MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mancerayder | 2025-04-06 19:29:22+00:00
Are you saying a focus on racial politics and feminism, and less on socialism/class politics? I think that is a wider Leftist trend in the last 10-15 years.

The Guardian has decent reporting but it also has some terribly embarrassing content. To wit:

"In Dark Laboratory, her groundbreaking new book, Goffe argues that it was the colonisation of the Americas by Christopher Columbus that set off the chain of events that has led us to where we stand today, on the precipice of global catastrophe.

Climate breakdown, she says, is the mutant offspring of European scientific racism and colonialism, conceived in the suffering millions of Africans, Asians and Indigenous Americans endured at the altar of capital accumulation.

The climate crisis is, put simply, also a racial crisis, and it is only once we come to terms with this, Goffe says, and what it means for the ways we relate to the world and each other today, that we can hope to find a solution." From https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/mar/28/dark-laboratory...
by kerkeslager | 2025-04-06 19:29:31+00:00
> I note that you, too, have failed to make a policy proposal that is concrete enough to discuss usefully.

I never complained that you didn't make a policy proposal, so you can't say I'm a hypocrite here. In fact, I've been pretty clear in other comments that it's foolish to hold HN comments to the level of legislation.

> If only 80% of advertising were illegal, probably Consumer Reports could continue to exist, although they would be exposed to some legal risk of being ruled to be illegal advertising, probably prompted by a letter to the Attorney General from a company whose products they reviewed poorly or neglected to review at all. Stricter regimes like most of those being proposed here would make it difficult for CR to discover the existence of products to review.

Straw man argument extraordinaire. Nobody is calling Consumer Reports advertising. On the contrary, I'm saying that independent review isn't advertising.

> But possibly you are thinking of a different structure of regulation than I am, rather than just failing to think through its unintended consequences. It's impossible to tell if your proposal stays so vague.

So maybe ask a question instead of assuming what I'm envisioning. Believe it or not, you're not obligated to guess what I'm thinking!

Legislation could pretty explicitly allow for independent reviewers: that's explicitly the solution I'm proposing to the lack of information.

> Stricter regimes like most of those being proposed here would make it difficult for CR to discover the existence of products to review.

Sorry, which commenter is proposing that independent reviewers can't be in contact with companies whose products they review?

In my thinking, companies would be explicitly allowed to submit their products for review, although I think I'd want the reviewers to still pay for the products (i.e. not receive them for free or at a discount).
Apple Locking Business Accounts
by craig_vg | 2025-04-06 19:29:33+00:00
Apple seems to be locking and/or closing business developer accounts, even if they have an active app on the App Store. Unclear how widespread but I’ve had it happened to me and seen a few others in the last 48 hours.

Not sure what to do or if anything can be done - I’m sure having apps orphaned on the App Store is not what Apple wants either.

Regardless this is a heads up to others - make sure you have non-business accounts with admin access to your apps.

https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/s/DFzX0Rfyc2

https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/s/FHmundoAKQ
by a3w | 2025-04-06 19:29:34+00:00
For three years now, my experience with LLMs has been "mostly useless, prefer ELIZA".

Which is software written 1966, but the web version is a little newer. Does occasional psychotherapy assistance/brainstorming just as well, and I more easily know when I stepped out of its known range into the extrapolated.

That said, it can vibe code in a framework unknown to me in half the time that I would need to school myself and add the feature.

Or vibe coding takes twice as long, if I mostly know how to achieve what I want and read no framework documentation but only our own project's source code to add a new feature. But on a day with a headache, I can still call the LLM a dumb twat and ask it to follow my instructions instead of doing bullshit.

But, vibe coding always makes my pulse go to 105, from 65 and question my life choices. Since few instructions are rarely ever followed and loops never left once entered. Except for on the first try getting 80% of the structure kinda right, but then getting stuck for the whole workday.
by deepfriedchokes | 2025-04-06 19:29:46+00:00
Hey Bud, anyone who claims this kind of “deep understanding” without evidence is running a cult. Always trust but verify; if you can’t verify you can’t trust and it’s just faith. The desire to have faith can come from a place of love but that desire is often exploited by those seeking power over others.

Check out this book: Combating Cult Mind Control by Steven Hassan.

Keep an open mind. I enjoyed reading your ideas of the universe but without evidence it’s just a fun idea. Science, empirical evidence, is what turns ideas into understanding.
by MoonGhost | 2025-04-06 19:30:31+00:00
> Anecdotally, I feel MoE models sometimes exhibit slightly less “deep” thinking

Makes sense to compare apples with apples. Same compute amount, right? Or you are giving less time to MoE model and then feel like it underperforms. Shouldn't be surprising...

> These experts are say 1/10 to 1/100 of your model size if it were a dense model

Just to be correct, each layer (attention + fully connected) has it's own router and experts. There are usually 30++ layers. It can't be 1/10 per expert as there are literally hundreds of them.
by palata | 2025-04-06 19:30:40+00:00
> Once upon a time these companies valued their user base

Because that's what was bringing profit then. We should never forget, that's the whole point of capitalism: companies maximize profit. Companies are not human beings with emotions, they are profit-maximizing entities.

They evolve in a framework set by regulations. The society, made of human beings with emotions, is supposed to define that framework in such a way that what makes companies profitable is also good for the people.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-04-06 19:30:42+00:00
Yes.

In the distillation process, steam from boiling water is condensed which cools it from a hot gas back into a very mineral-free liquid distilled water which collects in a very clean reciever.

Distilled water will evaporate without leaving a trace, unlike most drinking water. More delicious if you ask me.

The dissolved minerals do not evaporate so they are left behind in the boiling vessel. Toxic minerals or not, sodium, calcium, lead, whatever, that's what the solid "scale" left over consists of. This is the traditional physical separation procedure to produce greatly purified water.

But distillation is not perfect, things that are not like minerals can be present in the feed, and if the impurities are things that can evaporate, they will distill in the same way the water does and so not be left behind in the boiling vessel. Basically these are considered Volatile Organic Compounds, things like paint solvents or alcohol themselves are distilled similarly (in industrial quantities before sale) and then they don't leave any residue when they evaporate during use either.

Volatiles if present can sometimes can be reduced by distillation if a certain percentage of water vapor is allowed to escape after it first gets boiling, taking some volatile impurities with it without being collected into liquid form, only letting cleaner water vapors be hitting the condensor later. Some PFAS are like this and anything volatile in significant amounts still may not be acceptable after distillation alone, so to remove these further treatment would be needed like carbon filtration before and/or after a distillation step.
by aerhardt | 2025-04-06 19:30:57+00:00
My mom told me yesterday that Paul Newman had massive problems with alcohol. I was somewhat skeptical, so this morning I asked ChatGPT a very simple question:

"Is Paul Newman known for having had problems with alcohol?"

All of the models up to o3-mini-high told me he had no known problems. Here's o3-mini-high's response:

"Paul Newman is not widely known for having had problems with alcohol. While he portrayed characters who sometimes dealt with personal struggles on screen, his personal life and public image were more focused on his celebrated acting career, philanthropic work, and passion for auto racing rather than any issues with alcohol. There is no substantial or widely reported evidence in reputable biographies or interviews that indicates he struggled with alcohol abuse."

There is plenty of evidence online that he struggled a lot with alcohol, including testimony from his long-time wife Joanne Woodward.

I sent my mom the ChatGPT reply and in five minutes she found an authoritative source to back her argument [1].

I use ChatGPT for many tasks every day, but I couldn't fathom that it would get so wrong something so simple.

Lesson(s) learned... Including not doubting my mother's movie trivia knowledge.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/who-paul-newma...
by ninkendo | 2025-04-06 19:31:39+00:00
The creators you’re paying on Patreon aren’t hosting their own videos though, YouTube is. Hosting videos isn’t cheap, who should cover that cost?

I get that YouTube doesn’t give enough of a percentage of profits to the creator, but the alternative should be a different video hosting platform that does give more profits to creators. Not patreon, which offers nothing in return. (It’s a glorified payment processor and doesn’t actually do any video hosting.)

That there are vanishingly few alternatives to YouTube in terms of actually hosting videos (I know of Vimeo and, I guess nebula? Only because it gets continually pushed on me by creators) maybe tells you that the act of hosting videos at scale is kinda hard to do profitably. Or else there’d be tons of alternative options.
by stevekemp | 2025-04-06 19:31:40+00:00
My parents moved home just before Christmas, and we had to spend a lot of money on short notice replacing windows, etc.

As a result of low cash for the first time ever my parents bought my sisters and I a shared present - A Sinclair ZX Spectrum, 48k.

The computer came with 10-12 casette-tapes, a tape recorder, bundle of manuals and a joystick. Unfortunately the tape-recorder didn't work so we couldn't load any of the games.

I spent Christmas reading the BASIC manual, and my sisters spent it being disappointed.

I wrote about this here, in the past in a little more detail:

https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming
by embedded_hiker | 2025-04-06 19:31:46+00:00
There are many local, and not-so-local, groups that do this volunteer trail maintenance, and they could definitely use some monetary donations. There is the PCTA, mentioned up-thread ( pcta.org ). I volunteer for Trailkeepers of Oregon, based in Portland, and is active in many parts of the state. trailkeepersoforegon.org . There is also the Washington trails Association, and many more.
by neomantra | 2025-04-06 19:32:08+00:00
I didn't mean to be pejorative (vs mugblood), but meant people without programming/systems skills (the "magic") but strong computer skills. I also didn't mean they aren't capable of learning it or growing, which maybe muggle implies.

Anyway, many soft-tech people are grabbing AI tools and using them in all sorts of ways. It's a great time of utility and exploration for all of us. But by not being previously exposed to systems security, hardening, the nature of bugs, etc, they just don't know what they don't know.

All of the security problems in the Original Post are challenges to them, because they don't even know anything about it in the first place, nor how to mitigate. What is great though (apparent in those Reddit threads), is that once it is pointed out, they seem to thirst to understand/learn/defend.
by marssaxman | 2025-04-06 19:32:23+00:00
There are forms of advertising which are consensual - someone who buys a copy of Vogue presumably does so because they want to see the products being advertised - but the advertising I would ban is that which responds to the demand for attention by flat-out stealing it. If it's not consensual, it should not be legal.

> you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely

I'm not usually a fan of brutal authoritarianism, but you're making it sound pretty good.
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-06 19:33:04+00:00
At this point why don’t we just go back to the Articles of Confederation.

If we accept the federal government can’t do anything what are we paying taxes for? Get rid of social security too, I’m not going to make it to whatever stupidly high age they raise retirement to.

I used to be a big government liberal, but the problem is eventually people you disagree with start running super government.
by netsharc | 2025-04-06 19:33:05+00:00
Yeah, scroll past the screenshot of the github repo to almost get to the meat of the story... tedium.co indeed.

It seems the actual meat is a link to a Wired article the author read and decided to write a long-ass blog post about, to promote his newsletter and project on ko-fi...

https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-affa...
by nradov | 2025-04-06 19:33:34+00:00
It's really tough to apply anti-trust law to companies that aren't selling commodities. What would or wouldn't count as a competitor to Instagram? Since it's free for end users, the customers are mostly advertisers. And they have a zillion other channels to get their message out. Meta hardly has anything approaching a monopoly for either advertisers or consumers. Consumers frequently post pictures on X, LinkedIn, Google Photos, Strava, Snapchat, etc.
by burcs | 2025-04-06 19:33:39+00:00
That was a rough read, not really sure I understood the authors point. It was kind of all over the place, bad because AI, bad because not really open-source, bad because doge...

Only thing I really left with was the author doesn't like the word gum. Seems like a hit piece on Sahil? Pretty sure the open-source part of Gumroad has been in the works for a while.
by IshKebab | 2025-04-06 19:34:10+00:00
I don't think so. Rust has much stronger typing than Go which allows you to prevent more classes of bugs than just memory errors.

The coolest one I've heard is that Fuchsia's network stack managed to eliminate deadlocks.

But even on a basic level Rust has that "if it compiles it works" experience which Go definitely doesn't.
by iambateman | 2025-04-06 19:34:31+00:00
The core point in this article is that the LLM wants to report _something_, and so it tends to exaggerate. It’s not very good at saying “no” or not as good as a programmer would hope.

When you ask it a question, it tends to say yes.

So while the LLM arms race is incrementally increasing benchmark scores, those improvements are illusory.

The real challenge is that the LLM’s fundamentally want to seem agreeable, and that’s not improving. So even if the model gets an extra 5/100 math problems right, it feels about the same in a series of prompts which are more complicated than just a ChatGPT scenario.

I would say the industry knows it’s missing a tool but doesn’t know what that tool is yet. Truly agentic performance is getting better (Cursor is amazing!) but it’s still evolving.

I totally agree that the core benchmarks that matter should be ones which evaluate a model in agentic scenario, not just on the basis of individual responses.
by tim333 | 2025-04-06 19:34:36+00:00
While I'm a fan of Buffett, as he himself says macroeconomics isn't his speciality.

One issue with the story is he suggests the people selling America stuff, say China end up accumulating American land and owning the country but it's not what generally happens in practice. In practice foreigners tend to end up either with US dollar debt, which tends to inflate away, or equity in US companies, of which YCombinator and similar churn out hundreds of new ones each year.

Another thing is foreigners may end up buying some US real estate but the likes of Amazon ends up taking over much of the worlds retail industry as local shops close around the globe.

For reasons like this it's probably not worth worrying too much about the deficit and leaving it to market forces to figure out.
by lukev | 2025-04-06 19:34:47+00:00
This is a bit of a meta-comment, but reading through the responses to a post like this is really interesting because it demonstrates how our collective response to this stuff is (a) wildly divergent and (b) entirely anecdote-driven.

I have my own opinions, but I can't really say that they're not also based on anecdotes and personal decision-making heuristics.

But some of us are going to end up right and some of us are going to end up wrong and I'm really curious what features signal an ability to make "better choices" w/r/t AI, even if we don't know (or can't prove) what "better" is yet.
by wrasee | 2025-04-06 19:35:06+00:00
Same. But a nice observation in conclusion

> To me, I think that there is a real opportunity to take away the reins from middlemen who extract value rather than add it by leaning into things we host ourselves. Creators, for too long, have given too much power away to the company that made our lives mildly more convenient. If they’re trying to optimize to the nubs, destroying quality of service in the process, why even bother letting them have a lane in the middle?
by dimal | 2025-04-06 19:35:32+00:00
It seems like the models are getting more reliable at the things they always could do, but they’re not showing any ability to move past that goalpost. Whereas in the past, they could occasionally write some very solid code, but often return nonsense, the nonsense is now getting adequately filtered by so-called “reasoning”, but I see no indication that they could do software design.

> how the hell is it going to develop metrics for assessing the impact of AIs when they're doing things like managing companies or developing public policy?

Why on earth do people want AI to do either of these things? As if our society isn’t fucked enough, having an untouchable oligarchy already managing companies and developing public policies, we want to have the oligarchy’s AI do this, so policy can get even more out of touch with the needs of common people? This should never come to pass. It’s like people read a pile of 90s cyberpunk dystopian novels and decided, “Yeah, let’s do that.” I think it’ll fail, but I don’t understand how anyone with less than 10 billion in assets would want this.
by Tainnor | 2025-04-06 19:35:40+00:00
This was written in 2016. The job market in 2016 was basically "you can throw a stone and find somebody looking for a developer". These days, the market is so different that I'm not sure if the same advice is still relevant.

In addition, some of this kind of advice has always struck me as particularly US-centric and I doubt it all applies equally well in e.g. Europe. You don't get very far here by not sharing your initial salary expectations early on, I think.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-04-06 19:36:09+00:00
The disconnect between improved benchmark results and lack of improvement on real world tasks doesn't have to imply cheating - it's just a reflection of the nature of LLMs, which at the end of the day are just prediction systems - these are language models, not cognitive architectures built for generality.

Of course, if you train an LLM heavily on narrow benchmark domains then its prediction performance will improve on those domains, but why would you expect that to improve performance in unrelated areas?

If you trained yourself extensively on advanced math, would you expect that to improve your programming ability? If not, they why would you expect it to improve programming ability of a far less sophisticated "intelligence" (prediction engine) such as a language model?! If you trained yourself on LeetCode programming, would you expect that to help hardening corporate production systems?!
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-04-06 19:38:09+00:00
Extremely sad to see Sahil is working with DOGE in basically firing hundreds of thousands of Americans (that too disproportionately veterans) in the manner they have been doing it.

I have always liked reading his honest takes on running a company, their unique way of working with non-full-time employees, etc.

I wonder if he has posted about his work in this regard himself?
by hypeatei | 2025-04-06 19:39:08+00:00
Tangential, but there was a recent sandbox escape vulnerability in both Chrome and Firefox.

The bug threads are still private, almost two weeks since it was disclosed and fixed. Very strange.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1956398

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/405143032

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-2783
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-06 19:39:23+00:00
I am an investor in an advanced manufacturing enterprise for spray nozzles (think beverage, ag, fuel applications). Time to end user is a consideration in the business the org does, based on my conversations with account managers. I admit how relevant this is is going to be a function of customer requirements and expectations, particularly around prototyping feedback loop (edit: a part being manufactured using an advanced CNC machine at ~4pm central time can be in the hands of a customer by 8am the next day, for example).
by shw1n | 2025-04-06 19:40:00+00:00
> In the real world, however, votes tend not to be politically coherent. Instead, what we see in a hyperpartisan polity, is that a diverse set of views collapses after an issue achieves partisan identity status. Talking about a thing through a partisan lens is what causes the partisan collapse. Hence the effects of mass and then social media on the quality of our discussions.

nailed it imo

not above politics, just think productive discussion can't happen if people don't know why they support things beyond "the tribe supports it"

or acknowledge when a belief is tribal vs reason-based
by mathren | 2025-04-06 19:40:19+00:00
These are my notes for a course in stellar physics that I am teaching, the full set of lecture notes is here https://www.as.arizona.edu/~mrenzo/courses/lectures.html and includes some more on neutrino cooling in evolved stars, core collapse physics, and a guest lecture (also with notes that I am NOT the author of) on high energy neutrinos, but if you want to learn specifically about neutrino astrophysics this is certainly not the most comprehensive resource.

Re neutrinos, I would also mention KM3NET which looks for Cherenkov flashes in the Mediterranean sea used as a detector, which recently detected some extremely high energy neutrinos, e.g.:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08543-1
by gruez | 2025-04-06 19:41:44+00:00
>They are written like that precisely so you won't try to weasel your way around a requirement. If they had said "verified badges may not be sold" then you would try to say "this isn't a verified badge but a they-paid-us badge." By wording it vaguely, it cannot be weaseled.

It also means enterprising prosecutors and regulators can use it as a cudgel against their opponents. As others have mentioned, the checkmark already meant very little when it came to whether the poster was trustworthy or not. It's like fining Chrome and Firefox for accepting letsencrypt certificates, because previously there was a $10 cost to having a lock appear on your site, and letsencrypt making it free misleads users.
What are the best AI tools to turn an idea into MVP?
by herberh2 | 2025-04-06 19:41:48+00:00
What are the best AI tools out there that can help take a product idea and refine it to get it to an MVP?

Not the coding part, but all the other stuff, like creating a business plan, validating the idea, identifying target market and customer pain points, building a PRD and user stories, etc.