MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nozzlegear | 2025-04-05 18:49:57+00:00
There's no doubt that it lead to pushback in a lot of places, but that just highlights why people were protesting in the first place. When the police kidnap the mayor's daughter, or walk off the job in response to calls for accountability, it's not a failure of the protest but rather a failure of the institutions being protested.

Like I said, I do agree with you that there are protests which aren't effective, and there are some that are even counterproductive. BLM was successful though, it did lead to reforms: Minneapolis banned chokeholds and revised their use of force policies, New York reallocated some of its NYPD funding, Colorado and New Mexico passed police accountability laws, etc.

Anyway, I know your main point wasn't about BLM, I'm not trying to drag you into a mire over whether it was successful or not.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-04-05 18:50:08+00:00
Can you point to an airtight law regarding speech that exists today - both as written and enforced? I can't.

This is a worse is better[1] situation. Specifically, I'm arguing against the MIT approach to lawmaking.

The MIT approach:

> The design must be consistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.

Thinking about laws like software terminates thought.

1. https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-04-05 18:50:16+00:00
Alegreya seems like a Garamond derivative, but it has a very interesting character; the glyph stroke widths—especially the verticals—have an intriguing taper. I really like the lowercase italic 'g' and 'h'.

Playfair is Didone, and I feel Didones (this includes TeX's default, Computer Modern) don't really do well on displays because of the very high contrast between the ball serifs and rather thin vertical strokes. Otherwise it's a nice Didone: I'd use it, but as a printed typeface.

I'm not the biggest fan of Ubuntu. Especially the lowercase 'r', it's got a weird shape.
by kadushka | 2025-04-05 18:50:45+00:00
So, how do we solve questions like these? How about collecting a lot of data and looking for patterns in that data? In the process, scientists typically produce some hypotheses, test them by collecting more data and finding more patterns, and try to correlate these patterns with some patterns in existing knowledge. Do you agree?

If yes, it seems to me that LLMs should be much better at that than humans, and I believe the frontier models like o3 might already be better than humans, we are just starting to use them for these tasks. Give it a couple more years before making any conclusions.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-05 18:51:02+00:00
You completely avoided interacting with the concerns I have in good faith. I understand that's the marketing pitch, I even understand there is some truth to it, but can you try to see the bigger picture and zoom out of an individual policy to see overall strategy? At the absolute best this is incompetence.

Even if we figured out manufacturing, wars are frequently won with technology, and those researches that fled Germany to get away from oppression are now fleeing America because colleges are robbing them of their dignity in expression and attempting to exploit them by taking the fruits of their labor, without the experiencing the "cost" of their own person-hood and individual beliefs.
Tired
by VaiTheJice | 2025-04-05 18:51:18+00:00
I’m tired of fragile systems.

Tired of crashes we’ve accepted as normal. Tired of operating systems that forget everything the moment something goes wrong. Tired of machines that don’t remember, don’t heal, don’t protect the user—only the company behind them.

So I’m building a new one.

It’s called *VaiOS*. A bare-metal, compression-first, fault-healing operating system.

It: - Compresses memory and pages at the core level - Monitors physical memory for degradation - Verifies every page with cryptographic integrity - Rolls back from memory corruption or crashes in real time - Is designed to *survive entropy, not just run code*

This is not a distro. This is not Linux. It’s written in Assembly and C, from scratch. Bootloader works. Memory map in progress. Compression-backed page recovery coming next.

Why?

Because I believe our systems should serve the user even in failure. Because I believe in coexistence with AI, not exploitation. Because I’m tired of OSes that die quietly.

Live demo and manifesto coming next week. I’d love your thoughts, questions, or brutal honesty.

If anyone’s building like this or thinking like this, I’d love to build with you.
by milleramp | 2025-04-05 18:51:20+00:00
I have bought more than 10 Roomba's (all used) over many years. I have slowly moved them around for different jobs, older 5,6,700 series made their way to clean the garage, while newer I, S models are working the upper levels of flooring and carpets.

In the last 5-10 years it looks to me like they had two competing teams internally producing different models. The I,J series compared to the S series, are very different. The mops scooba vs braava. I really like their designs and repairability but if I had to update I would probably try one of the roborocks they seem to be a lot better.
by mikestew | 2025-04-05 18:51:21+00:00
Redmond, WA has a ban on billboards. Locals can see this demonstrated by driving 124th St. and crossing Willows Rd into Kirkland. First thing you’ll see are billboards.

Just got back from a trip to Florida. Billboards along every freeway, and 75% of them are personal injury lawyers. If you’re a resident of Redmond, it is an obnoxious contrast.
by SecretDreams | 2025-04-05 18:51:44+00:00
No paid advertising, whether that involves financial compensation, in kind gifts, or something else.

There would be no commercial ads online if google received no kickbacks to show ads. There would be no influencers, either. I'd be okay with non-profits and government agencies advertising benevolent things to us, like vaccinations.

The only hard part is to develop systems to actually ensure nobody is receiving compensation if they are showing a product.

I'd also be fine to make exceptions for internal advertising, e.g. you're already on the Google website and Google is advertising their own products/services to you.
by ksec | 2025-04-05 18:52:10+00:00
>It's such a wild idea that I've never heard it in the public discourse.

>Algorithm-driven platforms like Instagram and TikTok that harvest and monetize attention, destroying youth, would lose their economic foundation.

I guess the author has never been on HN.

This simply assumes Instagram would no longer function because of zero ad placement dollars. I guess the author doesn't know how KOLs works in product launch and promotion.

I get a lot of stick every time I had to say this, but a lot of people in tech, has a very simplistic view that all ads are evil without understanding how ad works in the first place. Especially beyond digital ad. And to make matter worst any discussions about Ad's argument has been downvoted in the past 10-12 years. Some of the questions which toomim purpose would be instantly dropped. I guess the vibe shift is real.

But if there is one type of ad we should ban. It would be political ads. A candidate's legitimacy should not be partly dependent on amount of ad money you throw at it.
by fpgaminer | 2025-04-05 18:52:20+00:00
https://www.llama.com/ https://www.llama.com/docs/model-cards-and-prompt-formats/ll...

Very exciting. Benchmarks look good, and most importantly it looks like they did a lot of work improving vision performance (based on benchmarks).

The new suggested system prompt makes it seem like the model is less censored, which would be great. The phrasing of the system prompt is ... a little disconcerting in context (Meta's kowtowing to Nazis), but in general I'm a proponent of LLMs doing what users ask them to do.

Once it's on an API I can start throwing my dataset at it to see how it performs in that regard.
by mrbonner | 2025-04-05 18:53:30+00:00
What an electrifying time to be alive! The last era that felt even remotely this dynamic was during the explosive rise of JavaScript frameworks—when it seemed like a new one dropped every quarter. Back then, though, the vibe was more like, “Ugh, another framework to learn?” Fast forward to now, and innovation is sprinting forward again—but this time, it feels like a thrilling ride we can’t wait to be part of.
by permo-w | 2025-04-05 18:53:41+00:00
>but we'd also lose (free) search engines.

I doubt this. more likely we'd end up in a scenario where, as a way of capturing market share, large companies subsidise their search engine with other branches of their business, for example, hosting. also since we're speaking hypothetically about government interventions, there's no reason that a government couldn't set up a publicly owned search engine, in fact one may already exist, I don't know

>Further, I'd argue that some forms of advertising are actually desirable. If I'm planning a vacation abroad, and want to make a reservation at a hotel, I'd typically go to booking.com or one of it's competitors. Those sites are pretty much 100% advertising, but how else am I gonna find a hotel on the other side of the planet, in a country I've never been before?

it's not advertising if it's on their own website

>You also run into some tricky hairsplitting questions. Where do you draw the line on advertising? Are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? Or is that advertising? I don't want to outlaw online shopping entirely, it's extremely handy! What about search engine results from those webshops? Free search engines will disappear, but let's say I have a paid account and search for "buy dell laptop". Are the results advertising? How do you differentiate and define the cases legally?

these are very simple dilemmas:

are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? yes, because you're on a webshop. practically all shops sell 3rd party products. advertising is listing products and services on non-commercial public places where people haven't chosen to engage with products

you search for "buy dell laptop", and the search engine has to produces the results that naturally bubble to the top from its algorithm

the issue I'd be more worried about with banning advertising is taking away the freedom it can allow small creators on places like Youtube, where now suddenly they'd be relying on subscriptions and/or donations, which can be a lot harder to come by than baseline advertising revenue. you'd get a lot more begging and pleading, and you'd get a lot more creators needing to rely on working under the umbrella of a larger organisation like they did before the internet
by jagged-chisel | 2025-04-05 18:54:09+00:00
> "Make the toolchain work without Xcode installed”

On macOS. Works fine on Linux.

This is such an easy ask. The only thing holding it back, imo, is Apple. Can’t let the plebs bypass Xcode to develop on their Macs!

My workaround is running a container with Linux Swift installed. Of course, I’m not targeting an Apple OS so I have the flexibility.
by cplat | 2025-04-05 18:54:18+00:00
That's not quite how auto-regressive models are trained (the expression of "ideas" bit). There is no notion of "ideas." Words are not defined like we humans do, they're only related.

And on the latent space bit, it's also true for classical models, and the basic idea behind any pattern recognition or dimensionality reduction. That doesn't mean it's necessarily "getting the right idea."

Again, I don't want to "think of it as a probability." I'm saying what you're describing is a probability distribution. Do you have a citation for "probability to express correctly the sentence/idea" bit? Because just having a latent space is no implication of representing an idea.
by neilv | 2025-04-05 18:54:33+00:00
> You never use phrases that imply moral superiority or a sense of authority, including but not limited to [...] "it's unethical to" [...]

Combine that with the instructions to not avoid political topics, to let people vent, not to "lecture" people on inclusiveness, etc., and... this will fit right in with where things are headed.
by comex | 2025-04-05 18:54:40+00:00
So how does the 10M token context size actually work?

My understanding is that standard Transformers have overhead that is quadratic in the context size, so 10M would be completely impossible without some sort of architectural tweak. This is not the first model to have a huge context size, e.g. Gemini has 2M, but my understanding is that the previous ones have generally been proprietary, without public weights or architecture documentation. This one has public weights. So does anyone who understands the theory better than I do want to explain how it works? :)
by fragmede | 2025-04-05 18:55:35+00:00
Right—but why should “new ABS plastic” be the bar for creativity? If the kid builds a structure no one’s ever imagined, from an unimaginably large box of Lego, isn’t that still novel? Sure, it’s made from known parts—but so is language. So are most human ideas.

The demand for outputs that are provably untraceable to training data feels like asking for magic, not creativity. Even Gödel didn’t require “never seen before atoms” to demonstrate emergence.
by veidr | 2025-04-05 18:55:38+00:00
You are laboring under the dubious assumption that Trump gives any fucks about the US economy. (And that, even more dubious, that the real-life congress will manage more than bloviation on TikTok.)

This is a pure klept move. Who knows if he understands that the US manufacturing iPhones and cars-with-no-foreign-parts isn't possible in his lifetime (or most of ours), but regardless, he understands that this is his chance to finally get rich for real after all that cosplayin', and doesn't need to understand the rest.
by chipsa | 2025-04-05 18:55:39+00:00
You are in MGRS zone 17S. MGRS also has grid square designations after the zone, and before the easting/northing numbers. A full UTM coordinate string will only have N/S at position 2/3, while a full MGRS coordinate string will have 3 characters at that position. A MGRS string will also be 2 characters shorter than an equivalent UTM string.

Civilian UTM doesn’t handle things near the poles very well. MGRS explicitly uses the zone characters to change to a polar projection. Those other 4 characters not used for row identification actually identify polar areas (NE, NW, SE, SE semi-hemispheres).
by ksec | 2025-04-05 18:56:02+00:00
Interesting this is released literally one hour after another discussions suggesting Meta ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43562768 )

>at this point it does not matter what you believe about LLMs: in general, to trust LeCun words is not a good idea. Add to this that LeCun is directing an AI lab that as the same point has the following huge issues:

1. Weakest ever LLM among the big labs with similar resources (and smaller resources: DeepSeek).

2. They say they are focusing on open source models, but the license is among the less open than the available open weight models.

3. LLMs and in general all the new AI wave puts CNNs, a field where LeCun worked (but that didn't started himself) a lot more in perspective, and now it's just a chapter in a book that is composed mostly of other techniques.

Would be interesting to see opinion of antirez on this new release.
by starfezzy | 2025-04-05 18:56:23+00:00
EDIT: When I said "I've felt the same way", I meant about outlawing advertising. Propaganda in general should be allowed—especially the political kind. But consumerist propaganda (aka advertising) needs to be abolished.

___

I've felt the same way. Some thoughts I had while reading:

> Propaganda is advertising for the state, and advertising is propaganda for the private. Same thing.

Rare to see someone else recognize this. Not all propaganda is malicious; all systematic spreading of ideas aimed at promoting a cause or influencing opinions is propaganda.

> Think about what's happened since 2016: Populists exploit ad marketplaces

This feels like calling out conservatives. Ironically, it's through relentless propaganda over a century that progressivism has become ascendant. We're reminded 24/7 from every mainstream institution, that what has historically been radically unpopular is ACTUALLY "normal" and "respectable". Indeed, it's only through such incessant propaganda that overwhelmingly unpopular trends have been able to take hold.

> what poisons our democracy is a liberating act in itself. An action against that blurry, “out-of-focus fascism”

What poisons our republic is progressives forgetting that they're ascendant and how they got there.
by brudgers | 2025-04-05 18:56:27+00:00
I struggle to keep up with all the content and conversations

You can't keep up with most things, let alone everything.

The feeling that you aren't keeping up is the result of increased experience with the world as an adult combined with a mistaken belief held when your experiences consisted largely of childhood.

On the bright side, once you accept how much you don't know and that you can't know everything, you realize that the rest of your life can be spent being amazed by the new things you learn. Or not.

Or to put it another way, trying to keep up is a manifestation of FOMO. Good luck.
by immibis | 2025-04-05 18:57:02+00:00
If Germany keeps finding that Jewish citizens of Israel are being antisemitic and wishing for their own deaths, perhaps it's actually Germany's antisemitism detector that is miscalibrated?

Not many people in Germany dare to bring this up, because suggesting that German's antisemitism detector could be miscalibrated, is, itself, something which Germany detects as antisemitism. Which, if you think for more than five milliseconds, is further evidence that it might be the case.
by jn6118 | 2025-04-05 18:57:53+00:00
I was surprised there was no mention of OpenMP in the discussion of shared-memory parallel programming in C.

OpenMP is a lot easier to work with (and is more concise) than pthreads. It is introduced using pragma directives (so you can maintain serial and parallel versions in the same code). It includes support for many common parallel patterns (e.g. distribution of array based and task-based calculations) and makes the synchronisation easier (or automatic). It also gives you powerful control over work sharing to reduce load imbalance, etc.

It's available in most common C and C++ compilers and many other accelerated programming solutions wrap the API (e.g. you can use OpenMP within a Cython module, called from a Python script).
by maxglute | 2025-04-05 18:58:12+00:00
>not a fully valued finished phone.

No, I should have been more clear relative to original comment. I was pointing out even % Apple charge customs, i.e. imports from PRC, large % is still ultimately not value captured by PRC.

For full priced iphone, i.e. $1200, Apple captures or offshores another big slice of $800 in Ireland for intangibles like software related IP. But within the $400-600 BOM for physical device / import unit cost for customs, ~80% are western components, i.e. western value capture.
by scosman | 2025-04-05 18:58:18+00:00
> These models are our best yet thanks to distillation from Llama 4 Behemoth, a 288 billion active parameter model with 16 experts that is our most powerful yet and among the world’s smartest LLMs. Llama 4 Behemoth outperforms GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on several STEM benchmarks. Llama 4 Behemoth is still training, and we’re excited to share more details about it even while it’s still in flight.
by bofadeez | 2025-04-05 18:58:43+00:00
People in other countries also have natural rights. Even if they live under oppressive governments, the right to free speech still exists. It's the same logic used by abolitionists to justify ending slavery.

"Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal, fundamental and inalienable (they cannot be repealed by human laws, though one can forfeit their enjoyment through one's actions, such as by violating someone else's rights). Natural law is the law of natural rights.

Legal rights are those bestowed onto a person by a given legal system (they can be modified, repealed, and restrained by human laws). The concept of positive law is related to the concept of legal rights."
by bko | 2025-04-05 18:58:57+00:00
If you say LLMs are a dead end, and you give a few examples of things they will never be able to do, and a few months later they do it, and you just respond by stating that sure they can do that but they're still a dead end and won't be able to do this.

Rinse and repeat.

After a while you question whether LLMs are actually a dead end
by mnky9800n | 2025-04-05 18:59:21+00:00
What about just restrict it to advertising on the internet?

The internet is supposed to be an information retrieval tool. Advertising’s whole goal is to stand between you and the information you actually want. And it does so by trying to anticipate instead of the thing you want, the thing you are most willing to buy next, whether that’s actual products with money or propaganda. Whereas an ad in a magazine about computers offers me relevant ads for products about computers. And if you read old ad copy a lot of it is a serious effort to try and convince you to buy their product. From some kind of argument for it. Instead of simply using statistics and data to predict what you will buy next. So this required the product to actually deliver something to justify the effort to advertise it.
by GMoromisato | 2025-04-05 18:59:33+00:00
My premise is that pattern-matching unlocks human-level artificial intelligence. Just because LLMs haven't cured cancer yet doesn't mean that LLMs will never be as intelligent as humans. After all, humans haven't cured cancer yet either.

What is intelligence?

Is it reacting to the environment? No, a thermostat can do that.

Is being logical? No, the simplest program can do that.

Is it creating something never seen before? No, a random number generator can do that.

We can even combine all of the above into a program and it still wouldn't be intelligent or creative. So what's the missing piece? The missing piece is pattern-matching.

Pattern-matching is taking a concrete input (a series of numbers or a video stream) and extracting abstract concepts and relationships. We can even nest patterns: we can match a pattern of concepts, each of which is composed of sub-patterns, and so on.

Creativity is just pattern matching the output of a pseudo-random generator against a critique pattern (is this output good?). When an artist creates something, they are constantly pattern matching against their own internal critic and the existing art out there. They are trying to find something that matches the beauty/impact of the art they've seen, while matching their own aesthetic, and not reproducing an existing pattern. It's pattern-matching all the way down!

Science is just a special form of creativity. You are trying to create a model that reproduces experimental outcomes. How do you do that? You absorb the existing models and experiments (which involves pattern-matching to compress into abstract concepts), and then you generate new models that fit the data.

Pattern-matching unlocks AI, which is why LLMs have been so successful. Obviously, you still need logic, inference, etc., but that's the easy part. Pattern-matching was the last missing piece!
by xpe | 2025-04-05 19:00:29+00:00
> No one cares about facts anymore.

There is no need to exaggerate. But I'm not only calling out a poor choice of words...

A lot of people (not as many as we would hope, I grant) care about the truth about facts. Even in this group, however, we have a problem: by the time these people are "looking for facts" their brains have already been shaped in various ways that bias how they look for facts, as explained in articles about motivated reasoning.