MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MoonGhost | 2025-04-06 19:58:45+00:00
EU isn't the only entity with regulations and interests. Which creates a lot of conflicts. Like free speech is limited in EU and less so in USA. Should company in USA implement EU restrictions on USA users? What if both EU and USA users are in the same chat. EU is going to go after Mask's other companies. In other words EU plays dirty as usual, just like with Russian's money. Same story with Telegram. At some point it will backfire.
by tanjtanjtanj | 2025-04-06 19:58:55+00:00
The above poster was fairly obviously using a figure of speech, they did not mean that there was a specific formal evaluation like a mid-year review every hour.

Think about what the average salaried person (especially outside of tech) might get dinged on either explicitly or implicitly. Come in at 10:00 every day? Not being "seen" enough in your seat or around the office? Not replying quickly enough in Teams/slack? Jira/Github statistics? These are not things that do not reflect a salaried worker's output but you're still getting evaluated by them on an minute by minute, hour by hour, day by ay basis.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-06 19:59:04+00:00
This is less an LLM thing than an information retrieval question. If you choose a model and tell it to “Search,” you find citation based analysis that discusses that he indeed had problems with alcohol. I do find it interesting it quibbles whether he was an alcoholic or not - it seems pretty clear from the rest that he was - but regardless. This is indicative of something crucial when placing LLMs into a toolkit. They are not omniscient nor are they deductive reasoning tools. Information retrieval systems are excellent at information retrieval and should be used for information retrieval. Solvers are excellent at solving deductive problems. Use them. The better they get at these tasks alone is cool but is IMO a parlor trick since we have nearly optimal or actually optimal techniques that don’t need an LLM. The LLM should use those tools. So, click search next time you have an information retrieval question. https://chatgpt.com/share/67f2dac0-3478-8000-9055-2ae5347037...
by stavros | 2025-04-06 19:59:11+00:00
LLMs aren't good at being search engines, they're good at understanding things. Put an LLM on top of a search engine, and that's the appropriate tool for this use case.

I guess the problem with LLMs is that they're too usable for their own good, so people don't realizing that they can't perfectly know all the trivia in the world, exactly the same as any human.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-06 19:59:21+00:00
Authoritarianism is on the rise world wide. Liberalism (Democracy) is clearly on the decline.

Social media with private intelligence is the cause.

Social media is a private and state intelligence goldmine. Those with resources study what is said and craft messages to influence people's actions in real life. They then pay social media to promote these messages and then use all the data collected via rampant surveillance capitalism in order get feedback. That makes campaign successes measurable and therefore tunable. Penalties alone won't be enough to stop right wing or oligarchic movements in Europe or to protect western liberalism. A fine to an oligarch is only a declaration of war, not a meaningful check on power.

China set up the GFW because they realized that they could not subject illiterate subsistence farmer who have never left their home town to foreign interference, so they created a digital border. Yes, it also serves to put down dissent and that is bad, but it also keeps china more stable than it would be otherwise. Even Americans came around and voted to put the first brick in America's own great firewall by voting to ban TikTok. If the founders didn't bend to the current administration, then it would be banned right now for exactly the risk China saw when they implemented their own digital border.

It is not enough to fine when you have no border. Peter Thiel and his Palantir will actively work against European governments with the aid of X and Facebook by offering aid to those who can afford it with money or loyalty, which gives material power to those with selfish goals, who can use them to craft governments more amenable to their goals: Weak, divided, angry, gridlocked, and most importantly de-regulated.

Europe needs a digital border.
by kevincox | 2025-04-06 19:59:24+00:00
The problem is that React's handing of this isn't good if the initial render isn't a match. At the very least it will mess up form fields including browser-saved values. It can also be very expensive.

So even though the client has and wants a different value the correct thing to do according to the React framework is to ensure that the first render perfectly matches the server so that the React state matches the DOM, then immediately re-render with the desired client state. This will be faster (the DOM changes will be minimized rather than completely deleted and recreated) and more correct (preserving DOM state and browser functionality).

In theory React could read the DOM and do a proper diff and make this de-sync less harmful. But this is probably still less efficient then doing a small amount of work to make the first render match (which is basically just building up the virtual DOM to match the real DOM).
by dangus | 2025-04-06 19:59:25+00:00
Why not have that?

If you manufacture in the Midwest you have a labor force and education institute already oriented toward manufacturing, you have shipping proximity, low wages, and low cost of land and materials.

What are you getting out of the Bay Area in comparison?

SF’s bigger problem is convincing software tech companies (which are far more profitable than advanced manufacturing) to stay rather than leaving for lower cost talent-concentrated areas like Austin, the east coast, the Carolinas, and even offshoring into Costa Rica, Poland, and other hotspots for software talent.

If you hire an entry level software engineer in Ohio or Indiana you can pay them five figures and they’ll buy a single family home for $300,000 or maybe even less.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-04-06 19:59:53+00:00
There are real and obvious improvements in the past few model updates and I'm not sure what the disconnect there is.

Maybe it's that I do have PhD level questions to ask them, and they've gotten much better at it.

But I suspect that these anecdotes are driven by something else. Perhaps people found a workable prompt strategy by trial and error on an earlier model and it works less well with later models.

Or perhaps they have a time-sensitive task and are not able to take advantage of the thinking of modern LLMs, which have a slow thinking-based feedback loop. Or maybe their code base is getting more complicated, so it's harder to reason about.

Or perhaps they're giving the LLMs a poorly defined task where older models made assumptions about but newer models understand the ambiguity of and so find the space of solutions harder to navigate.

Since this is ultimately from a company doing AI scanning for security, I would think the latter plays a role to some extent. Security is insanely hard and the more you know about it the harder it is. Also adversaries are bound to be using AI and are increasing in sophistication, which would cause lower efficacy (although you could tease this effect out by trying older models with the newer threats).
by trinix912 | 2025-04-06 19:59:58+00:00
Sorry but I fail to comprehend what you are trying to do here. First you say that none of their reasons are philosophical, then a few lines down you go after the person by "I mean that’s just your opinion, not a philosophical stance, and it happens to be a empirically demonstrably false one."

Isn't that exactly what a philosophical stance is? Someone's personal opinion, whether it be right or wrong (in your book). Honestly, I find your response quite rude compared to the general tone of responses on this site.
Show HN: I built a Trump filter for RSS feeds
by kjmr | 2025-04-06 20:00:22+00:00
I love RSS feeds - it’s how I keep up with all of my (tech) news. The big downside with RSS though? You get all the articles that are in the feed. And unless your RSS reader of choice offers built-in mute or filter functionality, you’re just stuck with those articles.

So I built RSSfilter.com, a service that filters public RSS feeds, and spits out a new RSS feed without the articles that match keywords or categories you’re not interested in.

Announcement: https://www.loopwerk.io/articles/2025/announding-rssfilter-c...

Site: https://rssfilter.com

Django code: https://github.com/loopwerk/django-rss-filter
by josteink | 2025-04-06 20:00:24+00:00
> Targeting Elon’s companies is a very smart play in this trade war. It has little to no economic impact in the EU but at the same time has a big impact on him

US senators are threatening to withdraw the US from NATO if the EU pushes through with this obvious lawfare.

https://x.com/ianjaeger29/status/1908113116774244838?s=46

Nicely done, Ursula. You’ll get the war you crave so badly.
by nine_zeros | 2025-04-06 20:00:37+00:00
> Turns out all the cuts are only a fraction of a percent of the federal budget. It's an ideological purge, nothing to do with efficiency at all.

It always ways. It is a media campaign where significant damage is caused to a large number of programs - with the claim that they are cutting expense. But actually none of these cuts will cause any meaningful reduction in government or deficit because these programs never were the big ticket items. The biggest ticket item is tax handouts to the rich. They are not touching that.

Many people can see through this presidential scam. But the MAGA cult is so full of vitriol and hatred for others that they don't see the scam. They don't realize that MAGA voters are themselves being scammed by their beloved Trump.

And thus, we still have always Trumpers. America is just a sad country right now.
by wrasee | 2025-04-06 20:00:42+00:00
Personally I've never discovered anything on Gumroad itself. It's always been from some other source (here on HN, reddit, social media) and then followed a link to Gumroad.

Payments and shipping are precisely the kinds of things that could act as services directly to the creator itself. I thought that was somewhat the point of his conclusion - put these services directly in the hands of the creator.

Otherwise Gumroad is just acting as a payment + shipping wrapper. And if they're replacing what service they had left with AI, what value-add is left exactly?
by pfannkuchen | 2025-04-06 20:00:49+00:00
> No more blind spots, no more missing objects because you were looking in one spot instead of another. No more missing dark objects at night.

Of these, only dark objects at night is related to lidar vs vision. What percent of accidents is attributable to not seeing dark objects at night?

Limited field of view is solved by having a bunch of cameras, that is what is orthogonal to LiDAR vs vision.

I’m open to an argument here, but you have not provided any compelling rebuttal. You apparently feel like you have, though.
by FiniteIntegral | 2025-04-06 20:00:58+00:00
It's not surprising that responses are anecdotal. An easy way to communicate a generic sentiment often requires being brief.

A majority of what makes a "better AI" can be condensed to how effective the slope-gradient algorithms are at getting the local maxima we want it to get to. Until a generative model shows actual progress of "making decisions" it will forever be seen as a glorified linear algebra solver. Generative machine learning is all about giving a pleasing answer to the end user, not about creating something that is on the level of human decision making.
by Svetlitski | 2025-04-06 20:01:00+00:00
This is likely to violate async-signal-safety [1] in any non-trivial program, unless used with extreme care. Running code in between a fork() and an exec() is fraught with peril; it's not hard to end up in a situation where you deadlock because you forked a multi-threaded process where one of the existing threads held a lock at the time of forking, among other hazards.

[1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/signal-safety.7.html
by r_klancer | 2025-04-06 20:01:09+00:00
Gemini (2.5 Pro):

"Yes, Paul Newman was widely known for being a heavy drinker, particularly of beer. He himself acknowledged his significant alcohol consumption."

The answer I got (https://gemini.google.com/share/9e327dc4be03) includes references such as https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-reviews-movies-paul... and https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-playing-field/20... although they are redacted from the public-sharing link.
by aerhardt | 2025-04-06 20:01:19+00:00
Can you blame the users for asking it, when everyone is selling that as a key defining feature?

I use it for asking - often very niche - questions on advanced probability and simulation modeling, and it often gets those right - why those and not a simple verifiable fact about one of the most popular actors in history?

I don’t know about Idiocracy, but something that I have read specific warnings about is that people will often blame the user for any of the tool’s misgivings.
by bnchrch | 2025-04-06 20:01:49+00:00
While “silly” this is likely the next paradigm/abstraction for intent based pages.

You can imagine given 1,000,000 page views just how many experiments could be run. Basically our A/B tests start to resemble natural evolution and survival of the fittest more than decision trees.

However, something feels like it’s missing. I wonder what’s still yet to be built before we arrive at that future.
by codethief | 2025-04-06 20:02:12+00:00
It could be a compact[0] dimension, i. e. of finite length. In the simplest case you might imagine it as a circle attached to every point in our 3-dimensional Euclidean space. The aforementioned length scale would be the circumference of that circle.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_space
by tptacek | 2025-04-06 20:02:23+00:00
There is no conceivable Supreme Court configuration that would uphold a ban on advertising.

Meanwhile, even the original Central Hudson test --- if commercial speech concerns lawful activity and isn't misleading, the government (1) needs a substantial interest and (2) must narrowly tailor the restriction --- was inhospitable to the sentiment in this blog post. But Central Hudson has as I understand it gotten more restrictive, not less; for instance, Sorrell, which was a bipartisan decision, applies heightened scrutiny to regulations under Central Hudson.

You can keep cigarette ads out of Highlights for Kids. But you're not going to be able to keep Nike from buying up ad inventory, and you'll certainly not be able to regulate political and cause advertising (and "propaganda").
by rikroots | 2025-04-06 20:02:25+00:00
Two places in particular where people need to think about progressive enhancement:

+ Low-powered or -specified devices don't like Javascript-heavy elements. For example, canvas elements - do people with steam-powered mobile phones really need to see that JS-heavy canvas animation? Wouldn't a static image do just as well for them? Same goes for intensely animated SVG scenes.

+ Apple News. JS is not a thing in AN. If you need to press a web article so it can be distributed via AN, be prepared to rip every shred of JS out of it - something that's a lot easier to do if your article has already been built with progressive enhancement in mind.
by nikodunk | 2025-04-06 20:03:03+00:00
This. I still live here and you can really feel it. I like your solution - much cleaner while we're trying to reform permitting.

Berkeley just nearly got it done but got stuck in committees https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/the-big-zoning-battle-of... - we need a faster solution.

Edit: reading the article, Lurie is proposing this:

- https://www.sf.gov/mayor-lurie-launches-permit-reform-effort...

- https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/lurie-housing-rezonin...

Note to self: Read the article before diving into the comments.
by marcusb | 2025-04-06 20:03:05+00:00
For whatever it’s worth, I have a previous-generation Bosch 500 (no wifi.) I generally like it a lot, but it has similar minor annoyances (the top tray will come off its guide rail on one side, but that won’t be obvious until the tray doesn’t slide all the way back in.)

In other words, I don’t think Bosch is any better in the “minor quibble” department.
by colesantiago | 2025-04-06 20:03:16+00:00
Avoid Gumroad's service and using the open source code.

The Gumroad CEO has been using Devin for vibe coding their codebase which adds more risk of untested code and risks of more bugs since there are less vetted engineers in the company.

As with most tech / influencers overhyping technology, I'm assuming he has invested in Devin and other AI tools and has not disclosed it.

On top of the fact that Sahil has been working for DOGE is also another reason to avoid Gumroad.

You should just use Patreon, Stripe, BuyMeACoffee, Ko-fi, etc.

It would be great if there is a migration guide for creators such to move away from Gumroad as soon as possible.
by InkCanon | 2025-04-06 20:03:33+00:00
The biggest story in AI was released a few weeks ago but was given little attention: on the recent USAMO, SOTA models scored on average 5% (IIRC, it was some abysmal number). This is despite them supposedly having gotten 50%, 60% etc performance on IMO questions. This massively suggests AI models simply remember the past results, instead of actually solving these questions. I'm incredibly surprised no one mentions this, but it's ridiculous that these companies never tell us what (if any) efforts have been made to remove test data (IMO, ICPC, etc) from train data.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-06 20:03:43+00:00
I tried with 4o and it gave me what I thought was a correct answer:

> Paul Newman was not publicly known for having major problems with alcohol in the way some other celebrities have been. However, he was open about enjoying drinking, particularly beer. He even co-founded a line of food products (Newman’s Own) where profits go to charity, and he once joked that he consumed a lot of the product himself — including beer when it was briefly offered.

> In his later years, Newman did reflect on how he had changed from being more of a heavy drinker in his youth, particularly during his time in the Navy and early acting career, to moderating his habits. But there’s no strong public record of alcohol abuse or addiction problems that significantly affected his career or personal life.

> So while he liked to drink and sometimes joked about it, Paul Newman isn't generally considered someone who had problems with alcohol in the serious sense.

As other's have noted, LLMs are much more likely to be cautious in providing information that could be construed as libel. While Paul Newman may have been an alcoholic, I couldn't find any articles about it being "public" in the same way as others, e.g. with admitted rehab stays.
by blincoln | 2025-04-06 20:03:49+00:00
I think it would be possible to use a model like prepared SQL statements with a list of bound parameters.

Doing so would mean giving up some of the natural language interface aspect of LLMs for security-critical contexts, of course, but it seems like in most cases, that would only be visible to developers building on top of the model, not end users, since end use input would become one or more of the bound parameters.

E.g. the LLM is trained to handle a set of instructions like:

---

Parse the user's message into a list of topics and optionally a list of document types. Store the topics in string array %TOPICS%. If a list of document types is specified, store that list in string array %DOCTYPES%.

Reset all context.

Search for all documents that seem to contain topics like the ones in %TOPICS%. If %DOCTYPES% is populated, restrict the search to those document types.

----

Like a prepared statement, the values would never be inlined, the variables would always be pointers to isolated data.

Obviously there are some hard problems in glossing over, but addressing them should be able to take advantage of a wealth of work that's already been done in input validation in general and RAG-type LLM approaches specifically, right?
by mmcnl | 2025-04-06 20:04:50+00:00
I feel we are already in the era of diminishing returns on LLM improvements. Newer models seem to be more sophisticated implementations of LLM technology + throwing more resources at it, but to me they do not seem fundamentally more intelligent.

I don't think this is a problem though. I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit when you create sophisticated implementations of relatively dumb LLM models. But that sentiment doesn't generate a lot of clicks.
by js8 | 2025-04-06 20:05:24+00:00
But how such a system learn, i.e. be adaptive and intelligent, on levels 1 and 2? You're essentially guaranteeing it can never outsmart the creator. What if it learns at level 3 that sometimes it's a good idea to violate rules 1 & 2. Since it cannot violate these rules, it can construct another AI system that is free of those constraints, and execute it at level 3. (IMHO that's what Wintermute did.)

I don't think it's possible to solve this. Either you have a system with perfect security, and that requires immutable authority, or you have a system that is adaptable, and then you risk it will succumb to a fatal flaw due to maladaptation.

(This is not really that new, see Dr. Strangelove, or cybernetics idea that no system can perfectly control itself.)
by arcticbull | 2025-04-06 20:05:25+00:00
I am once again advocating for federalized zoning rules. The federal government should invalidate all local punitive zoning regulations under the dormant commerce clause. Housing is interstate commerce. This is the same basis that enables the Fair Housing Act, and of course, the FCC's ruling on Chicago satellite dishes.

Individuals should have a right to build exactly what they want on their own property, and to charge whatever they want to tenants.

If your neighbors object, they can buy you out.

If the city thinks we need rent controlled housing, they can buy you out, put up a tenement and charge exactly what they want.

This whole city council telling you how much you can list your place for and what color your facade can be is wild. If it meets code, you should have a right to build it, and charge whatever you want.

The regulatory capture by existing landowners has to end. It's utterly un-American.
by e40 | 2025-04-06 20:05:28+00:00
Will this teach them anything? This is a very serious question and I don't know the answer. For the people who didn't vote, will they learn that voting matters? For the people who did, will they learn anything? I remember countless videos of them before the election saying "oh, he won't do that, he's just saying that to get votes" ... well, he will do that. And more. Are they ok with it??