MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigyabai | 2025-04-15 23:36:45+00:00
I don't see a strong case for investing in "safe" AI when implementation is what scares people. Just because you made a less discriminatory or de-stereotyped model doesn't mean it's actually safe in-practice. The model could be forced to make unsafe decisions anyways, or be used in contexts where safety is relative or impossible. Marketing it as safe is the sort of misnomer that will inevitably disappoint people, really no different than the flak OpenAI gets for their own misleading name.

Kudos for trying to solve the issue, but I think you're looking for the wrong solutions. We don't need safer AI, we need smarter people plugging into the endpoints. Intelligence is a dog-eat-dog world, I'd feel pretty iffy prioritizing safety over results if my money was on the line.
by profmonocle | 2025-04-15 23:37:20+00:00
> 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts

That's too generous. "Not your personal army" started because 4chan had a well-earned reputation for harassment - usually raiding other web sites, but often targeting individual people who caught their attention for one reason or another.

The "not your personal army" slogan came about because people who were very aware of this reputation were showing up, hoping to make a web site or person they disliked the next target. That got annoying fast, hence they told those people to go away.

It wasn't a moral stance against target harassment - far from it. It was a stance that the group mind will choose the next target when they feel like it - not because some rando is mad at their ex or something
by delecti | 2025-04-15 23:37:27+00:00
Does that matter? I'm not trying to be sarcastic or glib, does it help in any way that it's half water?

It's probably not an accurate comparison, but I don't find any consolation in the fact that a lot of the bulk/weight of cleaning my cat's litter box is water. I don't know if it meaningfully changes anything about the task for a cow though.
by dccoolgai | 2025-04-15 23:37:31+00:00
Meshtastic UI is pretty far along that path right now. You can purchase a device for like $50ish that gives you a few miles of reach in the right conditions and has a decent UI built in (on the latest rev). If you want to run firmware on chips and use UI from your phone over Bluetooth you can run on like $12ish per endpoint.
by wegfawefgawefg | 2025-04-15 23:37:40+00:00
A healthy skepticism is good.

Have you gone on social media recently? It is like 90% nonfactual weirdness. Even here on hackers news its tons of mutually exclusive unfalsifiable assertions of perspective, not fact.

I dont know about your family, but mine is pretty religious. Listening to their conversation during thanksgiving gives me about a 90% nonfact rate.

I think humans are just are not beings of fact in general.
by roughly | 2025-04-15 23:37:58+00:00
I like this!

In the grand HN tradition of being triggered by a word in the post and going off on a not-quite-but-basically-totally-tangential rant:

There’s (at least) three areas here that are footguns with these kinds of calculations:

1) 95% is usually a lot wider than people think - people take 95% as “I’m pretty sure it’s this,” whereas it’s really closer to “it’d be really surprising if it were not this” - by and large people keep their mental error bars too close.

2) probability is rarely truly uncorrelated - call this the “Mortgage Derivatives” maxim. In the family example, rent is very likely to be correlated with food costs - so, if rent is high, food costs are also likely to be high. This skews the distribution - modeling with an unweighted uniform distribution will lead to you being surprised at how improbable the actual outcome was.

3) In general normal distributions are rarer than people think - they tend to require some kind of constraining factor on the values to enforce. We see them a bunch in nature because there tends to be negative feedback loops all over the place, but once you leave the relatively tidy garden of Mother Nature for the chaos of human affairs, normal distributions get pretty abnormal.

I like this as a tool, and I like the implementation, I’ve just seen a lot of people pick up statistics for the first time and lose a finger.
by chiefalchemist | 2025-04-15 23:38:31+00:00
A better title would be: "How this one time the U.S. became a science superpower".

We all know the rule: Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Two significant and obvious difference come to mind. I'm sure there are others.

1) WWII did major physical damage to Europe and Japan, to say nothing of the underlying economic damage (e.g., Britain's war debt handcuffed them). Sans any serious competition, of course the US excelled.

2) Along the same lines, the US then didn't have the trillions in debt the US has now. Many of the universities seeing their grants cut are well into the black. On the other hand, Uncle Sam is drenched red ink.

I understand the value of investing. But given the financial fitness of the universities, it feels more like subsidies. Subsidies that aren't benefitting Sam a/o US taxpayers. Yes, Sam can continue to buy success, but at what cost?
by trueismywork | 2025-04-15 23:39:31+00:00
Germans have entered the chat. The attendant telling you it's your fault is such a classic normal thing to happen in Germany. No one will ever bat an eye. And if you notice that thr attendant could have been a little softer, they'll repeat confused, "but it's your fault."

Germans in my opinion have perfected the art of no empathy for mistakes.
by dimal | 2025-04-15 23:39:57+00:00
But really, 4chan-style bullshit took over the rest of the internet. At least in the old internet, it was self contained there. If someone spouted nonsense they read on 4chan, you could easily dismiss them as a crank. Now everyone is posting and reposting bullshit on a multitude of microblogging shitsites.
by jcranmer | 2025-04-15 23:40:55+00:00
You're not really contradicting o11c here; what LLVM calls "environment" is a mixture of what they called libc/abi/fabi. There's also what LLVM calls "subarch" to distinguish between different architectures that may be relevant (e.g., i386 is not the same as i686, although LLVM doesn't record this difference since it's generally less interested in targeting old hardware), and there's also OS version numbers that may or may not be relevant.

The underlying problem with target triples is that architecture-vendor-system isn't sufficient to uniquely describe the relevant details for specifying a toolchain, so the necessary extra information has been somewhat haphazardly added to the format. On top of that, since the relevance of some of the information is questionable for some tasks (especially the vendor field), different projects have chosen not to care about subtle differences, so the normalization of a triple is different between different projects.

LLVM's definition is not more or less correct than gcc's here, nor are these the only definitions floating around.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-15 23:41:18+00:00
I checked out the Alliterative Morte Arthure ( https://metseditions.org/read/KWj7bbRIl0RBUmG9uG60zTv8Wak97Z... ).

I'm charmed by the Middle English footnoting style of providing glosses for words that may trouble the modern-English-speaking reader without bothering to note which words those glosses are for.

However, this edition isn't typeset correctly, and the glosses are appearing attached to the wrong lines. (At least, I'm assuming that "great", glossing an empty line, is meant to gloss "grete" on the following line, and "shameful deeds", on the line "And the precious prayer / of his pris Moder" is actually meant to gloss the following line "Sheld us fro shamesdeede / and sinful workes".)†

This is a pretty serious problem.

More generally, these appear to be edited critical editions, and I wish academic texts would actually display the text of the work they represent. I don't mind displaying a standardized "editor's rendering", but show the actual text too. I want to know what the scribe wrote. This is an electronic reference. We can afford the space.

† Tangentially, it's also interesting that "sinful" counts as alliterating with "shield" and "shame".

--- edit ---

Heh. I looked into the display. There are two different documents, text and glosses, and they're supposed to be synched up by matching <br> tags.

This could actually work, because the panel for the text has a hardcoded width of 487 px regardless of window size. But they've blown it by including a sentence at the beginning of the text that is more than one line long - even though they know exactly how long a line is - and ignoring that in their emission of <br> tags. So every line of text is pushed down by one line, and the same isn't true of the glosses.

The correct way to do this is to have the glosses in the same document as the text:

And the precious prayer of his pris<div class="gloss">excellent</div> Moder

and then style the glosses to float to the right.

Or if you need separate documents, you could have a table and put glosses in the same row as the line they're glossing. The text is already displayed in a table - but there's just one row, with one cell for line numbers, one for the text, and one for the glosses.
by o11c | 2025-04-15 23:41:39+00:00
I wouldn't call them "same concept" at all. Segments (program headers) are all about the runtime (executables and shared libraries) and are low-cost. Sections are all about development (.o files) and are detailed.

Generally there are many sections combined into a single segment, other than special-purpose ones. Unless you are reimplementing ld.so, you almost certainly don't want to touch segments; sections are far easier to work with.

Also, normally you just just call `getauxval`, but if needed the type is already named `ElfW(auxv_t)*`.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-04-15 23:41:40+00:00
DRY applies here. Placing files in a directory hierarchy and/or naming them according to a strict convention is "writing it down" once; repeating that in a text config file is writing it down a second time.

A good build system should use a concise but configurable rule to decide what to build as far as possible. Whether the details of that rule are "compile every file below this directory" or "compile every file that matches *.cpp but not *Test.cpp" (or some combination, or similar) isn't important.

Then it's the programmer's responsibility to "write the info" correctly by strictly conforming to that rule in how they name and place files, and/or tweaking the rule if necessary (e.g., "... But don't compile any file that has a period as the first character of its filename").
by charlie90 | 2025-04-15 23:41:47+00:00
I assume if it reaches dire levels the government will just mandate that you raise children. I dont see anything wrong with that, personally. Raising kids is a duty like paying taxes or registering for the draft. Previously, it was just assumed that people would do it on their own, but it seems like the government needs to add "sticks" to get people to do it.
by Shekelphile | 2025-04-15 23:41:48+00:00
It's the opposite, actually. This place has always been owned and operated by a musk crony. Musk only got his paws on reddit recently, and has barely had any success besides getting the admins to shut down r/cyberstuck.

Here on HN anti-musk/regime posts get deleted automatically, TERF and other bigoted posters are allowed to post through spam filters from freshly made accounts, and everything else that isn't clearly delineated as 'liberal media' but negative for the regime just gets flagged or deranked from listing.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-04-15 23:42:29+00:00
I want ...-to-3D-scene. Then I can use Blender to render the resulting picture and/or vid. Be it "text-to-3D-scene" or "image-to-3D-scene".

And there's a near infinity of data out there to train "image-to-3D-scene" models. You can literally take existing stuff and render it from different angles, different lighting, different background, etc.

I've seen a few unconclusive demos of "...-to-3D-scene" but this 100% coming.

I can't wait to sketch out a very crude picture and have an AI generate me a 3D scene out of that.

> ... in short, something that allows minute creative control just like current tools do?

With 3D scenes generated by AI, one shall be able to decide to just render it as it (with proper lighting btw) or one shall all all the creative control he wants.

I want this now. But I'll settle with waiting a bit.

P.S: same for songs and sound FX by the way... I want the AI to generate me stuff I can import in an open-source DAW. And this is 100% coming too.
by sly010 | 2025-04-15 23:44:14+00:00
Very cool, but by css-rotating (skewY(-6deg)) the canvas at the last moment, you introduced aliasing on the border between the canvas and the rest of the page which kills the vibe. The browser can't automatically blend the canvas with the rest of the page. It's noticeable even on a brand new retina display. Maybe you could keep your canvas square and introduce the skew in the shader.
by ok_computer | 2025-04-15 23:44:20+00:00
I have an uneasy feeling logging into a Text Editor vscode and seeing a Microsoft correlated account, work or personal, in the lower left corner. I understand that settings sync or whatever but it’d be preferred to keep to a simple config json or xml (pretty sure most settings are in json).

I have no problem, however, pasting an encryption public key into my Sublime Text editor. I’m not completely turned off by ability fir telemetry, tracking, or analytics. But having a login for a Text Editor is totally unappealing to me with all the overhead.

It’s a bummer that similar to browsers and chrome, the text editor with an active package marketplace necessitates some tech major underwriting the development with “open source” code but a closed kernel.

Long live Sublime text (i’m aware there are more pure text editors but do use mice)
by 9rx | 2025-04-15 23:44:23+00:00
> Surely there is some middle ground?

Is there? It seems quite binary from my vantage point. Of course, I'm not oblivious the fact that I'm arguing, so, that means I don't really have a clue.

Perhaps the middle ground, if we are to call it that, is actually the division of "I don't know and I don't care" and "I don't know but wish to learn more"?

Now, one could find a change in emotion there, transitioning between care and lack of care. While emotion is related to the mind, I'm not sure that is what a "made up mind" or "changed mind" refers to. As far as I can tell, as it is used, people consider refer to the mind in that context to be something rational or logical, not something of the arbitrary emotional whim.

> If we dichotomize between "knowing with the certainty of math", and "not knowing", we end in some pretty weird places.

How so? You've piqued by interest.
by btilly | 2025-04-15 23:44:35+00:00
The case where the precedent was set suggests that it is within the outer perimeter of what the President does to give a speech designed to whip up a crowd before they head them off to the Capitol to attempt a coup.

While Trump may go farther than that, it is hard to imagine any other President in our history who would have considered doing anything more deserving of criminal prosecution in a US court.

Given how polarized our country has become and the requirement for a 2/3 majority in the Senate, it is also difficult to see how we could ever again wind up in a situation where the threat of impeachment is a significant concern to a sitting President. Given the current state of the Republican party, I'm not even sure whether an attempted military coup by Trump would get that result.
by BizarroLand | 2025-04-15 23:45:58+00:00
In theory, yes, but there's also an insularization, where the older posters who got there first and accumulated clout inside of the group now actively prevent new users from participating until they have completely consumed the knowledge of the group, and even then they might still be excluded just for having an account that isn't old enough or that hasn't generated enough value to the group.

It would be like having to read and parse every book in the Library in order to get feedback on your short story, and half the time the reviewers will just throw your story in the trash before even reading the cover.
by roenxi | 2025-04-15 23:46:07+00:00
> I consider it pretty unlikely that we'll ever see a former President even be charged with a crime...

You could have stopped the sentence here; most US presidents are responsible for acts that appear to be criminal but for the fact that it is political convention not to charge them. The most egregious case I recall was Anwar Al-Awlaki [0] - where he seems to have been killed on the president's orders without actually having done anything specific to justify it. Searching for "crime" on his Wikipedia page turns up nothing much. If a president isn't publicly investigated by the judicial system for having a US citizen killed it is hard to see when charges would be appropriate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
by chris_wot | 2025-04-15 23:46:50+00:00
There's an amazing scene in "This is Spinal Tap" where Nigel Tufnel had been brainstorming a scene where Stonehenge would be lowered from above onto the stage during their performance, and he does some back of the envelope calculations which he gives to the set designer. Unfortunately, he mixes the symbol for feet with the symbol for inches. Leading to the following:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyh1Va_mYWI
by andrelaszlo | 2025-04-15 23:47:10+00:00
Well, the thing is that if it's Sunday you can't know if it's the Sunday at the end of the week or the Sunday at the beginning of the week. Therefore, each Sunday is in two weeks and should be counted twice, 8 + 2 = 10 days in a week. Don't feel bad, a lot of people miss this.
by theteapot | 2025-04-15 23:47:26+00:00
> ... DOGE employees demanded the highest level of access ... When an IT staffer suggested a streamlined process to activate those accounts in a way that would let their activities be tracked, in accordance with NLRB security policies, the IT staffers were told to stay out of DOGE's way, the disclosure continues.

But did they actually "turn off logging"?? How do you even do that? Anyone know what access control system they are talking about?
by danwills | 2025-04-15 23:47:52+00:00
Quite right! I think if the values were linearized (~gamma 0.5) lerp might be mostly ok though, right?

And what about doing rgb->hsv, then lerp, then hsv->rgb? I'm unclear whether that also needs linearization, or whether the gamma can maybe just be done to the 'v' component before lerping?

Color is a surprisingly deep and fascinating topic, that's for sure! :)
by consumer451 | 2025-04-15 23:48:38+00:00
This is such a cool topic. Homo sapiens are exactly evolved to reproduce. This is instruction #1, or else we wouldn't be here to discuss it. We might call this the super-not-weak anthropic principle?

We produce multiple hormones which control our behavior to reproduce, and then different ones to raise those kids. It's been nice for millions of years. Parents think that creating their children is the best thing they ever did, generally speaking.

Yet... we have recently created what is otherwise a really cool economic system, which somehow overrides all of that!

Aside from "are we alone in the universe," this is one of the most interesting problems in my mind.
by NunoSempere | 2025-04-15 23:48:50+00:00
Here is a thread with some fun fermi estimates made with that tool: e.g., number of calories NK gets from Russia: https://x.com/NunoSempere/status/1857135650404966456

900K 1.5M # tonnes of rice per year NK gets from Russia

* 1K # kg in a tone

* 1.2K 1.4K # calories per kg of rice

/ 1.9K 2.5K # daily caloric intake

/ 25M 28M # population of NK

/ 365 # years of food this buys

/ 1% # as a percentage
by KennyBlanken | 2025-04-15 23:50:14+00:00
Multiple white supremacist mass shooter have been 4chan users and they cheered on the Buffalo shooter who was live updating during his murder spree: https://www.thetrace.org/newsletter/4chan-moderation-buffalo...

The christchurch shooter was a 4chan regular https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed...

The whole "boogaloo" white nationalist/supremacist movement started on 4chan:

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux...

"Not your personal army" but 4chan users would routinely dox, swat, and otherwise harass people all the time.

I have no idea why people are whitewashing 4chan so hard.
by mkl | 2025-04-15 23:50:20+00:00
> it's not really common knowledge that PDF is basically just a subset of postscript.

Because that's not actually true? Check out the table in the PDF specification, Appendix A, p985, listing all the PDF operators and their totally different PostScript equivalents, when there are any: https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard...

The PDF imaging model is mostly borrowed from PostScript, though PDF's imaging model also supports partial transparency. The actual files themselves are totally different.

In this case, no PDF files were involved at all, but a PostScript file renamed to .pdf, which was used to exploit an old insecure GhostScript's PostScript execution engine (PostScript is a programming language, unlike PDF) or maybe parser:

> According to S0I1337, it was done by exploiting a vulnerability on 4chan's outdated GhostScript version from 2012 by uploading a malformed PostScript file renamed to PDF to gain arbitrary code execution as 4chan didn't check if files with PDF extensions were actually PDF files -- https://wiki.soyjak.st/Great_Cuckset, see also the image in A_D_E_P_T's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43699395
by hammock | 2025-04-15 23:50:24+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film)

$36 million dollars and an Academy Award. A l m o s t done by just one person. And entirely with open source software.

The guy's previous movie was a true one-man show but didn't really get screenings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Away_(2019_film)
by vunderba | 2025-04-15 23:50:35+00:00
From the article:

> In my class last fall, I told students that they could use generative AI to get a better understanding of what was going on. They could not use it on problem sets. It was crystal clear that people used it on problem sets anyway because they would turn in assignments that would have been too sophisticated for a 126 student."

Reminds me of that clip from "The Critic" where Americans can purchase guns from a vending machine but first have to answer NO to the question "Are you a criminal?"

https://imgur.com/a/gfOmddR

And coincidentally also when people were saying that vibe coding was strictly intended for prototyping / experimenting and not for production. Uh huh, sure buddy, and I have a bridge to sell you.

On a more positive note, Brian Kernighan comes across in the interview as exactly the kind of teacher you'd want to have - super genuine and passionate about imparting knowledge to his students.
by sensanaty | 2025-04-15 23:51:19+00:00
This is largely a US issue.

My partner here in NL got fired from a regular retail job, but the company still had to pay her 3 months of salary because she had a permanent contract and worked there for 3 years. I mean it's minimum wage, but still. She also had a month of warning, plus she could choose whether she wanted to use her remaining vacation days or have it paid off alongside the 3 months (the holiday pay gets taxed up the ass though).