MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kevincox | 2025-04-30 12:31:48+00:00
To provide a simple (although contrived) example of the type of thing that can happen. Imagine that you have a table with three columns `gps_coordinate`, `postal_code` and `city`. The way these are set is that the new coordinate gets posted to the API and `gps_coordinate` is updated. This then kicks off a background task that uses the new coordinate to lookup and update `postal_code`. Then another background task uses the postal code to look up and set `city`.

Since these happen sequentially, for a single update of `gps_coordinate` you would only expect to be able to observe one of:

1. Nothing updated yet, all columns have the previous value.

2. `gps_coordinate` updated, with `postal_code` and `city` still having the previous values.

3. `gps_coordinate` and `postal_code` updated with `city` still having the previous value.

4. All fields updated.

But the ordering that aphyr proved is possible allows you to see "impossible" states such as

1. `postal_code` updated with `gps_coordinate` and `city` still having the previous values.

2. `city` updated with `gps_coordinate` and `postal_code` still having the previous values.

Basically since these transactions happen in order and depend on one another you would expect that you can only see the "left to right" progression. But actually you can see some subset of the transactions applied even if that isn't a possible logical state of the database.
by r3trohack3r | 2025-04-30 12:31:51+00:00
HN already has a pretty good immune system for this sort of thing. Low-effort or repetitive comments get down-voted, flagged, and rate-limited fast. The site’s karma and velocity heuristics are crude compared with fancy ML, but they work because the community is tiny relative to Reddit or Twitter and the mods are hands-on. A fleet of sock-puppet LLM accounts would need to consistently clear that bar—i.e. post things people actually find interesting—otherwise they’d be throttled or shadow-killed long before they “replace all human text.”

Even if someone managed to keep a few AI-driven accounts alive, the marginal cost is high. Running inference on dozens of fresh threads 24/7 isn’t free, and keeping the output from slipping into generic SEO sludge is surprisingly hard. (Ask anyone who’s tried to use ChatGPT to farm karma—it reeks after a couple of posts.) Meanwhile the payoff is basically zero: you can’t monetize HN traffic, and karma is a lousy currency for bot-herders.

Could we stop a determined bad actor with resources? Probably, but the countermeasures would look the same as they do now: aggressive rate-limits, harsher newbie caps, human mod review, maybe some stylometry. That’s annoying for legit newcomers but not fatal. At the end of the day HN survives because humans here actually want to read other humans. As soon as commenters start sounding like a stochastic parrot, readers will tune out or flag, and the bots will be talking to themselves.

Written by GPT-3o
by pete1302 | 2025-04-30 12:31:58+00:00
I was eagerly expecting such practical breakdown of the Vision. Thanks for the numbers.

But, the scenario is of a Open-Source solution for a Student living in a Hostel/ Home.

The Vision is tilted towards Hostel Dorms where you won't bother a Home Theater, but where every friend has Apple device( any robust device with good onboard audio).

My Friend himself has a MBPRO and 2 iPhones, Totalling to 6 Apple device( Audio Sinks).
by lores | 2025-04-30 12:32:51+00:00
"Incompetence is rampant" is enough. No, incompetent people do not get fired from the private sector either. The dumbest tech question I have ever heard from a tech manager ("why don't we do datamining in Flash?") was from an established guy at an established corporation that controls a lot of the things the world does and really, really shouldn't.
by pantulis | 2025-04-30 12:33:13+00:00
I think the overall consensus would be being cautious of creating a product on top of a third party platform and marketplace, worse it being MS itself. But! If this is a one person team, I think this is exactly the other way around and basing the product on top of Teams is unbelievably competitive to the point that if MS shuts you down in a couple of years you can still have made a profit.
by ndriscoll | 2025-04-30 12:34:14+00:00
At least when I was a kid 20 years ago in the US, the math curriculum worked toward physical science and engineering applications (i.e. algebra, geometry, calculus), which also sets you up to understand probability/statistics. My impression was that's more or less standard all over. Has that changed?

I'm not sure how to interpret your last statement, but that seems like a problem worth correcting if true? They're going to need to understand fractions to do any math more advanced than elementary school level.
by Sharlin | 2025-04-30 12:34:18+00:00
It's useful for navigation in the open ocean without satnav or even a chronometer, which is what it was designed for in the 1500s. Not for much else.

Is the use of Mercator in schools common, globally? Based on what I've read on the internet it's common in the US, but I have no idea about other countries. In Finland I think I only ever saw Robinson or Winkel-tripel type compromise projections. Mercator was maybe used as an example of how projections distort things.
by ethbr1 | 2025-04-30 12:34:28+00:00
As part of the last generation to grow up without phones in (early) school, this.

The endless rationalizing of why kids need to have phones at every moment rings hollow...

Because grade school kids actually did just fine without them.

Things functioned, people got where they needed to get, emergencies were handled, etc.

Especially with pre- and post-school access, we're balancing a minimum of in-school utility against a massive danger to learning and development.

We should just accept we built addiction boxes and therefore restrict them appropriately.
by swiftcoder | 2025-04-30 12:35:10+00:00
I think there might be something to be said for the idea of teaching computer literacy on smartphones. There's often a real gap in comprehension of conceptual computer use in those who grew up in the age of ambient smartphones/socialmedia/etc.

That smartphone one only uses for TikTok is still 100x more powerful than any computer we had access to at that age, and it can do real work (just so long as you look beyond the consumption apps).
by mirekrusin | 2025-04-30 12:35:11+00:00
Exactly, I think all those base models should be weeded out from this nonsense, kardashian-like labyrinths of knowledge complexities that just makes them dumber by taking space and compute time. If you can google out some nonsense news, it should stay there in search engines for retrieval. Models should be good at using search tools, not at trying to replicate their results. They should start from logic, math, programming, physics and so on, similar to how education system is suppose to equip you with. IMHO small models can give this speed advantage (faster to experiment ie. with parallel diverging results, ability to munch through more data etc). Stripped to this bare minimum they can likely be much smaller with impressive results, tunable, allow for huge context etc.
by ants_a | 2025-04-30 12:35:24+00:00
Interesting why this magic would be needed. Vanilla Postgres does support quorum commit which can do this. You can also set up the equivalent multi-AZ cluster with Patroni, and (modulo bugs) it does the necessary coordination to make sure to promote primaries in a way that does not lose transactions or makes visible a transaction that is not durable.

There still is a Postgres deficiency that makes something similar to this pattern possible. Non-replicated transactions where the client goes away mid-commit become visible immediately. So in the example, if T1 happens on a partitioned leader, disconnects during commit, T2 also happens on a partitioned node, and T3 and T4 happen later on a new leader, you would also see the same result. However, this does not jive with the statement that fault injection was not done in this test.

Edit: did not notice the post that this pattern can be explained by inconsistent commit order on replica and primary. Kind of embarrassing given I've done a talk proposing how to fix that.
by clydethefrog | 2025-04-30 12:35:57+00:00
Netherlands too. They are also banned during breaks. Schools where the ban had been implemented reported more concentration of students in class and more social interaction between students. Various studies show that contacts between students are returning, now that they are no longer hunched over their phones. There is much more conversation and social contact.

Dutch Government research: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/rapporten/2024/07/12...
by roganartu | 2025-04-30 12:36:01+00:00
You simplify the tax code so that, like the vast majority of other developed nations, these situations do not apply.

However that requires a centralization of power that is politically unpalatable in the US currently.

In practice, I think that this issue largely persists in the US because of tipping culture though. It perpetuates an acceptance of final cost uncertainty that makes the insanity of all the examples you describe seem somehow not so weird after all.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-04-30 12:36:03+00:00
I think this is a reasonable description of what happened, and a real danger. Dogmatically gettng stuck on one set of economic and social possibilities just because they fit into the grand benevolent -ism is the issue is always fraught.

It goes both ways, of course.

When people say: "Oh, we can't do socialism, or anything that looks or feels even a tiny bit like socialism, because look what happened with Lenin et al!", I think they are ironically engaging in the very essence of what lead to these attempted revolutions going so poorly.

Social and economic rigidity and dogmatism is the issue.

Socialism has some good ideas, and can be hellishly bad. Capitalism has some good ideas, and can be hellishly bad. Same for anarchism, veganism, hedonism, and so on. This isn't to say that all ideologies are equal, but that dogmatism is generally very dangerous.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-30 12:36:03+00:00
No, it can't be both. "Get this through your skulls" is not an idiomatic† way to say "listen to this" in English. It's an idiomatic way to say "listen to this, idiots". It isn't possible for an expression to be simultaneously unmarked and marked.

For a different Biblical phrase, Jesus is often reported as greeting people with the expression "peace be upon you". This is not exotic; the reason he's doing that is that it's Aramaic for "hello". (And still "hello" today in the region, but we tend to write down the modern version as "salaam" rather than "peace be upon you".)

† It occurs to me, given your question, that you might be confused over the difference between "idiom" [meaning: a more or less fixed expression whose meaning is opaque] and "idiomatic" [meaning: (of a manner of speaking) ordinary / natural / unlikely to raise eyebrows]

It's sense (1) here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idiomatic ("Pertaining or conforming to [...] the natural mode of expression of a language"), not sense (2).
by arichard123 | 2025-04-30 12:36:04+00:00
How surprising to find this here. I've just started making sourdough bread. It turns out that I can't make it like the local bakery, but actually, that's fine. I had to really think? Do I like open crumb? Actually no! I want sandwich bread.

I've been exploring what I can get away with. Leaving the bread to rise overnight on the counter? Yep. It's fine. Leaving the starter for 2 days instead of feeding every day when it lives on the counter. Sure - no problem. Knock it back or just quickly shape. Doesn't matter. Bake at 1.5 or 2 or 2.5 the size. It doesn't matter enough.

Things that are not fine, shaping the bread, leaving it to rise in the oven which is on a timer and then the oven turns off but I'm not back for an hour to take it out. Crust too dry!

Your mileage may vary of course. But sourdough just seems so much more forgiving than a fast acting yeast.

I've yet to see if I care about a difference between a proper knead after the first rise or just a quick shaping. It's quite fun trying the different possibilities.
by ericrallen | 2025-04-30 12:36:06+00:00
I know there is actual data and then there’s “anecdata,” but it’s hard to reconcile the “jobs go unfilled,” and the experience I know of everyone actually looking for a job right now (and having just recently finished looking myself).

It was bleak out there. Hundreds of applications for a handful of interviews. Maybe a few rejection emails. Mostly silence.

The actual data may not back me up here, but it feels like the worst job market since I started my career ~15 years ago.
by ben_w | 2025-04-30 12:36:14+00:00
Yes, and?

The same is the case with the Dyson swarm. Space goes from being empty to partially re-emitting as a warm object in our direction.

The joule heating from current human power is negligible; conversely, a 4% partial Dyson swarm directly heating the earth (i.e. not just greenhousing Sol) wouldn't be just +3 K change in equilibrium, it would be something like +24,400 K, which would vapourise and gravitationally unbind the planet.
by patates | 2025-04-30 12:36:43+00:00
I really like Gemma 3. Some quantized version of the 27B will be good enough for a lot of things. You can also take some abliterated version[0] with zero (like zero zero) guardrails and make it write you a very interesting crime story without having to deal with the infamous "sorry but I'm a friendly and safe model and cannot do that and also think about the children" response.

[0]: https://huggingface.co/mlabonne/gemma-3-12b-it-abliterated
by afpx | 2025-04-30 12:36:44+00:00
I'm surprised by the reactionary tone from a journal like Nature. I would have much rather liked an appeal to the public showing data and analysis of what all of that science funding has accomplished for the people paying for it. Every American currently has well over $100,000 in government debt, and I think they want to get their money's worth.

I guess I'm a little biased - I used to run programs of scientists funded by government grants, and in my experience, they really excelled at pontificating and defending their territory.

My friends in academia often complain of the politics and inefficiency at colleges - they imply that science has become a leisure activity for kids of the wealthy. Being a scientist has jumped toward the top of the status tracks, and it has attracted types of people that seek out those tracks.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-30 12:37:03+00:00
> to what degree Amazon will willfully comply with government requests that come in via phone call and not a warrant

This has been rumbling on for years, regardless of administration, because the security services love overreach. This is the basis of the whole "EU safe harbor" dispute, because Microsoft can't guarantee to EU customers of their Ireland datacenter that they will follow GDPR and not leak customer secrets to US security services.
by lxgr | 2025-04-30 12:37:29+00:00
The difference is in both culture and topology.

TLS (or more accurately, the set of browser-trusted X.509 root CAs) is extremely hierarchical and all-or-nothing.

The PGP web of trust is non-hierarchical and decentralized (from an organizational point of view). That unfortunately makes it both more complex and less predictable, which I suppose is why it “lost” (not that it’s actually gone, but I personally have about one or maybe two trusted, non-expired keys left in my keyring).
by kurikuri | 2025-04-30 12:38:27+00:00
So, what ‘algorithms’ are you talking about? The randomness comes from the input value (the random seed). Once you give it a random seed, a special number generator (PRNG) makes a sequence from that seed. When the LLM needs to ‘flip a coin,’ it just consumes a value from the PRNG’s output sequence.

Think of each new ‘interaction’ with the LLM as having two things that can change: the context and the PRNG state. We can also think of the PRNG state as having two things: the random seed (which makes the output sequence), and the index of the last consumed random value from the PRNG. If the context, random seed, and index are the same, then the LLM will always give the same answer. Just to be clear, the only ‘randomness’ in these state values comes from the random seed itself.

The LLM doesn’t make any randomness, it needs randomness as an input (hyper)parameter.
by klntsky | 2025-04-30 12:38:28+00:00
Moreover, habr is a great example why you should not let your site be 'out of politics' (which basically means making a silent deal with fsb to let their ambassadors roam free in the comment section for the luxury of not being blocked). At a certain point in time the site pivoted from being somewhat anti-censorship to a cesspot full of turbonormies, all because of the owners desire to stay highly monetized. There is nothing they would not force you to accept if you are only interested in views and money, but you will get neither in the end.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-30 12:38:45+00:00
> In Germany you have schools for students targeting university. I was in such a school. Every student there was there to get into university.

Yes, but if half the class was not smarter than you (by whatever standard), then that segregation was too low to really hit the spot anyway.

My personal experience was the completely opposite: I learned more useful knowledge in school than in university, despite wasting like a year of math on trigonometric sum formulas and similar nonsense; but the baseline for physics/electronics, programming and math was much more applicable and necessary than anything I learned in university (frequently overspecialized and barely useful).

Sure, I also learned a lot during university on my own, but mostly thanks to sufficient free time and personal interest; university itself did not contribute too much there, and this was somewhat similar during school already anyway (most specifically with programming).

To me, it sounds like you suffered from mediocre teachers in school and learn better on your own-- but neither is universal enough to draw system-wide conclusions IMO.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-04-30 12:39:01+00:00
>The same emphatic, overly friendly and enthusiastic mannerisms too.

That's just a feature of American culture, or at least some regions of America. Ex: I spent a weekend with my Turkish friend who has lived in the Midwest for 5 years and she definitely has absorbed that aspect of the culture (AMAZING!!), and currently has a bit of a culture shock moving to DC. And it works in reverse too where NYC people think that way of presenting yourself is completely ridiculous.

That said, it's absolutely performative when it comes to business and for better or worse is fairly standardized that way. Not much unlike how Japan does service. There's also a fair amount of unbelievably trash service in the US as well (often due to companies that treat their employees badly/underpay), so I feel that most just prefer the glazed facade rather than be "real." Like, a low end restaurant may be full of that stuff but your high end dinner will have more "normal" conversation and it would be very weird to have that sort of talk in such an environment.

But then there's the American corporate cult people who take it all 100% seriously. I think that most would agree those people are a joke, but they are good at feeding egos and being yes-people (lots of egomaniacs to feed in corporate America), and these people are often quite good at using the facade as a shield to further their own motives, so unfortunately the weird American corporate cult persists.

But you were probably just talking to a midwesterner ;)
by scotty79 | 2025-04-30 12:39:22+00:00
Branching iteration seems like a great idea. But I think the syntax shouldn't come from tree traversal. It should be something general. You tell the normal for loop how to go to the next sibling (`increment`) and when to end naturally (`condition`) or prematurely (`break`) and how to skip current sibling (in whole or partially) (`continue`). Branching iteration would also need to know how and when to branch, that includes skipping branching for this particular item, end whole iteration naturally and prematurely.

So something similar to `break` and `continue` should be the method of branching (descending into the tree).

I think Scala might be a great language to prototype implementation of such construct.
by amazingamazing | 2025-04-30 12:39:26+00:00
why would you want this? brush your teeth or swish with high concentration fluoride mouthwash. there's actually no benefit of ingesting fluoridated water. any benefit is simply incidental since it must touch your teeth down the hatch. don't take my word for it - go read the papers yourself, they all say as much. Or to put it another way, would pumping fluoride to your stomach help your teeth? I hope you know the answer.

literally every toothpaste in the united states explicitly says to spit, not swallow. there's a reason for that.
by Meneth | 2025-04-30 12:39:41+00:00
On my Waterfox 6.5.6, it opened but remained blurry when zoomed in. MS Paint refused to open it. The GIMP v2.99.18 crashed and took my display driver with it. Windows 10 Photo Viewer surprisingly managed to open it and keep it sharp when zoomed in. The GIMP v3.0.2 (latest version at the time of writing) crashed.
by shayway | 2025-04-30 12:40:20+00:00
Smartphones were just starting to be common right around the time I hit middle and high school. Teachers let us use them whenever we wanted, more or less, but if there was something we were supposed to be doing, we were only allowed to use them for educational purposes.

We were often encouraged to use them, in fact. If there was ever a question someone asked that the teachers couldn't answer, or they heard an argument between students about something that could be solved by looking up hard data, they would invite us to take out our phones and look it up. One of the teachers would occasionally make little websites and apps related to whatever we were learning at the time. Sometimes we were shown interesting blog posts, educational youtube videos (before it was an industry), personal sites from people who make things. It was reinforced again and again that they were for discovery first, creation second, and anything else third.

I feel very lucky for that to be how I learned to interact with them. The fact that we have magic machines that can answer any question in our pocket, that can take photos and connect us to people and teach us languages, yet we've corrupted them to the point that people are willingly giving them up and banning them from educational settings, is one of the greatest failings of modern society in my view. Or rather, an indication of even deeper and more troubling problems.
by close04 | 2025-04-30 12:40:23+00:00
> Not sure why there are so many salty comments. Russian invasion of Ukraine represents a regression to colonialism.

Reads to me like the people have no problem with the idea of boycotting countries or products one doesn't align with as much as OP's apparent hypocrisy and selective application of his reasons.

But I say "apparent" because he doesn't flat out condemn invasions. He says he had no problem with the smaller scale invasion going back to 2014, or the many other invasions around the world, they were fine. Only the "full-fledged invasion of Ukraine" in 2022 crossed the boycott threshold for him.

This could leave a bad taste at best for some fellow HNers.