MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sshh12 | 2025-04-14 00:20:55+00:00
I haven't read a good justification from them on this but it did seem reasonable to me that if the protocol allows auth to be added on top then it's less critical to be in the spec v1 itself.

It's not no security vs security but not standardized vs standardized.

Agree though that's it's not ideal and there will definitely be non zero harm from that decision.
by hangsi | 2025-04-14 00:22:29+00:00
This seems untrue, especially for reddit?

Using the 1/9/90 split [0] for creators/commenters/readers, it seems farfetched to suggest that reddit accounts (which benefits readers making an account to curate subreddit subscriptions) can't follow this pattern where many legitimate human users do not comment often.

[0] "The 1% Rule", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-04-14 00:24:18+00:00
> A relative known youtuber called the primeagen has recently done a challenge sponsored by Cursor themselves where he and some friends would "vibe code" a game in a week. The results were pretty underwhelming. They would have been much faster not using generative Ai.

I ended up watching maybe 10 minutes of these streams on two separate occasions, and he was writing code manually 90% of the time on both occasions, or yelling at LLM output.
by kccqzy | 2025-04-14 00:24:19+00:00
My personal preference only: I'm glad my current employer has no equity compensation altogether; just base salary and bonus. My former employer did have RSUs, but they have an auto-sell program that I utilized every year.

In college the computer science department had an extracurricular talk about finances for a software engineer; the invited speaker was very adamant that holding most of your net worth in a company that employs you was an unacceptable concentration risk. I remembered that to this day.
by jrmg | 2025-04-14 00:24:45+00:00
For a while, some people dismissed language models as “stochastic parrots”. They said models could just memorise statistical patterns, which they would regurgitate back to users.

…

The problem with this theory, is that, alas, it isn’t true.

If a language model was just a stochastic parrot, when we looked inside to see what was going on, we’d basically find a lookup table. … But it doesn’t look like this.

But does that matter? My understanding is that, if you don’t inject randomness (“heat”) into a model while it’s running, it will always produce the same output for the same input. In effect, a lookup table. The fancy stuff happening inside that the article describes is, in effect, [de]compression of the lookup table.

Of course, maybe that’s all human intelligence is too (the whole ‘free will is an illusion in a deterministic universe’ argument is all about this) - but just because the internals are fancy and complicated doesn’t mean it’s not a lookup table.
by jaxtracks | 2025-04-14 00:25:32+00:00
I've been doing something similar for the past couple years for several different modes of working:

1) In my campervan with Starlink internet so I don't need to set up additional screens

2) Cafes and co-working spaces when I don't mind looking like a huge dork

3) Out at trailheads/crags when I don't mind looking like an even huger dork

Some notes:

- Pocketable PC or laptop works, but Samsung phone with DEX is really the move since you don't need to tether or anything, just plug in, use Termux to SSH to your dev box (my beefy home rig over Tailscale usually) and go.

- Power demands aren't insane, phone battery is good for a few hours. Wireless charger or power splitter necessary for more.

- One-handed chording keyboard (I'm up to about 50wpm on a Twiddler) makes working in a terminal pretty straightforward. You can use the phone's screen as a mouse with this setup.

- The new XReal glasses with built-in chip are great. Pros drop soon, should be better. With Vitures or other glasses where the display is fixed, terminal work is still do-able if you're proficient with tmux or similar.

- Downside of the new integrated chip glasses is outdoor usability. They got hot in direct sun, and leak more light.

- You do look really weird using these in public since you're wearing dark glasses indoors looking around. I don't let it deter me from getting my work done but yeah, just be warned.

I've done week-long bikepacking trips taking only my phone, twiddler, XReals, and small solar panel. As long as I can hit cell for a couple hours a day I can still keep things moving with my consulting clients. I usually do this just sitting up against a tree wherever I got good signal.

Starlink mini seems like it would add more freedom to this (I like remote singletrack) but it's too heavy and power-hungry for leg or bike based trips still. We're about to try a rafting trip with a couple other outdoor-oriented digital nomads and a Starlink this season though!
by irrational | 2025-04-14 00:26:50+00:00
> Did anyone commenting realize they were trying to engage with a bot designed to monetize their empathy?

I thought, they are probably all bots, but then I got to your next line:

> Maybe they were also bots, spiraling endlessly into their algorithmically optimized oblivion?

Yep. It's bots all the way down.
by beowulfey | 2025-04-14 00:27:27+00:00
No way. I have no problem paying. I don't even mind the price. When I signed up last time I chose the monthly option because thats what I was used to for nearly every subscription. I didn't do the math to notice it matched the price of the annual subscription and not once was the cancellation fee mentioned. I was totally caught off guard by the fee and was lucky it was close to the end of the contract.

It's the same shit internet providers used to do in the US that thankfully they can no longer do. I cannot understand anyone defending Adobe on this if they actually used that plan the way they explained it. Maybe it's better now, but it absolutely was shady as hell a few years ago.
by rr808 | 2025-04-14 00:27:53+00:00
This is a better solution. I think a lot of high speed rail enthusiasts think that if we build the passengers will come. Its really unproven, I think American cities are so different to most of the world high speed rail would be unpopular. Very few people want to go from downtown one city to another - most city centers aren't that nice and when you get to your destination you'll need a car anyway.
by tinier_subsets | 2025-04-14 00:29:25+00:00
>I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.

A really great (awful) example of this that I saw was on the typewriters subreddit (which is already 90% people posting pictures of the same 5 or so overhyped machines):

In the 1950s, Royal used to give out gold typewriters as part of a writing contest.[0] I saw one of these come up on Goodwill’s auction site, saved screenshots for my records and followed it closely, since I knew bids would get really stupid really fast. Sure enough, winning bid was around $1500.

About two weeks after the auction ended (about the time Goodwill’s very slow shipping takes), I saw it pop up on the subreddit, exact machine, identical scratches, blemishes, and all to the one I had screenshots of. The post title? “Found this at my local thrift store for $50. How’d I do?”

That was enough to finally make my delete my account and seriously question anyone who thinks Reddit is actually good for niche hobbies.[1]

[0]https://www.antikeychop.com/gold-royal-quiet-de-luxe-typewri...

[1] Well, that and the fact that and the fact that I was probably going to lose my mind if I earnestly gave detailed advice on repairing a machine I had personally stripped and reassembled, only for someone to get upvoted to the top for posting a confident pseudo answer about some mechanism—that may or may not even exist in that machine—that they only faintly understood from a general YouTube video that they only half watched.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-14 00:30:19+00:00
> If you pass Columbus, you’d also go through Indianapolis. Or you could go north and pass through Cleveland and Detroit.

Which

1. Already exists

2. Leads to the same problem as before - the population size just does not justify those investments, nor is there any business demand when a flight will always remain faster.

> Anyway, if you only support building infrastructure in regions of the U.S. that are as densely populated as eastern China, you’d basically never build anything

I support building infrastructure that solves an actual problem - and public transit connectivity between NY and Chicago isn't one of those.

It will remain slower than flight transit (so most business and plenty of personal travel will remain flight based) and car ownership remains high in the US, so for personal travel, the independence of driving would still outcompete rail.

Those billions of dollars on such a hypothetical are better spent on plenty of other alternative programs - for example the local transit expansion grants which the Biden admin bundled as part of the IIJA, which helped expand bus and local rail transit instead.

Even China has stopped financing these kinds of mega-projects becuase of tightening financial due dilligence, and tries to tie investments with an actual business case [0]. Heck, now prices are roughly the same between a domestic flight and HSR on the major lines in China.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/business/china-bullet-tra...

----------

The only network that could even justify a high speed rail is the DC-Philadelphia-NYC-Boston corridor (so an extended Acela Line), but are you also fine with the federal government expropriating land to speed up development OR spending decades democratically building consensus.

And even then DCA to JFK or Logan will remain time competitive for business travel
by derbOac | 2025-04-14 00:31:20+00:00
This struck me as a strawman argument against the "stochastic parrot" interpretation. I really disagree with this premise in particular: "if a language model was just a stochastic parrot, when we looked inside to see what was going on, we’d basically find a lookup table." I'm not sure how the latter follows from the former at all.

As someone else pointed out, I think there's deep philosophical issues about intelligence and consciousness underlying all this and I'm not sure it can be resolved this way. In some sense, we all might be stochastic parrots — or rather, I don't think the problem can be waved away without deeper and more sophisticated treatments on the topic.
by nopinsight | 2025-04-14 00:31:53+00:00
Solving hard math problems requires understanding the structure of complex mathematical reasoning. No animal is known to be capable of that.

Most definitions and measurements of intelligence by most laypeople and psychologists include the ability to reason, with mathematical reasoning widely accepted as part of or a proxy for it. They are imperfect but “intelligence” does not have a universally accepted definition.

Do you have a better measurement or definition?
by _heimdall | 2025-04-14 00:32:34+00:00
This argument isn't particularly compelling in my opinion.

I don't actually like the stochastic parrot argument either to be fair.

I feel like the author is ignoring the various knobs (randomization factors may be a better term) applied to the models during inference that are tuned specifically to make the output more believable or appealing.

Turn the knobs too far and the output is unintelligible garbage. Don't then them far enough and the output feels very robotic or mathematical, its obvious that the output isn't human. The other risk of not turning the knobs far enough would be copyright infringement, but I don't know if that happens often in practice.

Claiming that LLMs aren't stochastic parrots without dealing with the fact that we forced randomization factors into the mix misses a huge potential argument that they are just cleverly disguised stochastic parrots.
by fnord77 | 2025-04-14 00:33:30+00:00
20 years ago I backpacked around Europe on a Eurail pass for all of April and part of May. I even paid the supplement for the high speed trains.

Most of the time, the trains were all but empty.

I think eventually Boston-NYC type routes will be handled by quad-copter type drones that land right in the city center. That type of passenger rail will be obsolete
by karlicoss | 2025-04-14 00:33:33+00:00
datetime handling can absolutely be a hot spot, especially if you're parsing or formatting them. Even for relatively simple things like "parse a huge csv file with dates into dataclasses".

In particular, default implementation of datetime in cpython is a C module (with a fallback to pure python one) https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Modules/_datetim...

Not saying it's necessarily justified in case of this library, but if they want to compete with stdlib datetime in terms of performance, some parts will need to be compiled.
by musicale | 2025-04-14 00:34:49+00:00
> Post-1974, however, D&D has been extremely reactive in its design. It largely does not innovate, but its massive gravity means anything it refines is reflected back into the industry in a massively disproportionate way

D&D is in an interesting position where if it innovates too much in its game design and mechanics (4E?) then (some) people complain that it's not D&D anymore, but if it doesn't innovate enough then (other) people complain that it's stale and old-fashioned. Which is a bit like complaining that Shakespeare is full of cliches.

Personally I'm happy with 5E+ being similar enough to other versions of D&D to be familiar, but with some clarified and refined rules, along with lots of options and classic flavor.

Many of D&D's most wonderful contributions aren't necessarily in rules proper, but in flavor and world-building. I have spent a lot of my RPG life, both computer and tabletop, in the Forgotten Realms.

(And to open a can of worms, I would also say that the original d20 System SRD and OGL, which spawned an ecosystem of compatible RPGs from multiple companies, was an important innovation – at least until Hasbro/WoTC sabotaged themselves multiple times.)
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-14 00:35:05+00:00
> How do you know we’re not just completing the next token

Because we (humans) weren't born into a world with computers, internet, airplanes, satellites, etc

"Complete next token" means that everything is already in the data set. It can remix things in interesting ways, sure. But that isn't the same as creating something new

Edit: I would love to hear someone's idea about how you could "parrot" your way into landing people on the moon without any novel discovery or invention
by Braxton1980 | 2025-04-14 00:35:54+00:00
>Their goals are similar.

This isn't then your previous comment that the results are similar.

Goals aren't nearly as important as results.

Also, to dive deeper, what goals and how many are similar, and how similar?

If you mean they are both supporting Israel, then yes, but the Democrats exert more control over their actions. For example Biden was limiting the bomb size that Israel could purchase and Trump removed that.

So if you want to help the Palestinians one side is the better than the other. It doesn't matter if the goals are similar or even the results. There's still a difference and as you can see voter apathy only helped Republicans
by aoki | 2025-04-14 00:36:05+00:00
In the US, the standard course sequence (e.g. at a good state university) is two years of calculus, diffeqs, and linear algebra (all taught as on-paper computation) concurrently with a course in discrete mathematics. The discrete mathematics course often doubles as an introduction to proof (as is apparently the case at UCI). Year 3 typically covers proof-based analysis, algebra, and linear algebra and some electives. Year 4 is typically electives.

At a fancy school, you can often take proof-based honors versions of Year 1-2 courses but you still may not get to skip over all of Year 3. Think: calculus using Spivak and real analysis using Rudin.

At Harvard, you can take Math 55, which is essentially Year 3 above (plus complex analysis) in Year 1.
by hinkley | 2025-04-14 00:37:14+00:00
I’ve implemented Norvig for a couple languages as a learning tool.

One thing I do that he didn’t before dropping to brute force though is the m squares with m possibilities check. If two squares in a row, column or group only have two possible values, then you can eliminate those possibilities from all of their siblings. Same for 3:3, 4:4 and 5:5.
by Lammy | 2025-04-14 00:38:05+00:00
> The Momentum framework calls on Amtrak and commuter rail agencies to […] shift their focus from increasing the geographic coverage and capacity of their rail services

> When making changes to rail infrastructure or services, state and local railroad agencies often must negotiate with the freight railroad companies that own most of America’s track network. These companies [are] reluctant to allow more frequent passenger service that could reduce the amount of time their freight trains have access to track.

This article completely fails to mention the actual cause of our modern situation. Before focusing on increasing geographical coverage we would first need to focus on not decreasing geographic coverage. Check out the Abandoned & Out-of-Service Rail map of North America and you can see the result of massive corporate consolidation where newly-combined railroads abandon parts of each constituent company's former network to end up with the most track they can run for the least money. There is zero redundancy left: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=10akDabya8L6nWIJi-4...
by mcdeltat | 2025-04-14 00:38:13+00:00
This is a cool project. Related fun anecdote: I once found an application at work where just about the ENTIRE test suite was a no-op as the author (and subsequent copy-pasters) misunderstood a GTest feature. Yep, dozens of unit tests which did not actually test anything. Fortunately the application did mostly work and wasn't critical. Experiences like these make me want to write "negative tests" to test test failure conditions.
by nopinsight | 2025-04-14 00:38:38+00:00
Please check out the post on Math-Perturb-Hard conveniently linked to above before making a comment without responding to it.

A relevant bit:

“for MATH-P-Hard, we make hard perturbations, i.e., small but fundamental modifications to the problem so that the modified problem cannot be solved using the same method as the original problem. Instead, it requires deeper math understanding and harder problem-solving skills.”
by kerkeslager | 2025-04-14 00:38:58+00:00
> This kind of circuitry—to plan forwards and back—was learned by the model without explicit instruction; it just emerged from trying to predict the next word in other poems.

This author has no idea what's going on.

The AI didn't just start trying to predict the next word in other poems, it was explicitly instructed to do so. It then sucked in a bunch of poems and parroted them out.

And... the author drastically over-represents its success with a likely cherry-picked example. When I gave Claude lines to rhyme with, it gave me back "flicker" to rhyme with "killer" and "function" to rhyme with "destruction". Of the 10 rhymes I tried, only two actually matched two syllables ("later/creator" and "working"/"shirking")I'm not sure how many iterations the author had to run to find a truly unusual rhyme like "rabbit/grab it", but it pretty obviously is selection bias.

And...

I actually agree with the other poster who says that part of this stochastic parrot argument is about humans wanting to feel special. Exceptionalism runs deep: we want to believe our group (be it our nation, our species, etc.) are better than other groups. It's often wrong: I don't think we're particularly unique in a lot of aspects--it's sort of a combination of things that makes us special if we are at all.

AI are obviously stochastic parrots if you know how they work. The research is largely public and unless there's something going on in non-public research, they're all just varieties of stochastic parroting.

But, these systems were designed in part off of how the human brain works. I do no think it's in evidence at all that humans aren't stochastic parrots. The problem is that we don't have a clear definition of what it means to understand something that's clearly distinct from being a stochastic parrot. At a certain level of complexity of stochastic parroting, a stochastic parrot is likely indistinguishable from someone who truly understands concepts.

I think ultimately, the big challenge for AI isn't that it is a stochastic parrot (and it is a stochastic parrot)--I think a sufficiently complex and sufficiently trained stochastic parrot can probably be just as intelligent as a human.

I think the bigger challenge is simply that entire classes of data simply have not been made available to AI, and can't be made available with current technology. Sensory data. The kind of data a baby gets from doing something and seeing what happens. Real-time experimentation. I think a big part of why humans are still ahead of AI is that we have a lot of implicit training we haven't been able to articulate, let alone pass on to AI.
by SuperNinKenDo | 2025-04-14 00:39:07+00:00
Really enjoyed my time using EXWM. Had to move to Wayland for a number of reasons, and really miss it. KDE Plasma has been fantastic, but I do miss the integrated scripting environment. Ironically I now use a heavily frames-based Emacs set up, and eschew most of Emacs internal window management capabilities.
by jltsiren | 2025-04-14 00:40:06+00:00
It's important to understand the argument in context.

Theoretical computer science established early that input-output behavior captures the essence of computation. The causal mechanism underlying the computation does not matter, because all plausible mechanisms seem to be fundamentally equivalent.

The Chinese room argument showed that this does not extend to intelligence. That intelligence is fundamentally a causal rather than computational concept. That you can't use input-output behavior to tell the difference between an intelligent entity and a hard-coded lookup table.

On one level, LLMs are literally hard-coded lookup tables. But they are also compressed in a way that leads to emergent structures. If you use the LLM through a chat interface, you are interacting with a Chinese room. But if the LLM has other inputs beyond your prompt, or if it has agency to act on its own instead of waiting for input, it's causally a different system. And if the system can update the model on its own instead of using a fixed lookup table to deal with the environment, this is also a meaningful causal difference.
by 0xEF | 2025-04-14 00:40:13+00:00
I've had no issues with eBay, despite the fee increase. I list my stuff at reasonable prices, generally under cutting recent sold-for prices and still make a few bucks.

It depends a lot on _why_ you are selling your used things. I am not trying to make a ton of money on them, just trying to keep stuff out of landfills and get it into the hands of people that can use it, maybe recoup some of my initial costs while at it.

I've had okay luck with FB Marketplace, but the amount of scammers and bots on there makes it an annoying last resort for me.
by nkurz | 2025-04-14 00:40:29+00:00
Along those lines, one big thing I worried about when reading your article was whether the camera's auto-white-balancing might be throwing everything off. I'm not sure how it works on an iPhone, but I'd suspect that presence of the red bag might cause it to reduce the redness of the rest of the image. One easy solution might be to always have two oranges in each photo---one inside the bag, and one sitting on top.