MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by acdha | 2025-04-04 00:39:35+00:00
> that Republicans focused on economy, and Democrats focused on social issues.

That impression is partially an artifact of the information space disparity. Republicans spent a ton of time talking about social issues and the Democrats talked about lot about economic issues, but coverage of those things was wildly uneven. If you had any exposure to the Hispanic communities affected by deportations now, ask how many of the people making “I didn’t know he’d deport hard-working people like …” comments spent 2024 hearing a ton about how trans were threatening women or drag queens were grooming kids to be gay on WhatsApp/Telegram, and not coverage of the many, many times widespread deportation was promised. It’s almost a cliche to find people who thought they were voting for lower prices and are just now realizing that tariffs are taxes they pay, and that’s a function of where they get their news.
by munificent | 2025-04-04 00:40:42+00:00
> AI democratizes access to pop culture.

Pop culture was already democratized. That's literally what makes it popular culture.

> So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order.

I suspect that improving the image quality of the memes does not measurably improve the quality of the human connection here.

> IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.

You never had to draw your characters. You can just play and use your imagination. Why would we let LLMs do our dreaming for us?
by porridgeraisin | 2025-04-04 00:41:00+00:00
> The fact that it was ever seriously entertained that a "chain of thought" was giving some kind of insight into the internal processes of an LLM bespeaks the lack of rigor in this field

This is correct. Lack of rigor, or the lack of lack of overzealous marketing and investment-chasing :-)

> CoT improves results, sure. And part of that is probably because you are telling the LLM to add more things to the context window, which increases the potential of resolving some syllogism in the training data

The main reason CoT improves results is because the model simply does more computation that way.

Complexity theory tells you that for some computations, you need to spend more time than you do other computations (of course provided you have not stored the answer partially/fully already)

A neural network uses a fixed amount of compute to output a single token. Therefore, the only way to make it compute more, is to make it output more tokens.

CoT is just that. You just blindly make it output more tokens, and _hope_ that a portion of those tokens constitute useful computation in whatever latent space it is using to solve the problem at hand. Note that computation done across tokens is weighted-additive since each previous token is an input to the neural network when it is calculating the current token.

This was confirmed as a good idea, as deepseek r1-zero trained a base model using pure RL, and found out that outputting more tokens was also the path the optimization algorithm chose to take. A good sign usually.
by jart | 2025-04-04 00:41:51+00:00
60% of the US workforce these days is white collar, and it's one of the great illusions of our time. Most of these jobs only exist to keep busy the 60% of the US workforce that has a degree. In the 1940's about 30% of the US workforce was white collar and only 5% had degrees. What caused this change? It's probably because blue collar workers made so much money and had so much leverage that businesses shipped all their jobs overseas. Blue collar people actually make real things and perform useful toil for society, whereas now they're working fake jobs for less money which they're told has higher social status. It's genius the way the system works. The way it takes from people (student loans, less pay) while persuading them they got a better deal. But how can you have a society where the majority of workers are administrators? Well you needn't look any further than America to find your answer. One day the music is going to stop and other nations, like China, whose workers held no such delusions of grandeur, will have the advantage. Their illusion is that the government is a dictatorship of proles, which makes people think it's high status to be a prole. Plus when your government is officially one big labor union, you can effectively ban unions from interfering with production.
by BjoernKW | 2025-04-04 00:41:57+00:00
> Canada, Australia, India, Vietnam, South Africa... there's a whole world of nominally friendly and economically viable suppliers out there

Where generally EU-based businesses aren't allowed to move their cloud infrastructure either.

With the US and Privacy Shield there at least used to be an agreement in place. While that agreement was frivolously nullified by EU courts, at least so far authorities haven't been overly eager to enforce that, probably because they know that'd put pretty much every EU-based company out of business.

Have fun trying to convince zealous bureaucrats and lawyers that hosting your customer data in Vietnam is fine for an EU-based business, though.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-04 00:41:59+00:00
I don't really get the American preoccupation with birth rates. We're already way overpopulated for our planet and this is showing in environmental issues, housing cost, overcrowded cities etc.

It's totally a great thing if we start plateauing our population and even reduce it a bit. And no we're not going extinct. It'll just cause some temporary issues like an ageing population that has to be cared for but those issues are much more readily fixable than environmental destruction.
by caseyy | 2025-04-04 00:42:10+00:00
OSINT = open source intelligence. It’s the whole of openly accessible data fragments about a person or item of interest, including their use for intelligence-gathering objectives.

For example, suppose a person shares a photo online, and your intelligence objective is to find where they are. In that case, you might use GPS coordinates in the photo metadata or a famous landmark visible in the image to achieve your goal.

This is just for others who are curious.
by jkmcf | 2025-04-04 00:42:27+00:00
We can decide to spend our money on more ethical providers, be it eggs, milk, or meat, but as animals, we cannot get away from the circle of life.

Is it more "humane" for an animal to be eaten alive by another predator? The only difference is mankind has industrialized the process, and we don't truly give thanks because we are so separated from the process.

Edit: I don't really want to dissuade against alternatives, the problem I see is many nutritionally inferior options.
by yamihere | 2025-04-04 00:43:13+00:00
Just joining in with the “Wow, this is amazing” crowd. I usually detest websites that dink with scrolling to animate content in and out of view, except for well designed long form narrative content; but this is slick.

A challenge to all the “10x-ed my productivity” LLManiacs: how long to recreate this landing page using nothing but prompts (and how much $$ for a how-to course :)

A challenge to the “the’re gonna take our jobs” LLMongers: git gud, its possible. this is living proof.

(yes, i did just want to post those portmanteaus, even though it was all ChatGPT: https://pastebin.com/zrsj6DcB )
by smashah | 2025-04-04 00:43:35+00:00
At the end of the day it is people who are doing OSINT and their self/ai confidence is a reflection of their fallibility, just as being manipulated by intelligence operatives in their discord servers to be peer pressured into pushing a certain narrative. OSINT should be about uncovering objective truth in a sea full of lies in a storm of obfuscation through a tsunami of misinformation caused by an earthquake of disinformation. Now these OSINT people need to battle the siren song of clout (and being first).

I doubt anyone can do it perfectly every time, it requires a posthuman level of objectivity and high level of information quality that hardly ever exists.
by creddit | 2025-04-04 00:44:32+00:00
> Do you really want to ruin the life of a person that ruins your entertainment?

They're not ruining my entertainment, I don't play any such online game. Even still, poisoning any element of trust in society should default make you a pariah. This is no different from anyone else who purposefully breaks the social contract in any other context for their own gains.

> Bypassing a good anticheat was and still is a good way to obtain a ton of reverse engineering and software security-related knowledge.

Getting into street fights with strangers is a good way to obtain a ton of self-defense related knowledge. I still think that's no excuse for someone to get into street fights with strangers. There are plenty of other ways to gain similar knowledge that don't require poisoning the community well.

> Cheating is another question, though.

??? How do you think you figure out how to bypass the good anti-cheat???
by SauciestGNU | 2025-04-04 00:45:08+00:00
I don't like carbon but I tend to prefer supporting USA and Taiwanese manufacturers. I'd love to see more domestic fabrication.

I was/am going to buy an Otso titanium frame, but they're made in Taiwan. Depending on the final price adjustment due to tariffs, it might actually be more cost effective for me to buy a Moots (made in America) frame to build.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-04 00:46:31+00:00
> Participants weren’t lazy. They were experienced professionals.

Assuming these professionals were great critical thinkers until the AI came along and changed that is a big stretch.

In my experience, the people who outsource their thinking to LLMs are the same people who outsourced their thinking to podcasts, news articles, Reddit posts, Twitter rants, TikTok videos, and other such sources. LLMs just came along and offered them opinions on demand that they could confidently repeat.

> The scary part is that many users still believed they were thinking critically, because GenAI made them feel smart

I don’t see much difference between this and someone who devours TikTok videos on a subject until they feel like an expert. Same pattern, different sources. The people who outsource their thinking and collect opinions they want to hear just have an easier way to skip straight to the conclusions they want now.
by smcin | 2025-04-04 00:46:41+00:00
Sure, but much ambiguity is trivially handled with a minimum amount of context. "Tomorrow I'm flying from Austin to Atlanta and I need to return the rental". (Is the rental (presumably car) to be returned to Austin or Atlanta? Almost always Austin, absent some unusual arrangement. And presumably to the Austin airport rental depot, unless context says it was another location. And presumably before the flight, with enough timeframe to transfer and checkin.)

(You meant inherent ambiguity in actual words, though.)
by photonthug | 2025-04-04 00:47:31+00:00
> The best-positioned lawsuits to win, like NYTimes vs. OpenAI/MS, is actually based on violating terms of use, rather than infringing at training time.

I agree with this, but it's worth noting this does not conflict with and kind of reinforces the GP's comment about hypocrisy and "[ignoring] the law as long as you've got enough money".

The terms of use angle is better than copyright, but most likely we'll never see any precedent created that allows this argument to succeed on a large scale. If it were allowed then every ToS would simply begin to say Humans Only, Robots not Welcome or if you're a newspaper then "reading this you agree that you're a human or a search engine but will never use content for generative AI". If github could enforce site terms and conditions like that, then they could prevent everyone else from scraping regardless of individual repository software licenses, etc.

While the courts are setting up precedent for this kind of thing, they will be pressured to maintain a situation where terms and conditions are useful for corporations to punish people. Meanwhile, corporations won't be able to punish corporations for the most part, regardless of the difference in size. But larger corporations can ignore whatever rules they want, to the possible detriment of smaller ones. All of which is more or less status quo
by mcoliver | 2025-04-04 00:48:18+00:00
Watch the whole thing for yourself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zicGxU5MfwE He talks about light for the first two things (cover the body and put it under the skin) and then switches to disinfectant. Was clearly talking about some kind of chemical to "clean the lungs" like you would clean you bathtub.
by autoexec | 2025-04-04 00:48:20+00:00
If companies could hike up their prices and still get consumers to pay them they'd already have done it. In fact, companies are constantly increasing prices as high as they possibly can up to the point where sales suffer.

They've taken advantage of recent events to prevent customers from feeling too ripped off though. When covid happened there were legit supply chain issues but even once they let up, and there were warehouse shortages because companies had so much unsold inventory, the companies continued to artificially restrict supply and blame the pandemic for higher prices.

Egg producers were busted colluding to inflate prices far higher than normal using the excuse of "bird flu" even as the largest supplier of eggs in the nation wasn't impacted at all by it (that's less of an excuse this time around though) and "inflation" is the new boogeyman companies are using to set expectations with consumers so that they can deflect blame for overcharging them, but even that only works for so long.

Nobody is going to pay $30 for a happymeal while their wages stagnate and their real earnings decline year after year.

Taxing the rich works just fine. We know it does because we used to actually do it. They'll spend billions trying to convince you that taking taxes from them is impossible and not worth trying tho. Why wouldn't they? That tactic has worked for them for a long time. Don't fall for it.
by o11c | 2025-04-04 00:48:37+00:00
My point is that a lot of apparently "simple" services do in fact call fork internally. Just a few things I've seen:

* fork to periodically make a snapshot of server state, to avoid slowing down the main server

* spawn an external gzip to compress a log file

* spawn a handler for some file format

* spawn a daemon to actually handle some resource, which might be used by other processes too (this really should be a separate managed service, but in the anti-systemd world this is often not the case)

If everything is working fine, you'll only waste a bit of server RAM for a few seconds if you fail to kill the children alongside the parent. But the circumstances in which you want to restart the service are often not "everything is working fine".
by ivraatiems | 2025-04-04 00:49:03+00:00
Though I think it is probably mostly science-fiction, this is one of the more chillingly thorough descriptions of potential AGI takeoff scenarios that I've seen. I think part of the problem is that the world you get if you go with the "Slowdown"/somewhat more aligned world is still pretty rough for humans: What's the point of our existence if we have no way to meaningfully contribute to our own world?

I hope we're wrong about a lot of this, and AGI turns out to either be impossible, or much less useful than we think it will be. I hope we end up in a world where humans' value increases, instead of decreasing. At a minimum, if AGI is possible, I hope we can imbue it with ethics that allow it to make decisions that value other sentient life.

Do I think this will actually happen in two years, let alone five or ten or fifty? Not really. I think it is wildly optimistic to assume we can get there from here - where "here" is LLM technology, mostly. But five years ago, I thought the idea of LLMs themselves working as well as they do at speaking conversational English was essentially fiction - so really, anything is possible, or at least worth considering.

"May you live in interesting times" is a curse for a reason.
by singleshot_ | 2025-04-04 00:49:25+00:00
It’s more reasonable to say that the idea of intellectual property is challenging for nonlawyers because of the difficulty in understanding ownership not as one thing, but as a bundle of various elements of control, exclusion, obligation, or entitlement, even some of which spring into existence out of nowhere.

In other words, the challenge is not to understand “what exactly is being owned,” and instead, to understand “what exactly being owned is.”
by linguae | 2025-04-04 00:49:32+00:00
I’m a 90s kid (born in 1989), and I remember the days of the anti-trust lawsuit, “Internet Exploder,” the Slashdot Borg icon, and resentment from Mac users, WordPerfect users, Netscape users, and others who strongly disliked the Microsoft monopoly.

Still, there’s something about Microsoft of that era. Bill Gates was “one of us,” a passionate nerd. This was an era where nerds like Jobs, Woz, and Gates ruled. The 1990s and the 2000s felt exciting, and it felt like technology was making the world a better place.

I must admit, even though I was firmly in the Jobs and Woz camp in the 2000s, I also fondly remember Windows 2000, Visual Studio 6, and pre-ribbon Microsoft Office. Contrary to Steve Jobs’ opinion, I believe Microsoft has occasionally exhibited great taste :). For better or for worse, the 1990s was peak Microsoft.

Something happened in the 2010s. It seems like the tech industry has become just like any other industry that has gotten entrenched, and today’s tech leaders simply don’t inspire me like how the leaders of previous eras did. Today’s Web media companies are far scarier than 1990’s Microsoft ever was.

Then again, I was a mere child in the 1990s, and I became an adult in the 2010s, and so I could be looking at the 1990s through childhood memories.
by NewsaHackO | 2025-04-04 00:50:20+00:00
>to a raciness in load_json where it's checked for file existence with an if and then carrying on as if the file is certainly there...

Explain the issue with load_json to me more. From my reading it checks if the file exists, then raises an error if it does not. How is that carrying on as if the file is certainly there?
by ddxv | 2025-04-04 00:51:36+00:00
I think this has already been happening. I've thought about this for years since living in China where they from the earliest days had conceived of their internet as "China's Internet".

The next piece that concerned me was GDPR which required EU citizens data to be processed in the EU. This is similar to laws in China.

The US has also brought up various bills similar to this, and I wouldn't be surprised if in the future "citizen data" is supposedly not to leave a specific country.

This of course benefits huge corporations who can handle this infrastructure but is quite difficult for smaller companies.
by ivraatiems | 2025-04-04 00:54:00+00:00
Mail it to me and I will take care of it for you ;)

Kidding, of course. Here's what I recommend:

The single best thing you can do for your machine is get a SATA SSD into it. That will 10x the performance of your system for most tasks immediately. After that, max out your RAM at 16GB DDR3.

Assuming a 500GB SSD, you can do both of these things using new parts for less than $100, and if you get used parts, for less than $50.

A system with a 2nd-gen i5 or especially i7, 16GB RAM, and 500GB SSD storage will be fast enoug for essentially every modern computing task that isn't modern gaming, graphic design, video editing, or complex programming (it'll be good enough for simple coding tasks). You can do whatever else you want.

As far as batteries, my recommendations are twofold: Get the highest-wattage charger you can (probably a 170watt for the T520, I think) and the largest battery possible. New ones are available on eBay. You want the "extended life" models. They're not great, but they should get you a few hours of usage. Depending on what you get and where it's from, it's another $20-$50.
by slg | 2025-04-04 00:54:46+00:00
I don't follow your analogy. Is the "specialized tool" the AI or the way that it returns "problematic" results? Because I'm not saying the system is bad for using negative stereotypes. I'm saying the system is bad because it removes natural variety from the results making them misleading. The reliance on stereotypes are just one example of this phenomenon with another example being "suave English spy" only returning Daniel Craig.
by jopsen | 2025-04-04 00:55:07+00:00
The Russians invaded with exterminations lists.

People in occupied territories are not safe from the Russians. Rather they became cannon fodder.

Surrender was and is probably not an option for Ukraine. Without Western support, what might an industrialized nation do if cornered with no options -- I don't want to know.

Regardless, if Ukraine wants to fight for freedom, you really think we shouldn't enable them? Or is freedom of no value to you?
by bobchadwick | 2025-04-04 00:55:20+00:00
I think you’re right, and they’ve found their useful idiot in Trump.

As for Trump himself, I think he truly believes the rest of the world is taking advantage of the US and tariffs are a way of setting things right. My guess is that in his view, the country (or at the least the rich people he cares about) will benefit from all this.
by jdlshore | 2025-04-04 00:55:31+00:00
Generally speaking, it reduces the cost of welfare programs by replacing complex need-specific bureaucracies with a simple blanket payment. Food stamps go away, for example, assuming a large enough payment. Similar for low-income housing, government cheese, Medicaid, etc. (Again, depending on the payment.)

So the total cost to government is lower, but probably not enough that the costs of the program are covered. Beyond that, it’s a wealth redistribution program. Wealthy and/or high-income earners pay more tax so that low-income earners get a net benefit.

The argument in favor is that the wealthy paying more tax is a net positive to society, because $3000 is worth more to someone earning $20K/yr than it is to someone earning $500K per year.
by themacguffinman | 2025-04-04 00:55:44+00:00
I don't think most people consciously or explicitly aim to only vote for the guy they relate to. The people they relate to will just naturally be more understandable to them and better match their expectations of what a competent manager looks like.

Realistically, no democracy can really depend on widespread familiarity with the hard skills of civic & political management. It just gets really technical and complicated, voters naturally have to reason about what little they understand, and you understand what you relate to.

I'm not trying to make the point that voting for the reality TV show candidate is good, my point is that the problems with reality TV show candidates are in their blindspot but there are other bad leaders that will fit in your own blindspot.

edit: sorry I just realized that you already made this point in one of your earlier comments! And yes, I personally agree with much of what you say.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-04 00:56:04+00:00
I think it also really limits the AI to the context of human discourse which means it's hamstrung by our imagination, interests and knowledge. This is not where an AGI needs to go, it shouldn't copy and paste what we think. It should think on its own.

But I view LLMs not as a path to AGI on their own. I think they're really great at being text engines and for human interfacing but there will need to be other models for the actual thinking. Instead of having just one model (the LLM) doing everything, I think there will be a hive of different more specific purpose models and the LLM will be how they communicate with us. That solves so many problems that we currently have by using LLMs for things they were never meant to do.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-04-04 00:56:04+00:00
I’ve read enough pseudo-intellectual Internet comments that I tend to subconsciously apply a slight negative bias to posts that appear to try too hard to project an air of authority via confidence. It isn’t always the best heuristic, as it leaves out the small set of competent and well-marketed people. But it certainly deflates my expectations around LLM output.