MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robinduckett | 2025-04-26 11:49:27+00:00
I just asked ChatGPT the following:

“Without looking it up, tell me about the Citiquetzelatropic effect”

Which is of course, nonsense.

It replied:

The term “Citiquetzelatropic effect” does not correspond to any known scientific concept, phenomenon, or recognized term in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, or related fields. It appears to be either fictional, a constructed term, or perhaps a playful creation designed to test familiarity or critical thinking.

If you intended this as a test or a trick question, you got me! Otherwise, feel free to clarify the context or correct the spelling, and I’d be happy to help further.

So what does this prove?
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-04-26 11:49:32+00:00
Nearly everyone has a viewpoint and taking the time to contribute is a strong clue the viewpoint is deeply-felt. Some people primarily adopt the Wikipedia rules as their viewpoint, but in hotly debated social issues like (oh, pick one out of a hat) the Covid-19 crisis and origin investigation-- Wikipedia is drowned in other viewpoints, and, because administrators mosly are alike, substantive groupthink.

I'm impressed by Wikipedia's efforts to root out "abuse" but in the end it's all a contest over truth, and Wikipedia fails in precisely the dynamic, high-interest, high-consequence topics that users seek out on the site.
by motorest | 2025-04-26 11:49:46+00:00
> Yeah, because it was ineffective and the people running it, like most federal bureaucracy - extremely incompetent (to mind bending shocking levels).

I think this sort of statement should be revised. From an outsider's point of view, there is a political current within the US that pushes with a fundamentalist fervor the idea that state institutions cannot do any good or anything right. This becomes a self fulfilling prophecy when they elect candidates that push these ideals, which have a vested interest in sabotaging, derailing, and shutting down projects.
by halgir | 2025-04-26 11:52:21+00:00
I use it in much the same way as you, and it's been extremely beneficial. But I also would not dream of signing my name on something that has been independently produced by AI, it's just too often blatantly wrong on specifics.

I think people who do are simply not aware that AI is not deterministic the same way a calculator is. I would feel entirely safe signing my name on a mathematical result produced by a calculator (assuming I trusted my own input).
by roenxi | 2025-04-26 11:52:41+00:00
> This logic will lead you to the conclusion that all news is propaganda.

A lot of media groups are pretty transparently in existence for propaganda purposes, but the logic doesn't imply that. It could be a media organisation exists to make their owners money while meeting an under-served need in the community. That is why most businesses exist. It obviously isn't why the BBC exists because there are a whole bunch of laws and public funding propping it up and it isn't independently profitable.

> ...absurd comparisons like your comparison between the BBC and RT.

The BBC had a policy for 60 years [0] of vetting applicants through MI5 based on their politics. And realistically it took 60 years to find that out we'll probably find out what the current vetting arrangements are in the 2040s. Any media organisation with that sort of historic tie to intelligence can be safely compared to RT.

> Incidentally, various British governments have tried quite hard to shut down (or at least neuter) the BBC and failed. You're failing to take into account the fact that the BBC is a popular institution and that there would be domestic political consequences for a government that attacked it too strongly.

That seems to be largely irrelevant. I'm sure there are factions in the Russian government that see RT as a waste of money on any given day and I'm happy to accept that British propaganda is popular in Britain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#MI5_vetting_policy
Ask HN: Translate high lvl AI risk policies to dev tasks and ensure enforcement?
by percfeg | 2025-04-26 11:53:00+00:00
I am a dev lead in a regulated industry. We're increasingly integrating GenAI apps into our stack, love them, but running into challenges ensuring these apps are aligned with internal AI risk policies before they get deployed. Often these policies are written by GRC team and hence very high level and business oriented, which making them hard to translate into actionable dev items. This ambiguity also makes it hard to effectively test whether the implemented controls actually enforce the intended policy.

I'm interested to know if others are facing similar hurdles and how you are tackling them. Specifically:

- How do you turn abstract AI policies into specific, testable requirements for your development teams?

- Are you automating the enforcement of these AI specific policies within your CI/CD pipelines or are you primarily relying on post deployment monitoring?

- What specific tools, frameworks, or platforms are you using for this purpose?

- What other challenges are you encountering in operationalise AI risk management/governance in SDLC?

Thanks in advance!
by RCFCodec | 2025-04-26 11:53:02+00:00
Thrilled to share a white paper on the Relational Compression Format (RCF) codec, driven by the Unified Conceptual Framework / Grand Unified Tensor Theory (UCF/GUTT), tested on the Kodak dataset. RCF delivers compression ratios >85% (files <15% of PNG size), PSNR >30 dB, and SSIM >0.9, outperforming JPEG, PNG, WebP, and JPEG 2000 in efficiency and quality. UCF/GUTT, introduced in The Relational Way: An Introduction (Amazon), the first book in a series, models reality as relational webs. RCF uses tensor-based math to encode image relationships, not pixels, achieving near-lossless results (e.g., SSIM 0.9430 on kodim07). It’s a novel approach for cloud storage, web delivery, AI vision, and eco-friendly tech. Thrilled to share a white paper on the Relational Compression Format (RCF) codec, driven by the Unified Conceptual Framework / Grand Unified Tensor Theory (UCF/GUTT), tested on the Kodak dataset. RCF delivers compression ratios >85% (files <15% of PNG size), PSNR >30 dB, and SSIM >0.9, outperforming JPEG, PNG, WebP, and JPEG 2000 in efficiency and quality.

UCF/GUTT, introduced in The Relational Way: An Introduction (Amazon), the first book in a series, models reality as relational webs. RCF uses tensor-based math to encode image relationships, not pixels, achieving near-lossless results (e.g., SSIM 0.9430 on kodim07). It’s a novel approach for cloud storage, web delivery, AI vision, and eco-friendly tech.

The paper details Kodak results and UCF/GUTT’s relational roots: https://relationalexistence.com/comparison. How does RCF compare to deep learning codecs? Any thoughts on relational compression for sustainable tech? Feedback welcome!
by rvz | 2025-04-26 11:53:31+00:00
The anti-trust regulators have targeted almost all but one of the FAAMG companies and that is Microsoft, who certainly knows how to avoid a break-up of their entire company.

The rest have not dealt with totally removing their cases entirely, so it makes sense for the FTC and the DOJ to target everyone else first before lastly bringing up a massive case against Microsoft.

Perhaps that is their strategy in all of this.
by Ruphin | 2025-04-26 11:56:02+00:00
That sort of response seems not too different from the classic "let me google that for you". It seems to me that it is a way to express that the answer to the question can be "trivially" obtained yourself by doing research on your own. Alternatively it can be interpreted as "I don't know anything more than Google/ChatGPT does".

What annoys me more about this type of response is that I feel there's a less rude way to express the same.
by torginus | 2025-04-26 11:57:17+00:00
This is an $27k car, with $7.5k rebate, so much for the unfairly competing Chinese. The MG4 is £22500 in the UK before tax, which is about $30k in USD, and that's a full-featured 5 door car, with double the range.

I do applaud the philosphy of cheap and barebones, and easily moddable, but my two cents is that trim is not the thing that's making cars expensive to make.
by mariusor | 2025-04-26 11:57:18+00:00
> Lance Armstrong never failed a drug test

That's not how I read this part of the Wikipedia article[1]:

> In June 2012, USADA accused Armstrong of doping and drug trafficking, based on blood samples from 2009 and 2010

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#20...
by wafflemaker | 2025-04-26 11:57:33+00:00
Please also mention how easy those exercises are:

Once per day, when peeing, do it differently. 1. Release the stream during the in-breath. 2. Stop and hold the stream on the outbreath. 3. If not yet bored or tired go back to 1. Else - finish peeing normally. That's it.

And note that for most people, a week to few weeks of the exercise give stronger orgasms and ability to delay the ejaculation.
by RetroTechie | 2025-04-26 11:57:34+00:00
Does anyone know if a list exists with various models of these Vtech machines, and what hardware is in there?

I come across Vtechs semi-regularly in places like thrift stores & flea markets. And wouldn't mind having a go at some.

The model discussed here seems fairly hacking/modding friendly (discrete Z80, cartridge port etc). But I suspect most Vtechs are dirt-cheap, undocumented ASICs + tiny LCD screens. No fun hacking that (besides ~0 collectors value).
by kasey_junk | 2025-04-26 11:57:47+00:00
China has one of the least free trade regimes in the world, their currency controls alone amount to potentially more than Euro tariffs on cars and that’s just one part of their governmental stacking of the deck for their manufacturers.

I think it’s easy to look at the outputs of their industries and compare them extremely favorably to the outputs elsewhere, especially in EV.

But once you start comparing tariff adjusted pricing it gets much trickier much faster.
by 59nadir | 2025-04-26 11:57:54+00:00
Have you tried using AI only for things you already know for a while? I almost only do so (because I haven't found that LLMs speed up my actual process much) and I can tell you that the things that LLMs generally leave out/forget/don't "know" about are plentiful, they will result in tons of debugging and usually require me to "metagame" heavily and ask pointed questions that someone who didn't have my knowledge simply wouldn't know to ask in order to solve the issues with the code they generate. A LLM can't even give you basic OpenGL code in C for doing some basic framebuffer blitting without missing stuff that'll cost you potentially hours or a whole day in debugging time.

Add to this that someone who uses a LLM to "just do things" for them like this is very unlikely to have much useful knowledge and so can't really resolve these issues themselves it's a recipe for disaster and not at all a time saver over simply learning and doing yourself.

For what it's worth I've found that LLMs are pretty much only good for well understood basic theory that can give you a direction to look in and that's about it. I used to use GitHub Copilot (which years ago was (much?) better than Cursor with Claude Sonnet just a few months ago) to tab complete boilerplate and stuff but concluded that overall, I wasn't really saving time and energy because as nice as tab-completing boilerplate sometimes was, it also invariably turned into "It suggested something interesting, let's see if I can mold it into something useful" taking up valuable time, leading nowhere good in general and just generally being disruptive.
by dimal | 2025-04-26 11:58:22+00:00
It goes deeper than that. All publicly traded corporations are morally obligated by the Friedman Doctrine [0] to do stuff like this. If something returns value for shareholders (and monopolies do) then a CEO must do it. This is how the whole system is supposed to work. Of course, there's no reason that capitalism must to work this way, but this is the toxic form of capitalism that we've unwittingly chosen. Thiel just gave a playbook for implementing this in the tech space.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
by shakna | 2025-04-26 11:58:57+00:00
The British government has repeatedly tried and failed to shutdown the BBC. They have repeatedly withdrawn funding. MI5 have had agents deployed inside the BBC to try and subvert it.

As of 2017, it runs by royal assent, and there is just about bukpus that the Parliament can do about it. Because at the same time, funding was moved to a trust, to prevent political interference - a trust that both main parties attempted to shutdown, and control, at different times, but were told that they could only operate within the rights granted by the royal charter.

> The BBC shall be independent in all matters concerning the content of its output, the times and manner in which this is supplied, and in the management of its affairs.

Its not a perfect system. But it is very far removed from the daily pressures of propaganda and an angry government. The BBC is not really "state backed". They are independent.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_independence

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Board
by wrasee | 2025-04-26 11:59:25+00:00
> “Of course, you wouldn't get away with it now.”

I say, try. Publish "Crap Towns, 20 Year Update" and ask what's changed? Revisit some of the original places, take some new photos. Plenty of scope to continue the humour, but also scope to hint at some wider reflections and continue the conversation. Having recognition of the first book also adds some authority to your commentary.

He says he won't, but he's also right that if it's funny, it works. Humour has a wonderful way of being able to say things you couldn't otherwise be able to communicate so effectively.

And a book that dares to go beyond the humour and reflect on 20 years of progress, would love to see it.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-26 11:59:50+00:00
I worked for a Japanese company, and they explicitly discouraged individual recognition. It was always the team; even if one person was the keystone.

I had a boss that authored a book on how to use some of our software. It was a good book, and he busted his ass, writing it (alone).

His bosses made him completely remove any mention of his name.

I feel that was going a bit too far, but I understand why.

They used to say "The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down."

The Japanese have the strongest teams I've ever seen, but it is difficult to get individual recognition.
Freshpaint (YC S19) is hiring back end and front end engineers (Remote, US only)
by malisper | 2025-04-26 12:00:38+00:00
What we do: Freshpaint bridges the gap between patient privacy and digital marketing by ensuring sensitive data is never shared with tools that aren’t HIPAA-compliant. Freshpaint bridges the gap between patient privacy and digital marketing by ensuring sensitive data is never shared with tools that aren’t HIPAA-compliant. We're a small, senior team building real-time data pipelines and and privacy-safe systems.

Tech stack: Go, Postgres, AWS, TypeScript, React.

We're looking for:

Backend Engineers: Experience with backend systems, APIs, distributed architectures, and product-focused engineering. Apply here: https://tinyurl.com/4nbv7wde

Frontend Engineers: Experience with React, TypeScript, and owning UI development in collaborative environments. Apply here: https://tinyurl.com/wfud7ppv

Experience at high growth, early stage startups is a must.

Fully remote (US). Competitive salary and equity.

Follow the URL's above to apply or email our recruiter at shannan@freshpaint.io
by morsecodist | 2025-04-26 12:00:51+00:00
I am not a lawyer but this sounds absurd. Even if everything in here were true it seems irrelevant to their non profit status. There are issue based non profits that do nothing but publishing information with an ideological slant. There is no restriction on a 501c3 being run by non-citizens let alone influenced. 501c3s can even engage in lobbying.

I know taking it at face value isn't the point but this claim is particularly galling.
by crabbone | 2025-04-26 12:01:05+00:00
Precisely.

This also reminded me, I think in the PHP 3 era, PHP used to "sanitize" the contents of URL requests to blanket combat SQL injections, or perhaps, it was a configuration setting that would be frequently turned on in shared hosting services. This, of course, would've been very soon discovered by the authors of the PHP site and various techniques were employed to circumvent this restriction, overall giving probably even worse outcomes than if the "sanitation" wasn't there to begin with.
by red_panda_ | 2025-04-26 12:01:18+00:00
Hi HN,

My good friend just published a deep-dive article about handling database transactions in Go, with a strong focus on Clean Architecture.

He worked hard to make it practical and easy to apply in real projects.

If you're building services in Go and care about clean, testable code, you might find it useful.

Feedback of any kind would be greatly appreciated!
by diego_moita | 2025-04-26 12:01:40+00:00
That is also one of his core arguments on his book "Zero to One".

To be fair, he is not the only one to think like that. Every "captain of industry" needs to be paranoid against competition. It is a basic survival instinct. Just look how much Steve Jobs freaked out about Android and Windows. Or how Alfred Sloan bought or merged every possible competitor. Or the history of Nabisco, the steel industry, Microsoft, AT&T, etc
by whatever1 | 2025-04-26 12:01:45+00:00
In fact I think this should be standard of the PhD curriculum.

In the first year you are clueless anyway, what a better use of your time than replicating some established result, and then publish your findings. In the experimental world the author will often skip details that are crucial to the success, just because it has become second nature to them. A replication study will reveal these, aka you know you need really sterile room to make this work, or you need to set-up this way your linux distribution.
by azangru | 2025-04-26 12:02:28+00:00
I had a similar reaction, though somewhat weaker, and had to take a double take at the images. On the one hand, at first glance, they aren't as mindlessly hopeless as most of other ai-generated imagery. They even make some kind of vague and superficial sense. But of course, if you look closely and try to decipher the details, it all falls apart.

Why do authors think that images like these are better than no images at all?
by lotsofpulp | 2025-04-26 12:03:47+00:00
I don't know about the UK, but in the US (20+ years ago), the metrics used to determine "well off" for the purposes of receiving lower prices for higher education had nothing to do with the parents' wealth, and only their income, with no accounting for assets and number of other children, not to mention jobs without access to subsidized healthcare and/or healthcare costs, etc.

In my case, immigrant parents just started earning a little money around the time I go to college, which means I don't qualify for any assistance, parents don't have enough money to pay for my college, nor would I want them to as it would hurt their ability to support my grandparents and my younger sister, so I am taking out loans at full price.

Using income as a proxy for wealth has screwed the middle/upper middle for such a long time, and the actually rich love it (can throw in the nonsense that is earned income taxes here).
by 20after4 | 2025-04-26 12:05:07+00:00
My impression has been that the project has never been fully scoped and kind of bounced around between teams with nobody ever fully dedicated to seeing it through to completion. Scope creep and a whole lot of competing ideas, on top of a genuinely hard to solve set of problems has caused it to get put on the back burner more than once.

Sometimes perfect is the enemy of good enough.
by jokethrowaway | 2025-04-26 12:06:42+00:00
A society that can laugh at itself is an homogenous society where citizens share the same values. Today unfortunately that's not the case anymore.

This is not a racism problem (the UK historically had a lot of well-integrated immigration in the previous centuries), but about minorities that don't want to be integrated and want to impose their culture (look at Sharia tribunals in the UK) - and criminals from poorer countries abusing the EU freedom to travel, the welfare state and how lax the police is.

The UK is not the only society to have been destroyed in the name of globalisation, but it's certainly a sad state of affair.
by shakna | 2025-04-26 12:07:30+00:00
"given the scope you decide to choose"

By changing the scope, you changed the effect. Unless you did every statistical validation here... Yeah. That reads exactly like data manipulation. t-distribution approaches standard normal distribution, when the degree of freedom increases. That's not something that anyone should ignore and give credit to. It's the same bullshit that Donald has repeatedly tried to do, to prove himself doing the right thing, even as everything falls apart.

Caring about the truth, requires caring about the methodology, and not just the conclusions.
by seltzered_ | 2025-04-26 12:08:25+00:00
See https://community.home-assistant.io/t/rooting-to-save-the-ne... , particularly the post asking about using the older unofficial APIs with Nest Thermostats on an airgapped network controlled by Home Assistant ( https://community.home-assistant.io/t/rooting-to-save-the-ne... ):

I'm wondering if an approach to saving older Nest thermostats and reducing ewaste might be:

- Using the older ‘unofficial API’ (from around 2014) assuming it still works, and integrate it with Home Assistant (see GitHub - gboudreau/nest-api: Unofficial Nest Learning Thermostat API ( https://github.com/gboudreau/nest-api ) & GitHub - wiredprairie/unofficial_nodejs_nest ( https://github.com/wiredprairie/unofficial_nodejs_nest#readm... ) )

- Encouraging folks to put older and unsupported Nest devices on a separate wireless network that doesn’t have internet access but access to a Home Assistant server for remote monitoring & control.

- Facilitate a way for Home Assistant based HVAC control setups to work with energy company savings programs where appropriate (in areas of the US this is fairly common, but they may only be supporting major brand vendors so far)
by arcticfox | 2025-04-26 12:08:55+00:00
This article would have been much better if it was at least a bit more direct. At the most crucial juncture, instead of including Zuck's own words, the author wrote the author's interpretation of his words and then an analogy.

> At this point, Zuck's CFO – one of the adults in the room, attempting to keep the boy king from tripping over his own dick – wrote to Zuck warning him that it was illegal to buy Insta in order to "neutralize a potential competitor."

> Zuck replied that he was, indeed, solely contemplating buying Insta in order to neutralize a potential competitor. It's like this guy kept picking up his dictaphone, hitting "record," and barking, "Hey Bob, I am in receipt of your memo of the 25th, regarding the potential killing of Fred. You raise some interesting points, but I wanted to reiterate that this killing is to be a murder, and it must be as premeditated as possible. Yours very truly, Zuck."