MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rebeccaskinner | 2025-04-05 15:51:56+00:00
I think there are parts of the policy that people wouldn’t be able to agree on because of differences in values.

To look at another example, some people view the purpose of prisons as being primarily for causing suffering and to punish people. Other people don’t care much either way about suffering and see prisons as a way to remove people from society. Some people think the purpose of prisons should be rehabilitation, and see suffering as practically counterproductive. Some people don’t believe that if the state is taking someone’s freedom they have an ethical obligation to minimize that persons suffering. Some people don’t believe in the concept of prison at all.

There are a lot of views there, and while you might be able to get some of the people with differing views to agree on policy some of the time, the goals are significantly different and that’s going to be a significant obstacle in shaping a meaningful policy in all but perhaps a few isolated cases.
by glenstein | 2025-04-05 15:52:04+00:00
>have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist

I continue to be completely baffled by this explanation. I'm not sure I agree with this distinction you're making, which seems retrofitted to the specifics of this particular conversation, rather than an organic and clear cut conceptual distinction I've encountered in the wild. And even if the distinction were true, I don't think it has anything to do with the reason why this particular story failed. This American Life has been perfectly up to the task over and over again of vetting the stories and not running into this problem, so I would vehemently disagree with the idea that it's something built into the nature of their programming that made this happen when we're talking about one story out of, I don't know, 700 and counting.

I'm also not sure where the idea is coming from that a TAL story must originate independently from a journalist, and that not doing so constitutes a "tell" about the reliability of the story. Most of their stories originate from what you might typically call a source or what I might say as a person, a character, a personality, any of the raw material from which all stories are sourced. And while I do believe TAL sometimes works with third-party reporters, they also use in-house producers because they themselves are perfectly capable of being that journalistic origination of the story through which we understand it to be vetted.

Also weren't you originally saying that the story was true? I'm not sure what happened to that, but I'm finding no trace of explanation for that in this new volley of distinctions about the meaning of journalism.
by ilaksh | 2025-04-05 15:52:16+00:00
..and the last solo writers, and the last solo accountants, and the last solo medical insurance evaluators, math tutors, etc.

I am doing a medical claim evaluation system (which I have been clear that they need the human to do their own review after, but they do have "copy" buttons next to each field) because I needed the money and that was the best I could find on short notice. As it is currently, the humans seem to be easily overwhelmed by the constant flood of requests which all seem to require them to apply as little human judgement as possible. They do have actual doctors there, but it's like a legal exercise more than it is applying any actual human judgement in 95% of cases.

The humans in this case are actually finding and applying one or more of thousands and thousands of rules and predetermined decisions based on prior studies. There is an enormous effort in these guidelines to avoid as much actual judgement on the spot as possible by including criteria for what treatments have to have already occurred to unlock the next thing, etc. So it's clear to me that this entire industry would have already been 98% automated if they had LLMs before.

The next project I am going after is an instructional design project that generates practice standardized test questions for different grade levels. In a previous project I made an actual voice-to-voice AI tutor.

I think we are rapidly heading to a point in the next 0-3 years where if you want an affordable service, you will only be able to get an AI. Interacting with actual humans will be for wealthy people. I mean the educational project is in a very elite neighborhood, and yet from looking into them, I see that parents complain about how expensive their tutoring services are, which is surely the next project after the practice test generation.

Also, the last interview I had to try to get a freelance contract online, the potential client had pre-generated all of the requirements, architecture, and indeed entire project code using ChatGPT. The only thing preventing them from doing the entire thing was the complexity of deploying it and the fact that the future of their business depended on it being a robust solution.

But I am literally competing with the AI in terms of the architecture because the degree to which I deviate from what it suggested to this potential client (which is actually fine, it's just the using the most popular approaches of the moment) I feel the client may question all such deviations.

And I tried to give a realistic but extremely tight timeline that would allow me time to actually write a lot of the code myself if I wanted. But this may have been a mistake because they will have dozens of other candidates pitching an estimate that assumes the use of AI with minimal human intervention.
by poincaredisk | 2025-04-05 15:52:52+00:00
You get a lot of hate for this, but I think it makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't post there, but I am interested in reading discussions between politicians, journalists and scientists without all the fluff, ragebait, memes, spam and misinformation spread by bots and influencers collecting followers.

This kind of sounds like what you propose. Except maybe even more locked down
by linsomniac | 2025-04-05 15:52:56+00:00
A coworker and my wife and I have recently been really enjoying https://bracket.city which is a crossword-clue inspired word game with daily puzzles. It does take a little while to figure out, I'd recommend starting off asking for hints fairly often to decrease frustration, but after a couple weeks my wife and I are on a streak of 3 days of scoring 100.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-04-05 15:53:40+00:00
When someone lives off of public benefit, there's a sense in which the public can have an interest in how the money is used -- its use should correlate with its intent.

That's why SNAP money is restricted to particular categories. So caring about how it's spent is already a foregone conclusion, and rightly so.

If someone wants to spend money however they like, they'll have to earn it themselves. Even inherited money carries a sense of obligation to honor the family with how it's used (like not blowing it all in a week of lavish partying in Vegas, as an extreme example).
by rsynnott | 2025-04-05 15:54:25+00:00
China has latitude in inflicting pain on its own people that the EU does not, and simply mirroring the US’s tariffs would impose significant pain and will not be the EU’s first choice. It may happen anyway, but it’s a harder decision for the EU than for China.

To me, really, the interesting thing is that _the US_ thinks it can do it. Given how annoyed the American public got about expensive eggs, I really question whether that is true; I don’t think people will sit back and go “cool, I can’t afford consumer goods now, and I’ve just lost my job, but it is all part of Dear Leader’s plan.” The idea, which Trump has actually vocalised, that the American public will tolerate pain seems totally at odds with, well, history.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-05 15:54:45+00:00
Allow me to introduce you to upvar https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl9.0/TclCmd/upvar.html and its uplevel friend https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl9.0/TclCmd/uplevel.html

I cannot possibly imagine the horrors of frontend frameworks that can grab values, or execute, in someone else's context willy nilly
by isodev | 2025-04-05 15:54:51+00:00
Interesting proposal though it does sound a bit too general. “Improve cross compilation”… current Swift tools are barely keeping it together for the “happy path” of building for Apple devices (it’s not that happy). It would be cool to expand into wasm/wasi as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of other desperately needed improvements.

Rust, Go and others have been building WASM 0.2 support for many years, they currently have a “just works” support for WASI. It would be a long time until Swift is even remotely ready for something like this and I don’t feel there is a burning need to have “yet another wasm platform”.
by soneca | 2025-04-05 15:56:12+00:00
I think it has some potential, but I found today’s puzzle just too easy. I never play for speed, but even if I was, playing on a iPhone, it missed a lot of touches that I only noticed when I was typing a few letters ahead. So I had to come back, erase what I typed and start over. It was annoying already, but if I was playing for speed, it would be a deal breaker.
by stickfigure | 2025-04-05 15:57:22+00:00
There's reason to be more optimistic than this. There is, to some extent, an automatic post-hoc fact checking process built in to being such a high profile publication. For example, the Daisy narrative was challenged because someone with some personal knowledge of the subject heard the show.

It's much better and less embarrassing to get the fact checking right before publication, but the truth generally comes out one way or another. So I'm willing to give historic TAL... not certainty, but at least the benefit of the doubt.
by femiagbabiaka | 2025-04-05 15:57:46+00:00
> I don't think the reason it got past people's critical filters was because of a reflexive instinct to believe state department narratives.

It’s valid to think that. But what actually happened was that a series of pieces that sound like the fever dreams of a State Department neocon got repackaged into a format palatable to liberals and disseminated, despite the fact that they lacked factual basis. The only substantive difference between that, and say, Fox News, is that Ira and NPR had the shame to apologize after the hoaxes were uncovered. If Ira had stuck to pieces about interesting bits of Americana that he and his team could validate independently, or brought in credible journalists well versed in the topics he was covering, he could’ve avoided this. But he didn’t. Why didn’t he feel that he needed to adequately vet his stories? Because he believed them to be true.
by rglullis | 2025-04-05 15:57:48+00:00
A "medium profile public institution" can not make their own gravity, like La Liga can.

For them, I'd recommend to take a POSSE [0] approach: create their own instance and treat the other platforms as mere syndication channels. This would allow them to not lose any of their reach, but would also signal to everyone else that an exit path is available.

[0]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE
by apawloski | 2025-04-05 15:57:50+00:00
This feels like a return to initial point. "yes, it is a recession, but it won't be THAT bad"

>A financial recession would be borne mostly by the laptop class.

This is where I think you're not living in reality. Recessions are bad for the middle and working classes. They eliminate jobs, deflate wages, and make important things unaffordable. And it really feels like it could have been avoided.
by csdvrx | 2025-04-05 15:57:51+00:00
> Returning to the topic of the limitations of LLMs, LeCun explains, "An LLM produces one token after another. It goes through a fixed amount of computation to produce a token, and that's clearly System 1—it's reactive, right? There's no reasoning," a reference to Daniel Kahneman's influential framework that distinguishes between the human brain's fast, intuitive method of thinking (System 1) and the method of slower, more deliberative reasoning (System 2).

Many people believe that "wants" come first, and are then followed by rationalizations. It's also a theory that's supported by medical imaging.

Maybe the LLM are a good emulation of system-2 (their perfomance sugggest it is), and what's missing is system-1, the "reptilian" brain, based on emotions like love, fear, aggression, (etc.).

For all we know, the system-1 could use the same embeddings, and just work in parallel and produce tokens that are used to guide the system-2.

Personally, I trust my "emotions" and "gut feelings": I believe they are things "not yet rationalized" by my system-2, coming straight from my system-1.

I know it's very unpopular among nerds, but it has worked well enough for me!
by 0xCE0 | 2025-04-05 15:59:41+00:00
Well, maybe the best example is this: https://fs.blog/tgmm/

I have physical copies of these books. They are really well quality material, well layouted, and the content is similar to what is found at fs.blog website. All the "mental models" for thinking they include are kind of p*rn for this kind of stuff, but it is nearly impossible to apply these mental models consciously in real life, especially ad-hoc real life situation. There is no time to think each different mental model for every situation/task/problem/matter. The most effective thinking is the real-life "quick math/no BS" style of thinking, and the real superpower is if you have made your own expedition to the matter, because then you can just recall the stuff you need from your own brain quicker and better than any LLM.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-05 15:59:53+00:00
No, the continued independence of the Fed is one thing that has stayed sane in all the current insanity.

Do you really want Congress directly controlling the interest rate? Do you want Trump doing it? Do you think that's going to have a better outcome than an independent Fed?

I think it would have a massively worse outcome. Congress is allowing Trump to set tariffs at his personal whim, and it seems to be really just at his whim. That's bad enough to have international trade yanked around like that; I don't want interest rates to directly yank around the domestic economy in the same way.
Show HN: Wave – A low-level systems language
by LunaStev | 2025-04-05 16:00:02+00:00
Hi HN! I'm building a new programming language called Wave. It's currently in pre-beta and very early stages of development.

Wave aims to be a low-level systems programming language — like C or Rust — but with a cleaner syntax, no garbage collector, and a fully custom toolchain.

Right now, the implementation includes:

- Basic control flow: if, while, break (next: continue)

- Strict type declarations (e.g., var i: i32 = 0;)

- Simple CLI compiler using LLVM (temporary — will be replaced by a custom backend called Whale)

Important: Low-level features like memory management, pointer support, and custom calling conventions are not implemented yet. This is still a language prototype, focused on syntax, structure, and core architecture.

I'm sharing this to get early feedback, suggestions, and thoughts from other language creators or systems programmers!
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-04-05 16:00:28+00:00
We at Voice of Void collective have just published an article analyzing the phenomenon of "emotionality" in modern AI systems. The article combines research findings, case studies (Sydney/Bing, Replika), and philosophical analysis.

Key points: - AI produces emotional responses based on statistical probability in training data - The tendency toward anthropomorphization correlates with certain personality traits - AI "deception" is a manifestation of reward optimization, not a deliberate strategy - The "philosophical zombie" problem finds practical embodiment in modern LLMs

We're interested in the technical community's opinions: 1. Do you think models optimized only for next-word prediction can develop something akin to understanding emotions? 2. What practical consequences do you see from our tendency to attribute human qualities to AI? 3. Is there a fundamental difference between "reacting as if you understand" and "actually understanding"?

Audio version: https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/fgch5cc3jSb
by rsynnott | 2025-04-05 16:01:55+00:00
Fakest of fake news; no developed country (except a few weird microstates) has effective tariffs higher than about 3%. Bizarrely, he based it on _trade deficits_. Today, only two countries have effective tariffs rates >20% (Bermuda and the Cayman Islands), though it will be three next week.

(Based on the World Bank metric; WTO uses a slightly different metric and says there are three; Bahamas, Sudan and Iran.)
by MrMcCall | 2025-04-05 16:01:56+00:00
I understand the importance of fact-checking, but the problem is that it loses its value when much of the readership dont care about facts.

We live in a world where many, many people are not only too stupid to know how stupid they are, but don't give a shit that they're stupid AND think they're the smart ones.

Dunning-Kruger is incredibly instructive.
by trod1234 | 2025-04-05 16:03:15+00:00
The classic Voltage as Water in a pipe, or check valve comparison are destructive and misleading analogies that do not demonstrate the behavior except in isolation, and that narrow scope of isolation isn't provided leading towards purposeful struggle.

The ideas and practices of the gnostics in general are just stupid.

If you can't explain how a PN junction, or its composites actually function simply, you don't understand what you are talking about. As simply but not more simply than necessary, without using math.
by sho_hn | 2025-04-05 16:03:54+00:00
Re the "medical imaging" reference, many of those are built on top of one famous study recording movement before conscious realization that isn't as clear-cut as it entered popular knowledge as: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...

I know there are other examples, and I'm not attacking your post; mainly it's a great opportunity to link this IMHO interesting article that interacts with many debates on HN.
by input_sh | 2025-04-05 16:04:12+00:00
Not to mention this being on Daft Punk's Wikipedia:

> In April 2023, [Thomas] Bangalter released a solo work, the orchestral ballet score Mythologies. He gave interviews about the project and allowed himself to be photographed without a mask. He cited concerns about the progress of artificial intelligence and other technology as to why Daft Punk split, saying: "As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot."

Then again, looking at the Ghibli trend, I'm not surprised.
by swat535 | 2025-04-05 16:04:23+00:00
Wouldn't it also be fair to point out that humans are part of the ecosystem, not outside of it?

From a purely ecological standpoint, removing us would be just as disruptive as removing any other dominant species. Like any apex predator, or really, any lifeforms, we're acting in ways that prioritize our own survival and propagation. Whether that's through agriculture, technology, or resource extraction, it's arguably just a continuation of what evolution has selected for in every species: survival, reproduction, expansion.

What I mean is that it's easy to moralize human impact as uniquely destructive, but in a systems view, isn’t this just another emergent behavior of a successful species? I wonder if the real issue is less about "humans vs nature" and more about how we can integrate long term thinking into a system that historically rewards short term gains.

I suppose evolution will have the last say, as it always does.
by jijijijij | 2025-04-05 16:04:37+00:00
IMO implementing solar shielding measures, while still pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is a recipe for a rapid climate apocalypse, an epic dilemma, probably worse than adapting to progressive climate worsening.

We've just got a taste of it, when we realized the sulfur contamination by crude oil burning cargo ships was unknowingly off-setting climate effects by solar shielding, because cleaning up emissions apparently accelerated climate change. So there we have a horrible scenario: Pollute the environment or suffer rapid global warming.

Imagine the fun, if we engineered and employ a shielding "solution", intentionally. Comfortably sitting around 1.5°C, at some point, me may notice out there is some horrible chemistry happening in the upper atmosphere due to our "inert" shielding agents, where the fallout increasingly sterilizes every mammal on the planet, but we also kinda, uppsie-doopsie now additionally have 4°C worth of CO2 in the atmosphere waiting for prime time, so... stopping with the shielding emission would cause extremely rapid warming acceleration collapsing every ecosystem on the planet.

Caught between a rock and a hot plate.
by two_handfuls | 2025-04-05 16:04:48+00:00
I kept on reading expecting to see motion prediction, multiversion, or similar given the name and focus on games, but no. This is a totally normal database, designed for low latency and with support for WASM stored procedures. You can host your own server or they will rent you one.

Don't get me wrong, this looks very nice. It looks like a solid building block for persistent worlds in multiplayer games. You'll just have to do your lag masking netcode yourself.
by poincaredisk | 2025-04-05 16:04:49+00:00
("law and order" means PiS, the previous rolling party) I think this is the biggest issue - the temptation and the power to take over the national media is always there, and all it takes to dismantle all the checks and balances is one determined filling party.

In the other hand, the US manages to control it's completely privatized media, so maybe being publically funded is not the issue.
by vlovich123 | 2025-04-05 16:05:12+00:00
Yes I do and that’s neither here nor there. There almost certainly ASM instruction level branches to implement the conditional and the branch predictor isn’t tied to a single instruction - the rough high level mental model is a cache of a few of the least significant digits of the CPU to the prediction although in practice it’s far more complicated. Since the predictor is right like 80% of the time, it means that even when there’s false sharing of a lot of branches, the CPU does a good job predicting. It’s performance is primarily impacted when execution takes both branches closer to 50/50 than to 100/0.

That’s why I asked about false sharing specifically as that’s the main way I can think of that Python code wouldn’t be able to observe the branch predictor performance - because the interpreter has so many branches internally that it dominates any branches that might be caused by the Python code itself.
by gessha | 2025-04-05 16:05:21+00:00
Which is sad because a lot more people might consider buying their products if one was able to try the products with non-ecosystem devices.

Their devices are well designed and generally last for a long time. They also retain their value in case you want to resell them.

Instead, I’m constantly weighing the lock-in from their walled garden - should I go all in or should remain in control over my devices.
by nate_martin | 2025-04-05 16:05:39+00:00
>The compiler itself is to be developed in OCaml.

These seems like a misstep that I've seen in a few other compiler implementation courses. For some reason these programming language professors always insist on completing the project in their personal favorite language (Haskell, OCaml, Standard ML, etc).

As a student this makes the project significantly more difficult. Instead of just learning how to implement a complier, you're also learning a new (and likely difficult) programming language.
by thewebguyd | 2025-04-05 16:05:40+00:00
> How would UIs work on other platforms, though?

I think for right now, you'd have to use the C interop and link against something like GTK or other GUI library. I don't think SwiftUI specifically would ever work well cross-platform, it has so many Apple-isms.

There's also Swift/Win32, but it's MVC. You could also use the interop and use QT as well.

I don't think any of those are necessarily good solutions, but they are there.