MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by martin-t | 2025-04-27 00:56:32+00:00
There are glimmers of hope - like Wales trying to ban lying in politics. But of course, the punishment has to be proportional to the offense, not just a slap on the wrist.

If I wanted to take things to an extreme, I'd ask why laws even need to be so specific about which offenses lead to which punishments and which offenses are even punishable in the first place (the "what is not forbidden is allowed" principle).

In theory, you could cover them more generally by saying that any time someone intentionally causes harm to others (without a valid reason), he will be caused proportional harm in return. Then all you need is a conversion table to prison time, fines, etc.

With lying, all you would need to prove is that the person lied intentionally and quantify the expected harm which would have been caused if the lie was successful (regardless if it actually was or not - intent is what matters).

As a bonus, it would force everyone to acknowledge the full amount of harm caused. For example, rape usually leads to lifelong consequences for the victim but not the attacker. In this system, such inconsistency, some would call it injustice, would be obvious and it would be much easier for anyone to call for rectification.
by kace91 | 2025-04-27 00:56:37+00:00
I’m not even sure that’s possible for some sites.

A few years ago I tried to create a separate digital footprint from scratch (just an experiment out of boredom when my isp offered a second number for free). I used an ultra cheap never before used android phone and set it up outside my home.

Google went nuts. All sorts of captchas, security checks and attempts to link me to other information popping up on every step. Eventually it wouldn’t let me use the phone unless I provided a credit card number.
by swores | 2025-04-27 00:56:50+00:00
But that's not how they actually work.

> "If an LLM happens to know the answer to your question, that answer will have the greatest weight"

An LLM doesn’t “know” anything in the way you’re imagining. It doesn’t have stored facts or indexed knowledge to check against, it just has weights learned between token sequences, and it outputs whatever next token is assigned the highest probability given the prompt and prior context. That might happen to produce a correct answer (and people are obviously working hard to make the models produce right answers as often as possible), but it might just as easily produce a plausible-sounding but wrong one, even if the correct information was in the training data. Because that correct information being there doesn't guarantee it will have the highest weighting ever, yet alone the highest weighting in all contexts of previous tokens and in all temperature settings.

You’re right that hallucinations can sometimes look like “extrapolations” that happen to land correctly, but that’s incidental. It’s still doing the same token-by-token probability selection regardless of whether it ends up right or wrong.

Framing it around “missing knowledge” vs “existing knowledge” is misleading intuition. It’s better to think about it in terms of probability distributions over token sequences: the model’s training biases it toward correct sequences more often than incorrect ones, but there’s nothing fundamental in the architecture that guarantees that if the answer was present in training, it will always beat out wrong guesses.

p.s. It's late at night here and I'm about to go to bed, so apologies if I've not explained well in this comment - I gave it to ChatGPT hoping it could tidy things up for me and it just made a way more confusing version so I'm posting it as is :D Let me know if my explanation still isn't clear and I could try again, or answer any questions you have, tomorrow
by orwin | 2025-04-27 00:57:20+00:00
What did the US democratic party ever do that was considered too left wing? Not said or wishcast, what material thing did they implement that was too left wing on abortion?

Theoretically, abortion in the US used to be extremely liberal (in the original meaning of the word liberal).

Materially? No one wait week 22 for an abortion unless it's an emergency, considering the damage it does.

The percentage of childbirth death plus late stage abortion in the US is barely superior to the one in my country where abortions after weeks 18 needs to be argued by two doctors and a social worker in front of a judge. And that percentage is only superior because US have a very, very high childbirth death for a developed country.

Materially, Usians do less late stage abortion than other developed countries where those are way more restrictive. Because people love to talk about 'theorically' when they talk about other people body and choices, never about what really happens, and that bothers me greatly.
by TrapLord_Rhodo | 2025-04-27 00:58:36+00:00
ICE is there to arrest a known fugative. The judge said you don't have the right to stop proceedings. They back down and say we'll just arrest him afterwards.

>[Afterwards] Dugan took the pair to a side door in the courtroom, directed them down a private hallway and into the public area on the 6th floor.

Seems like “intentionally misdirecting” federal agents to me.
by boroboro4 | 2025-04-27 01:01:53+00:00
Those are vastly different abuses of power between now and back then. And those abuses of power need to be prosecuted and people should go to jail. It would be also great if we put more protection against future abuses of power, both similar to the ones right now and ones in the past.

But one can only dream, i highly doubt any of this will happen.
by jonchurch_ | 2025-04-27 01:02:07+00:00
It is a useful concept, and letting the whispers of the vexillophiles[0] into your head will lead you to see that most flags are well, pretty bad.

CGP Grey has a lot of opinions[1] about this.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexillology

[1] https://youtu.be/l4w6808wJcU
by daft_pink | 2025-04-27 01:04:30+00:00
The problem is you go to an independent bookstore do they have lots of Isaac Asimov? Nope. They just have some very niche books, some virtue signaling books and the top best sellers and lack any sort of deep collection of classics. They also generally lack the important computer science publishers as well like Manning and No Starch Press. Just doesn’t compare when you used to be able to go to Barnes & Noble or Borders and scope out books in person and they would have a strong collection. Online is currently the way to go currently.
Ask HN: How do folks without 'seniority' in a domain launch, e.g., 'AI in SRE
by mattfrommars | 2025-04-27 01:05:35+00:00
I saw the name of this company in my feed and took it as a complete random example. Nothing particular about why this one. But I picked to highlight a trend I've been seeing lately.

> https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/parity/jobs

The founders appear to be novice in terms of real world experience. And I did not spot any certification that could be valued for a SRE engineer, for example CKAD. Nor they seem to have worked in SRE domain for say minimum four to five years to display seniority and domain knowledge.

Yet, somehow, they have pitch and 'enough' experience to justify and showcase to the world a 'AI SRE for Incident Response'

Like, what am I missing here? This is like me with zero experience in dental practice to launch an AI firm in dental space to solve dentist's problem.
by heylook | 2025-04-27 01:07:07+00:00
> If an LLM happens to know the answer to your question

You're missing the point. It doesn't "know" anything. The only thing it can "know" is the statistical relationships between tokens in its dataset. It doesn't "know" anything about the meaning of those tokens. It doesn't even "know" whether it "knows" anything or not. The best it can do is "Here's a recursively generated string of ASCII codes that are statistically likely to follow each other according to the data corpus."

It's Rashomon. It can point you in the right directions a lot of the time, but there's no getting around the fact that you have to double-check its answers with external sources.

> Or at least this is how I interpret the term.

That's not a very useful interpretation because it's not grounded in technical reality.
by kappasan | 2025-04-27 01:07:47+00:00
We have something similar here in Kyoto! But we're Japan so there's an actual anime [1] and a character relationship chart [2], both straight from the city government.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OInuZFHeQo

[2] https://www.city.kyoto.lg.jp/kotsu/cmsfiles/contents/0000215...
by genter | 2025-04-27 01:08:33+00:00
I doubt it, people will forget in a generation or two. How many people have actually read The Jungle? How many people have actually seen our rivers on fire? How many people remember when the air was so polluted going outside would kill you? How many people remember corporations hiring private armies and literally killing their employees because they dared to strike? The people that benefit from so many of our laws are cheering their removal without understanding why they're there.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-27 01:08:40+00:00
> we must distinguish between "good voter suppression", like banning votes from toddlers

Banning votes from toddlers is not as clear cut a point as you make it look like.

As a thought experiment: imagine an extreme society made 15% of childless adults, 5% of young parents and 80% of toddlers.

Would it make sense/be fair if the 15% of childless adults could pass laws that remove voting rights for life from anyone that piss their pants in public whatever their age ?

You could end up in a situation where 20 years later 90% of the adults of the country have no voting rights. Finding a way (setting the 5% of parents as representatives ?) to mitigate these kind of issues is generally important, which is why there's no cut and dry "good" voter suppression, only compromises.

Your preoccupations seem to be centered on protecting the system from demagoguery and outside influences, which is a valid POV, but that can't be the only angle nor the central focus. Even if 80% of the population was provably dumb, you'll still need a system that takes their voice into account to avoid the country getting overthrown or become a dictatorship.

> universally

Honestly I don't like that word, and it removes a lot of nuance that is utterly needed for politics and ruling systems. There is almost nothing universal, especially when it comes to "good" and "bad".
by dlcarrier | 2025-04-27 01:09:11+00:00
The regulation did exactly what it was designed to do: take the base-model Nissan Versa off the market and prevent any low-cost vehicles from competing in the US market. (Remember when brand-new cars were available for under $10,000? Inflation adjusted, that was still less than $15,000)

Sure, ultrasonic sensors have a better outcome than backup cameras in a cost-benefit analysis (https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/nhtsa-2006-25579...) and allow you to simultaneously look out the windows and get feedback from the sensor, but allowing them would have allowed for the sale of cars too cheap to have infotainment systems, and that was not the goal of the regulators.
by em-bee | 2025-04-27 01:09:14+00:00
ok, i don't know about south korea and what's going on there with the extremely low fertility rate. but china has way more support for children than the US. china's low fertility rate is not because of social or economical factors like elsewhere but because of the one-child policy which has been abolished a few years ago.

I don’t think anywhere else puts an effort into making being a parent not suck

i don't believe that is true. not even in developing countries. the reason we can't see that is that developing countries suffer from other problems. but those problems don't motivate people there to not have children. on the contrary.

And even places putting material resources into family and parent support, it doesn’t move the needle

because material considerations are not a big factor. you were arguing that having children is expensive, and that children are only to be afforded by the wealthy, and treated as a status symbol.

but if that is a factor then it is only a factor in the united states and nowhere else in the world. especially not in developing countries.
by handoflixue | 2025-04-27 01:09:58+00:00
> Before LLMs you could have had participants using Stack Overflow to cheat.

"could have", yes, but mostly didn't until LLMs showed up.

The problem is that LLMs lower the bar to cheating: using Stack Overflow still requires a pretty solid knowledge of the domain (and in a professional coding context, usually wouldn't even count as cheating). The LLMs also let you do this much faster.
by darkteflon | 2025-04-27 01:10:56+00:00
Linux gaming is absolutely incredible right now. After an essay of several months, however, I recently switched my gaming rig back to Windows 10 for three reasons alone: the multiplayer game I mainly play with my buds is one of the very, very few that won’t work on Linux due to anti-cheat shenanigans, Steam Big Screen has a persistent bug with Nvidia cards even as of 560.x, and I could never quite get Sunshine + Moonlight streaming (essential for playing games with the kids around the house) working without micro-stutters. I fully expect 2 of those to be solved within the next few months (doubtless someone more proficient with Linux could solve them in an afternoon).

Very excited for SteamOS general availability for desktops. Owning a Steam Deck has made me really appreciate an immutable OS - especially for a gaming rig, which I don’t want to spend time maintaining.

Edit: As an aside, I’ll just add that for anyone interested in streaming, Steam Remote Play has quietly gone from being an also-ran, to genuinely excellent in the last couple of years. It requires - in my case at least - a lot less tinkering than S+M and produces an extremely low-latency, high quality feed.
by culi | 2025-04-27 01:11:10+00:00
If you don't wanna pay $74 for CrossOver, there's also Whisky which impressed me and I've had great success with. It's an open source Wine wrapper for macOS

https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky

EDIT: it seems that at some point in the past month the author stated whisky is no longer maintained!
by bschwindHN | 2025-04-27 01:12:26+00:00
It's amazing that it works at all, but yeah the setup sounds like a total pain.

I've mostly just stuck with gaming on the Switch because it starts up fast, doesn't update excessively, and mostly just gets out of the way to let me play the game I want to play. This is only in the context of first party titles though, I can't speak as well to third party titles.
by undeclared | 2025-04-27 01:12:32+00:00
Just launched new website for MetaDock.

Features:

* Split-screen layout system

* Ability to move positions and resize windows

* Workspace system

* Automated docking system makes an automatic grid layout (unless you move positions on anything)

* Reset layout system that will reset layout back into a grid

* Built-in browser system with multi sign-in and proxy per profile feature (you can VPN to like 10 places at once, logged into the same website, under different logins)

* App docking system (beta) - Grabs most apps & games (not everything works perfectly)

* Comparison engine - quickly search multiple search engines at once, you can add as many searches and search engines as you want

* Link saver - Grab a bunch of things you want to visit later, then visit them all at once

A lot more...

I'm happy to answer any questions
by sedev | 2025-04-27 01:13:06+00:00
The general notability guideline is another thing that's effectively downstream of "there's not enough editor time to keep everything up to basic standards." If Wikipedia had 10x the editor-hours it does now, notability requirements would de facto loosen, because there would be enough editor-hours to keep the extra articles useful. Seriously, editor time is the major bottleneck of Wikipedia.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-04-27 01:14:28+00:00
I love the ceremony associated with this machine's retirement. As I get older and have more experience replacing gear I installed and worked with for long stretches of my career, I have started to appreciate ceremony more.

In the last 15-ish years I've taken to stashing notes in and around hardware I've installed. I write the date, an anecdote about the weather or the news, and my name. It has been nice to find these notes years later, when I'm lucky enough to be one retiring the gear. I hope, when other people have retired gear I've installed, they get a little kick out of seeing a voice from the past.
by 1659447091 | 2025-04-27 01:14:35+00:00
> On the legal immigration side cancel all non-tourist visa types and let existing visas expire.

You're saying you want to remove immigration visa's from the Spouse of a US Citizen? A US Citizen's intercountry adopted orphaned child, and immediate relatives (like a parent) of said US citizens? I mean trumps parent-in-laws already took advantage of that on their way to being naturalized, so Im sure he'd be good getting rid of that one now.

> Replace them with a simple employer sponsored visa with a ~400k/year (inflation adjusted) payroll tax and let any company that wants to pay the tax sponsor as many people as they want.

You also want US farms to pay 400K/year for their seasonal farm workers (H-2A), when they are already squeezed by the couple thousands they pay plus all the other cost currently? Do you want to be able to afford food?

I guess we can put up windmills on current farm land and import all food from countries that exploit their workers and pay them far less than $15-20/h these workers get. They probably don't provide meals, safe housing & work conditions either, as is already required with H-2A. Now you want them to pay 400k on top of that because it's difficult to find US Citizens who do not see this kind of farm work as "below" them?
by throwaway314155 | 2025-04-27 01:14:42+00:00
Thatseems fairly subjective . Specs similar to a MBP? Because mine has a retina, 120 Hz display with HDR with max brightness of 1200 nits.

That MBP display utterly crushes my other standalone monitors- a 4K@60 w/ HDR@300-nits. Or a 1080p @90 Hz (SDR).

but of course. can't wire my linux gaming pc up to my laptop's display without some surgery.
by zzo38computer | 2025-04-27 01:14:44+00:00
Which formats are helpful can depend on the use. I think DER (which is a binary format) is not so bad (although I added a few additional types (such as key/value list, BCD string, and TRON string), but not all uses are required to use them). I had also made up Multi-DER, which is simply any number of DER concatenated together (there are formats of JSON like that too). (I had also made up TER which is a text format and a program to convert TER to DER. I also wrote a program to convert JSON to DER. It would also be possible to convert CSV, etc.)

It was also my idea of an operating system design, it will have a binary format used for most stuff, similar to DER but different in some ways (including different types are available), which is intended to be interoperable among most of the programs on the system.
by roenxi | 2025-04-27 01:14:59+00:00
One of the more exciting AI use-cases is that it should be about competent to handle the conversational parts of diagnosis; it should have read all the studies and so it'll be possible to spend an hour at home talking to an AI and then turn up at the doctor with a checklist of diagnostic work you want them to try.

A shorter amount of expensive time with a consultant is more powerful if there is a solid reference to play with for longer before hand.
by thomascountz | 2025-04-27 01:15:20+00:00
The researchers argue that the ends justify the unethical means because they believe their research is meaningful. I believe their experiment is flawed and lacks rigor. The delta metric is weak, they fail to control for bot-bot contamination, and the lack of statistical significance between generic and personalize models goes unquestioned. (Regarding that last point, not only were participants non-consenting, the researchers breached their privacy by building a personal profile on users based on their Reddit history and profiles.)

Their research is not novel and shows weak correlations compared to prior art, namely https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01103
by nkurz | 2025-04-27 01:15:37+00:00
I read Kabloona by Gontran de Poncins a couple decades ago and it's stuck with me ever since. I don't think I've ever seen it mentioned online before. It's high on my list of books that should be top-rated classics, but as far as I can tell it's basically unknown. If you've never heard of it, seek it out, it's fabulous!

Edit: Since alecst has obviously already read Kabloona, I might as well give a few more that are on that "list": Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker, Goatwalking by Jim Corbett, and Hyssop by Kevin McIlvoy. Maybe you'd like one of them too.
by jsheard | 2025-04-27 01:16:32+00:00
Yeah, unfortunately Apple have backed themselves into a corner there with their ~220ppi Retina display standard. Nobody makes monitor-sized panels that dense which also support high refresh rates, they're all limited to 60hz. The Apple monitors still don't support VRR either, even though the software support has been in place on macOS for a while it only works with third party monitors.
by alpaca128 | 2025-04-27 01:16:37+00:00
> There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared

Not really. 99% of the time it's someone claiming that it happens.

And it's always an anecdote, never clear proof that it happened. Let alone that it happened because of the audio and not web activity. And that the conversation was actually the cause for the ad and not the other way around.

Is it technically possible? Sure. But if so many people are so certain that it definitely happens, why didn't dozens of people already prove it with a fresh Google/Apple account and phone?
by gus_massa | 2025-04-27 01:17:16+00:00
IANAMD. IANAB. Let's guess anyway:

The Ca in bones is probably renewed very slowly. C H O N very fast, in particular water. Na, K and Cl are very soluble and also get renew very fast. Some rare elements like I are probably reused a lot and renewed very slowly. I'm not sure about P, my hand waving is confused. Assuming a burger per day, we ate our weight in meat every few years, but I'm not sure if all the Fe is absorved in and exchanged for the internal one.
by colkassad | 2025-04-27 01:18:13+00:00
Has Reddit ever spoken publicly about this issue? I would think this to be an existential threat in the long term. Posting patterns can be faked and the models are just getting better and better. At some point, subreddits like changemyview will become accepted places to roleplay with entertaining LLM-generated content. My young teenager has a default skepticism of everything online and treats gen AI in general with a mix of acceptance and casual disdain. I think it's bad if Reddit becomes more and more known as just an AI dumping ground.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-27 01:20:42+00:00
> where IDs are harder to get by than in US

Is it ? If we're talking national IDs, most EU countries have it mandatory, so there's no requirement other than officially existing as a person.

If we're talking voting registration ID, many countries auto-enroll their citizen the moment they're adult or naturalize, and procedures are only required when your info changes or you explicitly get barred from voting (I don't even know when that happens, minor offences will not trigger that)
by culi | 2025-04-27 01:21:05+00:00
Well there's JSONL which is used heavily in scientific programs (especially in biology)

But CSV represented as JSON is usually accomplished like so:

{ "headers": ["name", "habitat", "food"], "data": [ ["Acorn Woodpecker", "forest", "grain"], ["American Goldfinch", "grassland", "grain"], ["Anhinga", "wetland", "fish"], ["Australian Reed Warbler", "wetland", "grub"], ["Black Vulture", "forest", null] ] }