MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crap | 2025-04-17 23:48:26+00:00
Thanks to everyone who gave feedback!

Arbitrary precision is now supported in 0.3.0 after integrating the `astro_float` (https://docs.rs/astro-float/latest/astro_float/index.html) `BigFloat` type as the base for numbers in the language.

Still working out the kinks, but its live so give it a try!
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-17 23:48:53+00:00
My parents' house shares a postcode with just one other house.

When I was in secondary school, one of my classmates didn't believe a letter would reach me if the envelope had only my name and postcode (no house number or street name), so I gave him a stamp and challenged him to try.

I brought the letter to school a couple of days later.
by roenxi | 2025-04-17 23:49:07+00:00
If you feel the US executive unilaterally assassinating a US citizen without even any particular accusation of a crime (while he was breakfasting, apparently) is clearly legal then that is cool, I just don't see what conditions would lead you to expecting the US president to be charged with a crime are. It is quite clear that unless he does something that the majority of Congress objects to there isn't going to be a prosecution, Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024) or otherwise. This is longstanding convention; if the president does something dodgy while in office it is broadly ignored by the legal system.
by charlie0 | 2025-04-17 23:49:25+00:00
If you replaced every worker with someone else of equal skill of course manufacturing company would continue to operate.

Making employees replaceable cogs is what industrialization was completely about. It's what happened during globalization. Think about all those seniors who lost their jobs when the factory went overseas. That was successful in large part because the distinction between a junior and a senior is not that great.

There would be some exceptions here for management and execs, but we are not talking about them here.
by kristopolous | 2025-04-17 23:49:26+00:00
I spend exactly Zero time on online echo chambers.

I don't use social media anymore and I don't own a television.

Auschwitz being in Germany was convenient because it was extrajudicial and outside of the German constitutional protection.

We're seeing the exact same thing. Trump shrugs that there's nothing he can do to bring the innocent person back AND that he intends to send thousands more regardless.

They've found their Auschwitz where people don't have a right to have rights as Hanna Arendt said. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Confinement_Center it even looks like a Nazi camp.

From the article "Trump further suggested to Bukele that he should "build about five more places" like CECOT"

They're actively trying to redefine citizenship status and send peace activists there.

What you're seeing is what Maurice Bardèche, the 60s French pro-fascist theorist was predicting. He's to fascism was Marshall McLuhan is to social media.

If these are new names to you then maybe the one scrolling through echo chamber memes might be you...

Personally I'm done with this fascist failing shit hole country.. I'm looking to leave. My portfolio is down over a million dollars since these Nazi retards took power.

Seriously, fuck this place
by blogabegonija | 2025-04-17 23:49:29+00:00
Lammers should try anyway.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) and psychedelic medicines are among the most high-profile evolving disruptive innovations within mental healthcare in recent years. Although AI and psychedelics may not have historically shared any common ground, there exists the potential for these subjects to combine in generating innovative mental health treatment approacheshttps://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.15...
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-04-17 23:49:36+00:00
> The smart money among his investors know these issues to be fundamental in deciding if OAI will succeed or not, and are asking the hard questions.

OpenAI has already succeeded.

If it ends up being a $100B company instead of a $10T company, that is success. By a very large margin.

It's hard to imagine a world in which OpenAI just goes bankrupt and ends up being worth nothing.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-17 23:50:01+00:00
> You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so.

He's_Outta_Line_But_He's_Right.gif

Seriously, AGI to the HN crowd is not the same as AGI to the average human. To my parents, these bots must look like fucking magic. They can converse with them, "learn" new things, talk to a computer like they'd talk to a person and get a response back. Then again, these are also people who rely on me for basic technology troubleshooting stuff, so I know that most of this stuff is magic to their eyes.

That's the problem, as you point out. We're debating a nebulous concept ("intelligence") that's been co-opted by marketers to pump and dump the latest fad tech that's yet to really display significant ROI to anyone except the hypesters and boosters, and isn't rooted in medical, psychological, or societal understanding of the term anymore. A plurality of people are ascribing "intelligence" to spicy autocorrect, worshiping stochastic parrots vomiting markov chains but now with larger context windows and GPUs to crunch larger matrices, powered by fossil fuels and cooled by dwindling freshwater supplies, and trained on the sum total output of humanity but without compensation to anyone who actually made the shit in the first place.

So yeah. You're dead-on. It's just about bilking folks out of more money they already don't have.

And Ashley Madison could already to that for pennies on the dollar compared to LLMs. They just couldn't "write code" well enough to "replace" software devs.
by lolinder | 2025-04-17 23:50:07+00:00
You're mixing up antitrust cases. The 2020 case [0], decided in August and going into remedies in a week or so, was about search. This one is about advertising [1], a separate market that the DOJ has argued Google has also been acting anticompetitively in.

Aside from that:

> now AI is taking over, which will further weaken their grip.

Maybe you've missed that they're pulling ahead of OpenAI on the AI front?

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

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...
by dumbledoren | 2025-04-17 23:50:26+00:00
> Americans can choose who they vote for

And yet, NOTHING changes. So, what does 'voting for' mean? North Koreans are not able to vote for more than one party, and yet they havent committed any genocide?

If every party that Americans vote for commits genocide, then its basically Americans are voting for that genocide or they dont care about the genocide at all.

Again, basically this is saying, 'We can just run our mouths, therefore we are not in an autocracy'. Tell all about that to Gazan children Israel is burning on live video.
by Loughla | 2025-04-17 23:51:36+00:00
I think it's a natural product of curiosity. And I think that intelligent life would only be so because of curiosity.

You want to figure things out or you're interested in seeing what happens when you fuck around with things.

So I think a technological progression is a natural progression for intelligent life.

Does that make sense? I feel like I'm not explaining myself well.
by m4rtink | 2025-04-17 23:52:04+00:00
There is a story about this by Stanislaw Lem: "Elsewhere Tichy meets a race of aliens (called "Indioci" in the Polish original, "Phools" in the English translation) who, desiring perfect harmony in their lives, entrust themselves to a machine, which converts them into shiny discs to be arranged in pleasant patterns across their planet." - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ijon_Tichy#Stories

(Not glue, but close enough.)
by arctek | 2025-04-17 23:53:35+00:00
Has anyone actually measured this yet?

Much of this feels like when they did studies on people who take mushrooms for example feel like they are more productive, but when you actually measure it they aren't. It's just their perception.

To me the biggest issue is that search has been gutted out and so for many questions the best results come from asking an LLM. But this is far different from using it to generate entire codebases.
by whalesalad | 2025-04-17 23:55:20+00:00
I love stuff like this. I had a behind the scenes album from inside a turbine that was down for maintenance at the Hoover dam, but my laptop was stolen right around that time and I had no backups (before the cloud). Very spooky watching water drip into the turbine housing (which you could nearly stand up in) knowing an enormous lake was directly above you.
by neilv | 2025-04-17 23:55:48+00:00
I didn't guess that autism was involved in that case, and I'm a little uncomfortable with something that might sound like suggesting that autistic people might be less corporate-compatible.

There are plenty of autistic people who wouldn't say what Damore did, and there are non-autistic people who would.

I also know autistic people who are very highly-valued in key roles, including technical expert roles interfacing directly with customer senior execs in high-profile enterprise deals.

People are individuals, and we tend to end up treating individuals unfairly because of labels and biases, so we should try to correct for that when we can.
by jorvi | 2025-04-17 23:56:04+00:00
> But I need to iterate a few times so that the code looks like what I want.

The LLM too. You can get a pretty big improvement by telling the LLM to "iterate 4 times on whichever code I want you to generate, but only show me the final iteration, and then continue as expected".

I personally just inject the request for 4 iterations into the system prompt.
by drdeca | 2025-04-17 23:56:42+00:00
Because (at least, according to special and general relativity) when two events U,V are simultaneous (in the sense of “the time coordinate is the same) in one frame, then from another frame U is before V (in the sense of the time coordinate in that frame’s coordinate system) , and in a third frame V is before U.

Hm, that’s probably not a very clear explanation..

Ok, suppose you depict time and one dimension of space on a grid, where traveling at c is depicted with a line that makes a 45 degree angle with the space axis. Draw two such lines crossing at the t=0, x=0 point. If you apply a “hyperbolic rotation” aka a “boost”, keeping the origin fixed, these lines will stay fixed, and each point in one of the 4 quadrants made by these lines will remain in that quadrant.

The upper quadrant consists of all events in the absolute future of the event at t=0, x=0 . The bottom quadrant consists of all events in the absolute past of the event at t=0, x=0 .

These boosts are what happens when one changes one’s reference frame by changing velocity. Of course, changing one’s velocity cannot change what events can have a causal effect on what other events, as it only changes one’s perspective.

Any line segment that you draw that would be faster than light speed can be hyperbolically rotated so that the endpoint has an earlier time coordinate in the boosted frame than the start point.

Whereas, the points in the upper quadrant always have positive time coordinates.

Now, if you only allowed one instance of FTL ever, that might not cause any cycles in causation? Maybe even if you only allow it in one direction? But those don’t seem particularly plausible. If you have it in both directions, and they aren’t separated enough I guess, then one could combine those line segments with ones that go at 45 degrees (I.e. light speed) in the forward-in-time direction, to make a loop.

Uh.

Ok so specifically these hyperbolic rotations, in units where c=1 , are t’ = t cosh(theta) - x sinh(theta) and x’ = x cosh(theta) - t sinh(theta)

Uhh…

Ok I think if FTL was only possible if the signals are still forward in time with respect to one fixed preferred reference frame, then there’s no issue. It is just when it is possible in both directions in a variety of reference frames that it results in a loop.
by dumbledoren | 2025-04-17 23:57:00+00:00
> and, yes, this is where a major non-Leninist Communist criticism of Leninism, and its descendants like Stalinism and Maoism, that feature totalitarian control of a command economy by a narrow self-perpetuating party elite stems from.

People always criticize that, and yet those systems delivered: They raised the Soviet citizens from mud huts to apartments within one generation. One thing that is prominent in the stories about the fall of the Eastern Bloc and its aftermath is how the Soviet citizens never thought that they could lose 'staples' like free education, healthcare, childcare, housing, food, paid vacations, maternity leave, guaranteed jobs etc in capitalism. They thought that they would have everything that Leninist socialism gave them in the USSR and an additional consumer economy. They were dumbfounded to find out that wasnt the case.
by ipcress_file | 2025-04-17 23:57:04+00:00
My wife and I moved our stuff across Canada -- from Alberta to Nova Scotia -- by mail. That's when I found out about the "monotainer," a giant palletized wire box that they fill with items heading to a common destination. Our boxes all went in a monotainer and made it to Halifax before we did.

The nicest part: Canada Post moved us in! Everything was waiting in our new apartment when we arrived.
by rkagerer | 2025-04-17 23:57:19+00:00
Of all the terrible, dumb-headed ideas. I would not want my kids scanning their face into who-knows-what third party's service.

I already decline this technology when finance companies want to use it for eg. KYC verification ("Sorry, I don't own a smartphone compatible with your tool. If you want my business you'll have to find another way. Happy to provide a notarized declaration if you'd like" has worked in the past).
by achierius | 2025-04-17 23:57:22+00:00
> premise is a bit naive - it assumes that deno's WASM VM doesn't have exploits, that pyodide doesn't have bugs,

Eh, I wouldn't call this naive. Two points:

1. Pyodide bugs should not be a huge concern here. As long as your python code is executing on top of a JS runtime, the runtime is what matters first and foremost from a security pov.

2. Yes, it's possible for Deno to have bugs. But frankly: it's much less likely to than most any other method for doing this sort of sandboxing. Deno sits on v8, which is the engine used by Chrome, and there are very few applications in the world which have a closer eye and larger dedicated security budget than Chrome. V8 can have bugs, sure, but I would expect they (along with JSC and maybe SpiderMonkey) will have far fewer than any other runtime for a serious dynamic language on the market today.

Yes, a VM would be better (and frankly, when you're talking about running Python on top of a JS runtime, might not even be less performance), but the reason why is not that they "have fewer bugs".
by stavros | 2025-04-17 23:58:21+00:00
So there's a wrong way and a right way to code with LLMs. The wrong way is to ask the LLM to write a bunch of code you don't understand, and to keep asking it to write more and more code to fix the problems each iteration has. That will lead to a massive tower built on sand, where everything is brittle and collapses at the slightest gust of wind.

The right way is to have it autocomplete a few lines at a time for you. You avoid writing all the boilerplate, you don't need to look up APIs, you get to write lines in a tenth of the time it would normally take, but you still have all the context of what's happening where. If there's a bug, you don't need to ask the LLM to fix it, you just go and look, you spot it, and you fix it yourself, because it's usually something dumb.

The second way wins because you don't let the LLM make grand architectural choices, and all the bugs are contained in low-level code, which is generally easy to fix if the functions, their inputs, and their outputs are sane.

I like programming as much as the next person, but I'm really not lamenting the fact that I don't have to be looking up parameters or exact function names any more. Especially something like Cursor makes this much easier, because it can autocomplete as you type, rather than in a disconnected "here's a diff you won't even read" way.
by pmags | 2025-04-17 23:59:48+00:00
Here's a few more:

• US Department of Agriculture (USDA) -- https://www.msn.com/en-us/public-safety-and-emergencies/heal...

• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) - https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elec...

Don't forget massive cuts coming down the line to Department of Energy, NASA and NSF too.

• Department of Energy -- https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/doe-preparing-10b-cl...

* NASA -- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01217-6

• National Science Foundation -- https://www.rdworldonline.com/nsf-layoffs-in-2025-deep-budge...

Who needs research, right?! /s
by financltravsty | 2025-04-17 23:59:55+00:00
Intuition.

The neurons fire and piece together the dots. I can write quite well if I'm primed for it (big if). Speaking as well; but I have to be in the "headspace" for it.

It's like sports. You are in the "zone." Though I've been told many people still have an inner monologue even during sport (sounds terribly distracting).
by abletonlive | 2025-04-18 00:00:08+00:00
This is insanely reductionist and mindless regurgitation of what we already know about how the models work. Understanding is a spectrum, it's not binary. We can measurably show that that there is in fact, some kind of understanding.

If you explain a concept to a child you check for understanding by seeing if the output they produce checks out with your understanding of the concept. You don't peer into their brain and see if there are neurons and consciousness happening
by LouisSayers | 2025-04-18 00:00:17+00:00
I have no doubt that if you sample a sound at high enough fidelity that you won't hear a difference.

My comment around digital vs analog is more of an analogy around producing sounds rather than playing back samples though.

There's a Masterclass with Joel Zimmerman (DeadMau5) where he explains the stepping effect when it comes to his music production. Perhaps he just needs a software upgrade, but there was a lesson where he showed the stepping effect which was audibly noticeable when comparing digital vs analog equipment.
by cmsj | 2025-04-18 00:00:53+00:00
When we say "the kind of things which humans do by thinking", we should really consider that in the long arc of history. We've bootstrapped ourselves from figuring out that flint is sharp when it breaks, to being able to do all of the things we do today. There was no external help, no pre-existing dataset trained into our brains, we just observed, experimented, learned and communicated.

That's general intelligence - the ability to explore a system you know nothing about (in our case, physics, chemistry and biology) and then interrogate and exploit it for your own purposes.

LLMs are an incredible human invention, but they aren't anything like what we are. They are born as the most knowledgeable things ever, but they die no smarter.
by F7F7F7 | 2025-04-18 00:01:37+00:00
The problem with tools like this is that somewhere in the chain between you and the LLM are token reducing “features”. Whether it’s the system prompt, a cheaper LLM middleman, or some other cost saving measure.

You’ll never know what that something is. For me, I can’t help but think that I’m getting an inferior service.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-18 00:02:27+00:00
Oh, make no mistake, I hate both of these. I loathe this forced surveillance of everyone because parents can't be bothered to supervise and teach their children about the most primary of human animal functions (sex), regardless of their reasons for it.

I take great pains to keep minors out of my adult spaces, and don't have to resort to anything as invasive as biometric surveillance or card charges. This notion that the entire world should be safe for children by default, and that anything and everything adult should be vilified and locked up, is toxic as all get-out and builds shame into the human animal over something required for the perpetuation of the species.

The adult content isn't the problem, it's the relationship some folks have towards it that's the issue. That's best corrected by healthy intervention early on, not arbitrary age checks everywhere online that mainly serve as an exercise of power by the ruling class against "undesirable" elements of society.
by paulkrush | 2025-04-18 00:03:37+00:00
I love parcels. Always have. My mom worked at the post office.

Cheap postage hack: Nearly all U.S. stamps issued since World War II don’t have value. You can buy old stamps on eBay for about 60–75 % of face value as “face” stamps—and they’re perfectly valid for mailing.

Unconventional postcards: A thin sheet of plywood with a Sharpie address label is a fun postcard. (it just costs a lot more than a normal postcard)

Small Flat Rate Box physics: With a 70 lb limit, you’d need something exotic—say, a primordial black hole—to exceed the weight cap.

Spare the carrier’s back: A Medium Flat Rate Box packed with 10,000 pre 1982 copper pennies tips the scale at roughly 68 lb. Maybe ship the coins another way—your postal carrier will thank you!
by karim79 | 2025-04-18 00:03:47+00:00
I'm reminded of this wonderful talk from Clara Sousa-Silva[0], a 'quantum astrochemist'.

At one point in this fascinating talk, she mentions that aliens would immediately be able to identify Earth as inhabited by life, because only a stupid and yet advanced civilization would be capable of creating CFCs. I highly recommend this video.

[0] https://youtu.be/iN0uyGVNlkQ?si=unBC3Cj228fKJV4i
by onli | 2025-04-18 00:05:21+00:00
You do not need to count that time. There are very few situations where the time which is not active work time matters. Dishwasher uses up less of your time (and saves money, energy, water). Note the origin statement: It's just so much faster to do the washing by hand. It's completely wrong, but makes clear what kind of time is to be measured here.
by viraptor | 2025-04-18 00:05:56+00:00
Unless you're good at actually maintaining your gpg keychain and need other people to access this, I really wouldn't bother with gpg. There are way better and simpler options.

Age has a simpler interface and SSH key support https://github.com/FiloSottile/age

ejson2env has the environment variable integration and ejson has multiple backends https://github.com/Shopify/ejson2env

direnv can support any cli secrets manager per project directory https://direnv.net/

I've dealt with enough "why did this break" situations with gpg secrets files used by capable teams that I'd never recommend that to anyone. And unless you really need the public key support (teams and deployment support), you're unlikely to gain anything better over a password manager.
by alew1 | 2025-04-18 00:06:45+00:00
Harvard is one of eleven American universities that practice need-blind admissions even for international students, meaning that students are admitted without regard for their financial status (i.e., no explicit preference toward richer students who can pay more tuition), and that financial aid covers full demonstrated need for all admitted students.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission