MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ckrapu | 2025-04-05 19:00:36+00:00
"It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics. This is due to the types of training data available on the internet."

Perhaps. Or, maybe, "leaning left" by the standards of Zuck et al. is more in alignment with the global population. It's a simpler explanation.
by imiric | 2025-04-05 19:00:44+00:00
There's a world of difference between announcing the existence of a product to potentially interested demographics, and abusing people's privacy by collecting their personal data in order to build a profile of them so they can be micro-targeted by psychologically manipulative content that is misleading or downright false—oh, and their profile is now in perpetuity exchanged in dark markets, and is also used by private and government agencies for spreading political propaganda, and for feeding them algorithmic content designed to keep them glued to their screens so that they can consume more ads that they have no interest in seeing... And so on, and so forth.

Whatever happened to product catalogs? Remember those? I'm interested in purchasing a new computer, so I buy the latest edition of Computer Shoppers Monthly. Companies buy ad space there, and I read them when I'm interested. The entire ecommerce industry could work like that. I go on Amazon, and I search for what I want to buy. I don't need algorithms to show me what I might like the most. Just allow me to search by product type, brand, and specifications, and I'm capable of making a decision. It would really help me if paid and promoted reviews weren't a thing, and I could only see honest reviews by people who actually purchased the product. This is a feature that ecommerce sites can offer, but have no incentive to.
by em3rgent0rdr | 2025-04-05 19:01:24+00:00
https://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/USB says "Software USB capture captures URBs (USB Request Blocks) rather than raw USB packets." So Wireshark couldn't give you the CRC, which would be stripped away.

You could hypothetically use a really-really high bandwidth oscilloscope (like 2 GHz to view 480 MHz USB HS signals), but those are expensive. So you would have to resort to using external USB sniffer...out of curiosity I found someone made a sniffer that is basically a USB-capable microcontroller plus an FPGA and a USB PHY: https://hackaday.com/2023/06/13/cheap-usb-sniffer-has-wiresh...
by rpastuszak | 2025-04-05 19:01:30+00:00
I don't think that's true. It's more of a function on how these models are trained (remember the older pre-ChatGPT clients?)

Most of the software I use doesn't need to refer it itself in the first person. Pretending what we're speaking with an agent is more of a UX/marketing decision rather than a technical/logical constraint.
by renerick | 2025-04-05 19:01:57+00:00
> No, treating some letter sequences like fi and ffi so that the letters stick together in a certain way is not "by this measure".

Except ligatures are not limited to fi and ffi. They can be used to change appearance of any sequence of characters, including words.

> It's noticeable; a B consistently occurs everywhere there is an A, wherever that font is used.

I'm not talking about substituting a single letter. I'm talking about outright obfuscation of a entire texts.

> You can't perpetrate an easter egg whereby a certain A is replaced.

Quite the opposite, it is trivial to apply different fonts to different parts of text, so you can keep some parts of text normal, and some parts (like numbers and data) obfuscated. In HTML you may notice some abundance of <span>s, sure, but in PDF? Literally no way, unless you copy-paste everything and compare it.

And this is not a hypothetical scenario or a 'minor threat'. Russian government used precisely this technique to obfuscate data in their online voters turn-out reports: (source in Russian, not found it reported in English) https://habr.com/ru/news/578846/. Have they used more subtle scrambling of only digits and not also mixing letters: who knows how long it would take for anybody to notice. From a technical perspective it's not so different from contextual alternates - both require custom made fonts.

There are other ways to alter document presentation too. Especially in CSS, you can create pseudo-elements, not present in the original HTML, or hide parts of HTML, or use a media query which checks if the page is being printed or not!

> We could prepare a page where every glyph appears, and detect substitutions via OCR.

Why the extra step? Why not take the OCR of potentially compromised document and compare it with its raw content? It would detect every substitution, whether it's ligatures, alternates, media queries etc. Why not inspect the font file for defined alternates directly?
by immibis | 2025-04-05 19:01:59+00:00
Should be easy enough to create a DroneBL for residential proxy services. Since you work on residential proxy detection at a FAANG service, why haven't you done it yet?

If they're doing things the above-board way from their own ASN, block their ASN.

If they're doing things the above-board way from third-party hosting providers, send abuse reports. Late last year there was a commotion because someone was sending single spoofed SSH SYN packets, from the addresses of Tor nodes, to organizations with extremely sensitive security policies. Many people with Tor nodes got threats of being banned from their hosting provider, over a single packet they didn't even send. They're definitely going to ban people who are doing actual DDoSes from their servers.

DDoS is also a federal crime, so if you and they are in the USA, you might consider trying to get them put in prison.
by terhechte | 2025-04-05 19:02:31+00:00
To add, they say about the 400B "Maverick" model:

> while achieving comparable results to the new DeepSeek v3 on reasoning and coding

If that's true, it will certainly be interesting for some to load up this model on a private M3 Studio 512GB. Response time will be fast enough for interaction in Roo Code or Cline. Prompt processing is a bit slower but could be manageable depending on how much code context is given to the model.

The upside being that it can be used on codebases without having to share any code with a LLM provider.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-05 19:02:46+00:00
> Pet friendly food places violate the law

Huh. It would seem that the FDA lacks jurisdiction to micromanage commercial affairs on private property among the states in this manner.

If someone knows a restaurant or bar owner—ideally who own their land and are in a red state—who was fined or otherwise damaged by the feds for letting pets on their premises, please reach out. Would love to sponsor a test case.
by swisniewski | 2025-04-05 19:03:01+00:00
Digital content is not “published” in the same way as traditional content.

Digital content is published by placing data on a computer, connecting that computer to the intent, then running software on that computer that allows software on other computers to connect to it and download that content.

Attempting to ban ads is an attempt to censor the content of that communication. It’s analogous to attempting to ban the things people can say over telephone calls. It would be a clear violation of the 1st Amendment.

The Author’s points about “Dopamine Megaphones” and “tracking” don’t hold up.

Posting something online is not the same as yelling through a megaphone. And restrictions on tracking are about behavior, not speech.

One can outlaw both of those things without unreasonably restricting speech.

But banning ads is absolutely unreasonable restraint of free speech rights.

If I speak on the telephone, I am allowed to hand the phone to someone else for a moment and let them speak. Banning such a thing would be unconstitutional.

Many online ads work in the same way.

Similarly, I can take money from someone, and in response speak things they want me to speak. Restraining that is also a violation of free speech rights.

Just because online ads are horrible, doesn’t mean they can be outlawed without trampling on fundamental rights.
by bertil | 2025-04-05 19:03:09+00:00
I just wish I had an option to say I’m not interested.

If you give me extra wishes, I’d love three options, to either say that the ad is annoying, the brand isn’t for me, or I don’t want to be offered that type of product.

The quality of ads would skyrocket if I could just stop seeing efforts to get me to be interested in things that I will never buy.

Just before joining Facebook, I was living abroad and confronted to ads in a language I didn’t understand constantly. As my bootcamp task, I measured that this was 4% of ads shown to users. At the time, this was already billions of dollars. My manager deemed that to be a ridiculous and pointless exercise. One night at the bar (there were three bars in the London office at the time), I mentioned it to a guy who happened to be the big ad boss, who immediately prioritized the project, I got a couple of smart guys who joined after I was promoted for finding this.

A bit later, I checked the conversion rate by how many times you’ve seen the same ad before. It was a precipitous cliff: people click on things they’ve never seen before. Ranking ads from the same advertiser happens to be one of those SQL/Hive query that doesn’t scale well, so I had to use the fact I came to the office early and has 12 hours of uninterrupted server time before the daily queries were hammering anything, and I had to sample a lot—but I realized I could sample by server, which helped a lot.

I tried to mention it to the same guy, who said he knew about that problem, but empowering users like I suggested would not work: it would shrink the matching opportunities, AI was getting smarter, etc. In practice, the debate around privacy got very toxic, and Facebook couldn’t let people do that without some drama about storing a list of advertisers that they said they didn’t like.

One of Sandberg’s trusted lieutenants lost a child late in her pregnancy; it was a whole thing. She started seeing ads for baby clothes just after, which triggered an optional ban on alcohol, gambling, and baby stuff. That’s still there. I worked with her briefly a bit later (after months of bereavement) and asked if it made sense to expand the category. She replied that those were two legal obligations, plus her well-known personal drama that no one dared push against, so she was able to push for those three, but that the company had changed. No other categories could be added: at that point, it would be too difficult. Mark used to not care about ads, but he started having expensive ideas, notably AI (to ban horrendous content); he needed the money, and he started to care about raking as much dough in as possible. I had worked on horrendous content (instead of ad language) enough to know that it mattered, so I was very conflicted. It felt surreal how much things had changed in nine months.

All that still feels like a giant waste, not the least how much energy goes into making and showing ads to people repeatedly swearing at their screen, begging to make that annoying copy disappear.
Ask HN: Did GitHub remove the raw diff
by withinboredom | 2025-04-05 19:04:29+00:00
I'm either going crazy, or GitHub removed/moved the raw diff ability. You used to be able to get a raw diff from a PR by just adding ".diff" to the url, but it appears it doesn't work anymore.

I generally use this when receiving a PR and don't want to go through the hassle of checking out their branch, so I would just grab the raw diff and apply it locally. This seems to have gone away though.

Is this a bug or something? Has anyone else noticed this issue and found a work around?
by johnea | 2025-04-05 19:05:20+00:00
So, for those of us down here at the bottom of the karma ladder, after 5000 lines of comments about giving antibiotics to cows, which had nothing to do with the article, there is some actual discussion of the topic.

This inability to bring a product to market is in fact an artifact of the for-profit healthcare system.

Besides the obvious aspects of weight-loss and erectile-dysfunction drugs being more profitable, there is also an issue with imaginary property.

Pharma will not bring a drug to market unless they can own exclusive rights. Since this is a naturally occurring molecule, some tweak will need to be made before the chemical is eligible for a patent.

So until some company can make a custom modification, without disrupting the efficacy, it won't be considered a viable product.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-04-05 19:05:22+00:00
No. This is called selective enforcement and is the worst thing in the world. It gives the enforcers the option to pick on whoever they want and give a pass to whever they want, as if there were no law at all. There is effectively no law at all, because literally anyone doing anything can be called either guilty or innocent at the whim of the person doing the enforcing, or whoever controls them.
by onemoresoop | 2025-04-05 19:05:24+00:00
> It's time to be optimistic.

Optimism is good for sanity and I try to trick myself into not being pessimistic at least but I honestly feel that's like burying the head in the sand. Those problems are still there aside from the ozone holes which have been fixed. In addition there are even more serious problems on the horizon. Having a kid makes me vacillate between optimism (for the sake of a sane family life) and horror our kids future.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-04-05 19:05:37+00:00
>any idea on how these characteristics could be measured?

Just a gut feeling, I would say intuitively.

Something to think about if you're just looking at popularity. It pretty much is a popularity contest by definition :\

Sometimes it also makes sense to consider the obstacles too. Pop idol contests are an example where contestants having extreme disadvantages are sometimes showcased, in contrast to those who might have grown up in the town of Hollywood, giving them a bit of a leg up.

Make sure not to overlook anything obvious, which can sometimes even happen if it's too obvious.

Like paywalls, that's obvious. But something that draws interest in spite of a discouragement/exclusion obstacle may just be more compelling to a certain degree compared to an equally popular alternative which is not bound by any obstructions.
by sillywalk | 2025-04-05 19:05:41+00:00
Inside the AS/400 by Frank Soltis, is a deep dive into IBM's AS/400 and its predecessor the System/38. Quite interesting. There is a 2nd or 3rd edition called Fortress Rochester: Inside the iSeries, but it tends to be hard to find and expensive.

[0] https://archive.org/details/insideas4000000solt/
by namaria | 2025-04-05 19:06:26+00:00
Are you asking me what is the best way to organize information, trees or tags?

Do you also want me to tell you what is the best way to foresee if a given program will halt?

The point is, bringing facile statements like "just make the right choice" adds nothing to the conversation. Some problems are hard and trying to short circuit the conversation saying that's easy just pick the right tool doesn't even apply here.
by belter | 2025-04-05 19:07:08+00:00
"...It has been suggested that Trump's apparent "avalanche of lies" consists of bullshit rather than of lying as strictly defined. According to Harry Frankfurt's influential 2005 book On Bullshit, the liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it, while the bullshitter does not care whether what they say is true or false. Eduardo Porter writes in The Washington Post that Frankfurt's bullshitter definition fits Trump: "To subvert the truth, you must first know it, or at least think you do. That’s not Trump’s game..."
by giantrobot | 2025-04-05 19:07:40+00:00
I've noticed "honestly" is often used in place of "frankly". As in someone wants to express something frankly without prior restraint to appease the sensibilities of the recipient(s). I think it's because a lot of people never really learned the definition of frankness or think "frankly..." sounds a bit old fashioned. But I'm no language expert.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-04-05 19:07:46+00:00
For single user, maybe. But for small teams GPUs are still the only available option, when considering t/s and concurrency. Nvidia's latest 6000pro series are actually reasonably priced for the amount of vram / wattage you get. A 8x box starts at 75k eur and can host up to DS3 / R1 / Llama4 in 8bit with decent speeds, context and concurrency.
by barriteau | 2025-04-05 19:07:55+00:00
I have both, they work pretty well, TapXR looks nicer but has one drawback: doesn't do very well in low light conditions and doesn't work at all in the dark; the old Strap doesn't have this problem, its only drawbacks are the extra seconds it takes to wear it and the weirder aesthetics.

I've only used them as keyboards, so I'm not very familiar with the media controller options, but as far as I can see it's a very easy mode to use.

You can use two of them at the same time, one in each hand, but it probably won't be necessary, you can get to type very fast with one hand.

They are very well supported on iOS. I once plugged one into Windows and it seemed to work fine, but I have not tested it extensively.
by xyst | 2025-04-05 19:08:14+00:00
This is 90% of my thoughts as well.

Another note I had is: keep the words to a specific category rather than a broad category.

For example: the today’s puzzle of “professional sports teams” had 4/5 of the teams from the NBA. The 5th answer was either the Detroit “Lions” (a professional _American football_ team) or more likely the London “Lions” (a _British_ professional basketball team).
by anoncareer0212 | 2025-04-05 19:08:19+00:00
Small point of order: bit slower might not set expectations accurately. You noted in a previous post in the same thread[^1] that we'd expect about a 1 minute per 10K tokens(!) prompt processing time with the smaller model. I agree, and contribute to llama.cpp. If anything, that is quite generous.

[^1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595888
by refibrillator | 2025-04-05 19:08:21+00:00
> the actual processing happens in 17B

This is a common misconception of how MoE models work. To be clear, 17B parameters are activated for each token generated.

In practice you will almost certainly be pulling the full 109B parameters though the CPU/GPU cache hierarchy to generate non-trivial output, or at least a significant fraction of that.
by weard_beard | 2025-04-05 19:08:36+00:00
I would love a book that gives a layman’s understanding of how to read and dissect a board you pull out of common modern device.

Say a roomba.

You might not know how or why each component works in detail at the end, but instead understand why the board is laid out the way it is and where each component controlling the functions and logic live, what might be broken, and whether and how to repair. I think if I were an impatient student with an interest in electronics that’s what I’d want. Then go back and study individual components, math, physics, and theory.

You could make a whole series: radio boards, home appliance boards, PC motherboards, car boards, etc.
by terhechte | 2025-04-05 19:08:42+00:00
I just loaded two models of different quants into LM Studio:

qwen 2.5 coder 1.5b @ q4_k_m: 1.21 GB memory

qwen 2.5 coder 1.5b @ q8: 1.83 GB memory

I always assumed this to be the case (also because of the smaller download sizes) but never really thought about it.
by TomMasz | 2025-04-05 19:08:49+00:00
I read the book when it came out and it was indeed a great story. Kidder did a remarkable job explaining technical topics that even non-techies could understand. You could just feel the pressure the team was under to deliver.

The Eagle seemed like a neat design but I never encountered a DG machine of any kind in the various companies I worked for. VAXen seemed to be everywhere, Sun and other UNIX workstations followed only to be shoved to the side by PCs in the early 90s (except for some applications like CAD and that was only for a while). Funny how such a vibrant industry segment could die so quickly.
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-05 19:08:53+00:00
> new generations of AI focused hardware

Some benchmarks are not encouraging. See e.g. https://www.hardware-corner.net/mac-studio-m3-ultra-deepseek...

That «AI focused hardware» will either have extremely fast memory, and cost prohibitively, or have reasonable costs, and limits that are to be assessed.
by susam | 2025-04-05 19:08:59+00:00
Seems to work for me:

https://github.com/susam/fxyt/pull/8.diff

https://github.com/susam/fxyt/pull/8.patch

https://github.com/susam/fxyt/commit/aa8f72f4c6eabc5568f7115...

https://github.com/susam/fxyt/commit/aa8f72f4c6eabc5568f7115...
by throwanem | 2025-04-05 19:09:10+00:00
I'm not sure about that. What happens if you "turn down the weight" (cf. https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude) for self-concept, expressed in the use not of first-person pronouns but "the first person" as a thing that exists? Do "I" and "me" get replaced with "this one" like someone doing depersonalization kink, or does it become like Wittgenstein's lion in that we can no longer confidently parse even its valid utterances? Does it lose coherence entirely, or does something stranger happen?

It isn't an experiment I have the resources or the knowledge to run, but I hope someone does and reports the results.
by asimpletune | 2025-04-05 19:09:15+00:00
Better would be to make targeted advertising unprofitable. This could be done by requiring data retention to be accounted for as a liability on the balance sheet.

E.g. If a business want to run an ad in the newspaper, go for it. But if they want to follow me around on the internet and collect information on everything that I do, then they should be required to record what they collect. Congress could then vote to make laws introducing taxes on that quantity.

Once this stuff is measured then appropriate counter measures could be taken to discourage socially damaging enterprises.
by jopython | 2025-04-05 19:10:25+00:00
United States is a Constitutional Republic. Not a democracy according to the US constitution.

$ grep -i democra us_constitution.txt $ grep -i republic us_constitution.txt The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

```
by OJFord | 2025-04-05 19:10:49+00:00
No, that's why I said 'unsolicited' rather than 'third-party', so take the motorway billboard toll road example - if you also happen to own the car dealership or the webapp, you can't advertise that, because that's not what I've come to your motorway for.

And what's solicited or 'relevant' doesn't need to be rigidly defined in statutes (assuming common law) - the ASA or OfCom whoever it would be (UK examples) slaps fines on the rulebreakers and if they think they've interpreted the law correctly in good faith then it goes to court and we find out (and the growing body of case law helps future would-be-advertisers interpret it).

The existing advertisement disclosure rules for social media for example don't allow the loophole you propose: a 'sponsored' segment shilling a product in a YouTube video isn't considered different from directly selling video time to the third-party in which to run their own ad reel.
by rayiner | 2025-04-05 19:11:07+00:00
> Neither having more stuff, nor having more money, is "better" in an 'objective' sense, but relative to what you want out of life. If the Japanese and/or Germans are happy saving, then good for them; if Americans are happy spending, then good for them too.

Except our monetary and industrial policy incentivizes or disincentivizes those choices. Japan and Germany engineer those producing versus consuming choices deliberately. And Americans wanted to change that so they voted for the guy promising tariffs.