and not crazy.

Wouldn’t it be great if the code that generated Zig code also be written in Zig? Why should codegen code be written in some completely unrelated language? Why should developers have to learn a brand new language to do compile time code Gen? Why yes Rust macros I’m staring angrily at you!
by bgnn | 2025-04-20 23:37:49+00:00
This makes sense as pots require very high precision of soil composition and water management. You need good drainage but a water reservoir under the pots with some kind of wick to keep it watering from the bottom. Also the size of the pot you need is huge compared to your intuition. A single tomato plant requires more than 100L of soil, 30% of which should be perlite, you need some pebbles for better drainage mixed in, and more than 50% should be compost. This often isn't enough for a tomato, so you need to add slow release fertilizers at different levels of soil. In a warm day (> 30C) you need to give 5L of water in the morning and in the evening. The water should stay in the pot but not flood it. Ah, also, they cannot handle cold as good as in soil either. So the pots should be moved indoors when it's too cold, and require shielding from a lot of wind.

If you prepare the pot, soil etc properly, you can get good results. It's very repeatable as it's a very precise recipe. If you put potting soil in a pot randomly it won't work at all.
by furyofantares | 2025-04-20 23:38:36+00:00
> Edit: she has to be real

Nah, having used HeyGen a bit, it's extremely clearly a HeyGen generation. There's a small number of movements and expressions that it continually uses (in forward and reverse).

Edit: I mean, to be clear, it is a real person, just like the author's video is. The way HeyGen works is you record a short clip of you saying some stuff and then you can generate long videos like these of you saying whatever you want. So the stuff you noticed does come from a real video of her, but it's not a real video that's lightly edited by AI, more like the AI has a bunch of clips it can continually mesh together while fixing up the mouth to continually generate video.
by hdivider | 2025-04-20 23:38:56+00:00
Consider all the small business defense contractors who are held to the letter of the most minute security compliance requirements. They have to somehow meet everything, with very limited resources.

And then at the top of government, the most sensitive information is frequently handled without any care at all. Not to mention 19-year olds with flash drives barging into the most sensitive IT systems of the federal government.

Slight imbalance there, I would say.
by dTal | 2025-04-20 23:40:15+00:00
>they can make their own mind up

On what basis can they do this? No human is born with a magical algorithm in their brain that can sort good ideas from bad. The only scalpels we have are those which we collect. Critical thinking must be bootstrapped. Mind viruses must be inoculated against. Just because you (eventually!) threw off your case of memetic measles, doesn't mean that everyone does. Some people die of it.