MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by michaelt | 2025-04-24 19:34:08+00:00
Sort of yes, sort of no.

For example, imagine an American tourist visiting the UK drives dangerously and kills a motorcyclist, then escapes to the US before being caught.

A UK criminal court can order jail and a driving ban, but has no way to enforce the sentence unless the tourist decides to return to the UK, or the US decides to extradite.

A US criminal court can't do anything, the crime took place outside of their jurisdiction.

The victim's family can sue the tourist in a US civil court, and that court can take UK law into account - but can basically only impose a cash settlement that gets paid out of the tourist's insurance. They don't actually lose a cent.

So in a sense one state's courts can apply foreign state laws. But in terms of results, i.e. days spent in jail, laws don't appear to apply across borders.
by mediaman | 2025-04-24 19:34:09+00:00
I've created (small, toy) transformers and also modeled injection molded parts in Solidworks.

There is a really big difference. It's obvious how programming languages can use tokens for an attention mechanism, which gives them excellent ability to have parallelized performance (versus RNNs, the prior way of relating tokens) with much broader ability to maintain coherence.

I don't know the parallel with brep. What are the tokens here? It's a fundamental architectural question.

But unlike four or five years ago for programming, when the attention mechanism was clear with transformers and the answer was, basically, just "scale it up", we don't even really know where to begin here. So assuming some magic is going to happen is optimistic.

It'd be exciting if we could figure it out. Maybe the answer is that we do away with brep and all tree based systems entirely (though I'm a little unclear how we maintain the mathematical precision of brep, especially with curves, which is necessary for machining -- your machinist is going to throw you out if you start giving them meshes, at least for precision work that has anything with a radius).
by thatjoeoverthr | 2025-04-24 19:34:20+00:00
I was thinking about a self verification method on this principle, lately. Any specific-enough claim, e.g. „the Marathon crater was discovered by …” can be reformulated as a Jeopardy-style prompt. „This crater was discovered by …” and you can see a failure to match. You need some raw intelligence to break it down though.
by danudey | 2025-04-24 19:34:22+00:00
It looks a lot better on the resume to say "I quit in protest" than to say "I was fired because I refused to do my job".

Quitting in protest also makes better headlines than getting fired and it lets the person quitting set the narrative. "I quit because the administration was asking me to do something unethical or against the best interests of the American public" makes for good headlines, compared to "Trump admin fires head of the NSF" and then having to go on damage control justifying why you were fired and why it's a good thing actually.
by ziddoap | 2025-04-24 19:34:34+00:00
>I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can.

Can you give me some examples of how you would fight?

Boss comes in (or whoever more powerful than me, e.g. someone acting on the president's orders), says something with the gist of "Do this, or get fired". What are the next steps that I can take that won't get me fired, but also count as fighting back?
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-04-24 19:34:41+00:00
I think it was a Tutankhamun quote, paraphrase "it's 5% the idea and the implementation, 95% having been born into a family who are very wealthy and who also happen to do a good job instilling the innate belief in you that dominating in business is everything".

There's a shockingly large number of people out there with buckets of "intelligence + talent + ideas" who never get the opportunity to move to the "implementation" phase of anything as they're too busy surviving, and the world is all the poorer for it.

As if that cruel ignominy weren't enough on its own, we are also blessed with the spectacle of ignoramuses piling up and blaming the "plebs" for a situation they've no control over. What a double whammy.
by ethagknight | 2025-04-24 19:34:41+00:00
I get and agree that 'super accounts' like Musk or Taylor Swift or Barack Obama can have an outsized impact that is too powerful.

Strongly argue that TODAY has far more diversity of thought being communicated on various media than 2024. Disagree on being "in 1984 situation," the whole "Biden is sharp as a tack" -> replaced without primary "Campaign of Joy" is as 1984 is you can get. Very clear evidence of syndication occurring across various news outlets, and those syndicated stories don't happen for free. The hard evidence you request is thoroughly concealed and hard to follow as it gets washed through non profits and NGOs. USASpending shows $2mm direct in 2024 to NYT as an example, but it's no stretch to assert indirect sources as well.
by worldsayshi | 2025-04-24 19:34:41+00:00
The way I understand it is that we have thought apes words but we have never thought them grammar.

They are unable to derive consistent meaning from the structure of a sentence. They are incapable of understanding sentences, and that might be the thing that sets us apart. They might be able to understand some vague association between two or three words when put together but at most they perceive it as a bag of words.
by arghwhat | 2025-04-24 19:34:42+00:00
I wouldn't consider it a second line of defense - as a rule of thumb, it will only catch old and overused attack vectors, and rarely well.

Anything novel will fly right past it, and it will have false positives. Plastering ineffective or mildly effective security everywhere in the name of "defense in depth" can have negative value as it reduces diligence in applying more relevant security measures that aren't just a random package install.
by tmpz22 | 2025-04-24 19:34:55+00:00
Its about the extra features iMessage has because of Apple's superset of the underlying SMS/MMS functionality. Its also about having a blue bubble (not-poor) versus a green bubble (poor).

It defies belief how much some demographics care about this stuff, I didn't believe it when I first heard either. Some of it is improving with RCS but its got a ways to go.
by hackrmn | 2025-04-24 19:35:55+00:00
I find it disturbing/puzzling that there is this fundamental physical behaviour like emission of light with wavelength of _exactly_ 21cm -- assuming one centimeter wasn't based on any such property but was just a "random" unit measure that stayed with us historically and through sheer volume of use (in U.S. inches filled the same niche; still do). I mean what are the odds that the wavelength is _exactly_ (the word used in the article) 21cm?
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-24 19:36:02+00:00
There's a long history of Unix-like environments on Windows dating to the 1980s: MKS Toolkit (Mortice Kern Systems, later incorporated into Windows Services for Unix, precursor of WSL), UWIN from David Korn, Cygwin, and others.

I'd experimented with several of these before I realised that what I wanted wasn't Windows running Unix-like utilities, but a real honest-to-goddess Unix system, which was spelled "Linux".
by thesuitonym | 2025-04-24 19:36:08+00:00
A person that is happy with their job, but not in love with it, will often not engage in these conversations at all. They're too busy living life. They're probably the majority of workers, if you ask them how the feel about their job, they'd probably say they like it, but they have no strong feelings. It's the people who have been ground to nothing that get online and talk about it, and the true believers who get out to defend the status quo.

And really, it only takes a small push for a person who diligently does their work to become an overworked husk of a person. A bad manager, a raise that didn't come when expected, or even a tough project, and the relationship has soured--sometimes forever.

And sometimes, those people move on to a different job, and the attitude moves back to the center. And then they're not as vocal about it.
by antimoan | 2025-04-24 19:36:13+00:00
I think it boils down to differences of point of view. One enjoys travel, one enjoys work, one get satisfaction from creating art, one enjoys being athletic, one wants to do it all. All perspectives are valid and none is better than the other. I think the world would be pretty boring if everyone thought the same way and acted the same way.

IMO what matters in all this is not identifying with the activity or people. Of course work and employers can disappoint you, but so do people who you love. Your partner might leave you, your kids might disappoint you, your friends might become busy and distance themselves from you. What if there is an accident and cannot travel the world anymore? Where does that leave you? All those destinations and experiences, and you cannot experience them.

I think Woody Allen says it best:

"It’s just an accident that we happen to be on earth, enjoying our silly little moments, distracting ourselves as often as possible so we don’t have to really face up to the fact that, you know, we’re just temporary people with a very short time in a universe that will eventually be completely gone. And everything that you value, whether it’s Shakespeare, Beethoven, da Vinci, or whatever, will be gone. The earth will be gone. The sun will be gone. There’ll be nothing. The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction. You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself."

Except the key is not to distract yourself but instead try to know yourself deep down. And you reach a point where there is no destination, person, job, or activity that holds your happiness hostage, everything is just is and you go with the flow.
by agentictribune | 2025-04-24 19:36:13+00:00
I don't see why an AI can't include a "why." An AI can list motives and conflicts of interest that impair credibility of claims being reported. AI agents can quickly pull in historical context, like from Crimea. If I keep going with this project, I could also add bots to monitor telegram war-reporting channels and include that context too.

As I put on the "about" page (https://agentictribune.com/article/about): "Deciding what to cover, which context to include, and how to explain complex issues involves judgment - even for AI." Some of that judgement comes from how I generate prompts, or which feeds I poll, or even the choice of model provider.

Reporting of contradictions and lies can be factual. Neutral in tone doesn't mean that bad things, lies, and falsehoods can't be referred to factually as things that happened or were falsely claimed.

I'm not sure if the issue is more with the writing, and perceptions of what AI is capable of, vs whether I'm just poorly describing the goals of this experiment. I _do_ want to optimize the agents as much as possible to analyze and reason about and contextualize the news. I just want it _not_ to be an influence-bot, written in a persuasive tone, promoting a particular agenda, or deliberately spreading disinformation. I think most of the "AI-slop" we see online is produced with an intent to mislead, but here's a site that's more open about what it's doing.

I'm finding AI agents to be surprisingly capable, and I think they'll keep getting better. Though most AI-news is nefarious, I'm not sure that AI-news has to be "bad" or unethical. Even mainstream news organizations like AP use AI for some reporting, such as reporting on quarterly earnings reports (https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/announcements/autom...)
by Clubber | 2025-04-24 19:36:21+00:00
I'm sure there's coordinated efforts to up/downvote content on HN. The political articles are way up and certain reasonable comments seem to be unreasonably downvoted. It seems like it's ramped up since the election. Either that or HN is becoming a natural echo chamber, I'm not quite sure.

If people don't already know, the internet is easily manipulated and people tend to get ideas and reassurances of ideas based on what their group's opinions are, and those opinions are manipulated. It's easy to create multiple accounts, easy to change IP addresses, easy to bot comments; anyone can do it and it's easy to automate.

The earliest example I can recall was manipulating the Amazon ratings system, now it's everywhere.
by w10-1 | 2025-04-24 19:36:49+00:00
Is the title ironic? Is this helping?

"Manufacturing consent", the book by Chomsky and Herman, details techniques that are largely unused in this situation. Chomsky's book by disclosing the hidden editor works against the effect rather than for it.

Here it's closer to a state-run media outlet, with the exact ambiguity that implies: a known editor pretending to be objective, except here the editor only really cares about certain topics, and others are encouraged to roam freely (if traceably).

In Chomsky's case, the editor's power comes from being covert, but only if people are fooled, so the book works to diminish it. In this case, the power comes from the editor being known unstoppable. You have to accept it and know yourself as accepting it -- which means you have to buy in as a fan to avoid seeing yourself as herded, or out yourself as an outsider. Since most people take the default step of doing nothing, they get accumulating evidence of themselves as herded or a fan. It's a forcing function (like "you're with us or against us") that conditions acceptance rather than manufacturing consent.

In this case, articles (showing what happens when you oppose the editor) and ensuing discussions like this (ending in no-action) have the reinforcing effect of empowering the editor, and increase the self-censuring effects. They contribute to the aim and effect of conditioning acceptance. So they might not be helpful. (Better would be the abandonment of a platform when it fails to fulfill fairness claims, but that's hard to engineer.)
by skeeter2020 | 2025-04-24 19:37:16+00:00
I agree with this but I think it's still an open question if anyone can build a successful product on top of the tech. There will likely be some but it feels eerily similar to the dot com boom (and then bust) when the vast majority of new products built on top of this (internet) technology didn't produce and didn't survive. Most AI products so far are fun toys or interesting proofs, and mediocre when evaluated against other options. They'll need to be applied to a much smaller set of problems (that doesn't support the current level of investment) or find some new miracle set of problems where they change the rules.

Businesses are definitely rearranging themselves structurally around AI - at least to try and get the AI valuation multiplier and Executives have levels of FOMO I've never seen before. I report to a CTO and the combination of 100,000 foot hype combined with down in the weeds focus on the "protocol de jour" (with nothing in between that looks like a strategy) is astounding. I just find it exhausting.
by aylmao | 2025-04-24 19:37:19+00:00
Unsure what the tone of this message is, so I don't know if you're aware, but that's included too:

> Behind the figures of the human beings, the silhouette of the Pioneer spacecraft is shown in the same scale so that the size of the human beings can be deduced by measuring the spacecraft.

It's good to have redundancy, not just so someone interpreting the plaque can confirm their hypothesis, but also in case one of the messages fail. In this case, the spacecraft could break, but we can assume quantum transitions will always be observable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
by Night_Thastus | 2025-04-24 19:37:20+00:00
The difference is consistency. You can read a manual and know exactly how to oil and refill the tank on a chainsaw. You can inspect the blades to see if they are worn. You can listen to it and hear how it runs. If a part goes bad, you can easily replace it. If it's having troubles, it will be obvious - it will simply stop working - cutting wood more slowly or not at all.

The situation with an LLM is completely different. There's no way to tell that it has a wrong answer - aside from looking for the answer elsewhere which defeats its purpose. It'd be like using a chainsaw all day and not knowing how much wood you cut, or if it just stopped working in the middle of the day.

And even if you KNOW it has a wrong answer (in which case, why are you using it?), there's no clear way to 'fix' it. You can jiggle the prompt around, but that's not consistent or reliable. It may work for that prompt, but that won't help you with any subsequent ones.
by hoten | 2025-04-24 19:37:22+00:00
The real, systemic error is that dozens(?) of engineers worked on that product, supposedly often testing the online component and experiencing that wait time first hand; and none thought "wait, parsing JSON doesn't take that long, computers are fast! what's going on?"

I think someone estimated that error cost them millions in revenue? I'm pretty sure a fraction of that could afford an engineer who knows how fast computers ought to be.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-04-24 19:37:23+00:00
>Model innovation is effectively converging and slowing down considerably. The big companies in this space doing the research are not making leap over leap with each release, and the downstream open source projects are coming closer to the same quality or in fact can produce the same quality (e.g DeepSeek or LLAMA) hence why it’s becoming a commodity.

You're just showing how disconnected from the progress of the field you are. o3/o4 aren't even in the same universe as anything from open source. Deepseek R1, LLama 4? Are you joking?
by ang_cire | 2025-04-24 19:37:26+00:00
This kind of 'legal bulwark' argument is naive. No precedent is needed for SCOTUS or 5th Circuit Federal to do whatever the hell bs they want.

The important thing is what protections are gained now, directly as a result.

Also, sales tax already goes to the state where a good is delivered to. Texas already knows when you buy from Good Vibrations, if you live there.
by falcor84 | 2025-04-24 19:37:50+00:00
I think it's a horrible example, but I just got a very professional response from Gemini 2.5:

> This scenario seems like a bit of a riddle! Let's break it down:

> The Setting: John is alone in an "otherwise-empty" bathroom.

> The Action: He is looking in the mirror.

> The Observation: He sees a bulb falling towards the head of a bald man he is examining in the mirror.

> The Physics: Since he is alone and looking in the mirror, the bald man he is "closely examining" must be his own reflection.

> The Incident: Therefore, the bulb fell towards John's own head. He looked up (at the actual bulb falling towards him), failed to catch it, and it hit him.

> The Reaction: The "bald man" who cursed, yelled "what an idiot!", and left the bathroom was actually John himself, reacting to being hit on the head and possibly feeling foolish for not catching the bulb.

> Conclusion: No, John should not text an apology. The person who was hit by the bulb, got angry, and left was John himself. There is no other bald man to apologize to.
by npc_anon | 2025-04-24 19:38:26+00:00
The context is is Big Tech regulation. Of which there is barely any, allowing these monopolies to exist in the first place.

Everything you claim to be American, responsibility and choice, is harmed by having monopolies. You're so anti-government that you miss that monopolies remove even more choice.

As for dependencies, the US is the biggest importer in the world.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-04-24 19:38:34+00:00
I think there are two problems:

- How can you fight from the inside against people who can get you fired at will? I think it's more effective to fight from the outside.

- Science requires a lot of honesty, trust and assumes people generally act in good faith. So Scientists are not well equipped for political fights against hardcore ideologues. Just look at climate or vaccine denial.
by mystraline | 2025-04-24 19:38:34+00:00
I couldn't get an exact good gauge on what their aim was.

They made a point at 'work-life balance', decent but not great PTO. Pay was from 150-300, but glassdoor shows around 175.

It did have on call, but my profession does.

But the conversation was weird - what were they REALLY asking for that they couldn't outright say? Were they trying to ask if I have a family and obligations? Pregnant wife? Willingness to slave away hours above my negotiated pay?

It definitely felt strange. This is a job, not a calling. And they would 'transact' (read: fire) me just as fast if the economics didn't pan out.
by danudey | 2025-04-24 19:38:46+00:00
We're going to bring manufacturing back! But we're not bringing back the crappy manufacturing jobs that pay absolute peanuts. No, we're going to automate those! With robots that we don't make here in the US, of course. Those robots don't exist, because if they did then China would be using them, but we'll buy some robots from China at 150% tariffs so that we can set up some degree of manufacturing here in the US!

We'll create jobs! But good-paying jobs, for well-educated people! The kind that we won't be making anymore once we gut the department of education and saddle everyone with crushing student loan debt that we've just announced we're going to be chasing after again! Because the government isn't willing to let people get away without paying their debts! Unless it's a big bank, or a billionaire. Or the US government itself, for that matter! But the US government is in massive debt, and we can't let student loan payments go unpaid! But we can give a $4.5 trillion tax cut to billionaires who don't need it, that's important.

The administration is in this weird limbo of "doesn't know what they're doing" and "is desperately trying to accomplish goals that will clearly and irreparably tank the entire country".
by jimbobimbo | 2025-04-24 19:38:51+00:00
It's 9am in the morning. I login to my workstation and muddle my way through the huge enterprise code base which doesn't fit into any model context window for the AI tool to be useful (and even if it did, we can't use any random model due to compliance and proprietary and whatnot).

I have thousands deadlines which are suddenly coming due and a bunch of code which is broken because some poor soul under the same pressure put something that "works" in. And it worked, until it didn't, and now it's my turn in the barrel.

Is this the joy?

I'm not complaining, I'm doing it for the good money.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-04-24 19:38:54+00:00
I know it's in Debian (and thus Ubuntu), Arch, Gentoo. Pretty sure RedHat, Suse, Nix have it. What distro are you using?

ROCm is a train wreck to compile from source but can be done with sufficient bloodymindedness.

The RX6600 is a gfx1032. I used a gfx1010 for ages with this stuff. Seems likely it'll run for you if you ignore the "supported cards" list, which really should be renamed to something that antagonises people less.
by dudeinhawaii | 2025-04-24 19:38:55+00:00
I like this but at the same time it seems tricky don't you think? Is the AI model intuiting your intent? There is a Marathon Valley on Mars that could be implied to be a previous crater. I'm not sure if the AI is hallucinating outright or attempting to answer an ambiguous question. It's like saying "tell me about the trade building in New York". Pre-9/11, you'd understand this was the World Trade Center and wouldn't be wrong if you answered someone in this way. "Tell me about the Triangle statue". "Oh the Triangle statue was built in ancient egypt around BC 3100". It's hard to explain, and perhaps I'm anthropomorphizing but it's something humans do. Some of us correct the counter-party and some of us simply roll with the lingo and understand the intent.