MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jxmorris12 | 2025-05-21 18:38:51+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Jack, the last author of this paper. It feels good to release this, the fruit of a two-year quest to "align" two vector spaces without any paired data. It's fun to look back a bit and note that at least two people told me this wasn't possible:

1. An MIT professor who works on similar geometry alignment problems didn't want to work on this with me because he was certain we would need at least a little bit of paired data

2. A vector database startup founder who told me about his plan to randomly rotate embeddings to guarantee user security (and ignored me when I said it might not be a good idea)

The practical takeaway is something that many people already understood, which is that embeddings are not encrypted, even if you don't have access to the model that produced them.

As one example, in the Cursor security policy (https://www.cursor.com/security#codebase-indexing) they state:

> Embedding reversal: academic work has shown that reversing embeddings is possible in some cases. Current attacks rely on having access to the model [...]

This is no longer the case. Since all embedding models are learning ~the same thing, we can decode any embedding vectors, given we have at least a few thousand of them.
by vel0city | 2025-05-21 18:39:14+00:00
They aren't opposites though. Its entirely possible to have something "easy to disable" and "difficult to accidentally disable".

Easy to disable, in that there are some easy to understand and find steps to disable it. Difficult to accidentally disable, meaning its not something that would be disabled as a side effect of some other change, isn't just a single click, isn't poorly labeled or described, etc.

In this case, it is first presented as a check box in the Privacy Settings area. It is titled "Screen security" and says "Prevent screenshots of Signal on this computer for added privacy.". Well documented. Click the check box, and it presents a modal window. The window then says, "Disable screen security? If disabled, this may allow Microsoft Windows to capture screenshots of Signal and use them for features that may not be private." You then have a Cancel or Disable buttons.

Its two steps to change it after navigating to that part of the menu. The positions to click are different between the two steps. It confirms if you're really wanting to disable it, and tells you things may be able to take screenshots of the app.

This reminds me of platforms which require you to type the name of a resource to delete something potentially important. It's easy to do, but one wouldn't accidentally click a button, type the full name of the resource, then click the confirm button.

My electric lawn mower is both easy to start the blade and difficult to accidentally start. You have to hold a button and then pull the start lever. Its two actions that you reasonably have to do with two hands in a particular order. Both actions are easy to do, doing both of them are easy (assuming you have two somewhat functional hands). Once going you just need to continue to hold the lever and just release that to stop the blade.
by overflow897 | 2025-05-21 18:39:14+00:00
There are parts of this I agree with and parts I do not. Being able to "talk" to documentation rather than dig through it to try to understand a concept feels like a way more efficient way to get to the same end.

I think digging through forums or comments or SEO garbage to try to find answers is a nightmare compared to having a solid llm do it for you. Being able to ask to explain a concept 5 different ways or compare concepts is incredible.

Or say - knowing nothing about 3d printing and being able to just ask it about current capabilities, materials, costs etc as an entrypoint. There are whole business ideas I wouldn't even consider exploring without it because it would be so overwhelming to research from scratch.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-21 18:39:53+00:00
I've been realizing lately, as I have leaned heavier on LLMs to do what I would have used Google and search to do previously, that what I want — what I am searching for — is not a page or site but just the damned answer to my query.

"At what time does the first train from Stirling to Edinburgh arrive?" I don't need a page to the train time-tables (or god forbid, a vacation package to Scotland) — just the answer to my question.
by keybored | 2025-05-21 18:41:14+00:00
My grandpa would hike all the time, ski. Very active except resistance training. And got dementia in his 70’s. Once he stopped going outside for a few years he started to move like he was ten years older.

No. I am not saying that exercise is futile. It is as useful as conventional wisdom says. But the whole thread here (except the obligatory “but correlation, or causation?” crowd) seems to have forgotten the topic. Excercise is not enough. You also have to be not-sedentary.
by dinfinity | 2025-05-21 18:41:32+00:00
> Later I started to see the patterns where government spends most of the money lining the pockets of the well-connected

It is definitely not most of the money in developed countries. Being cynical is fine, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Governments do enormously important and valuable things with most of the money. Just take a look at where money is spent in the budgets of developed countries.
by vessenes | 2025-05-21 18:41:48+00:00
OpenAI board: "Should we dilute the company 2% to acquire Jony Ive for the next 10 years? Yes."

Hacker News: "Man these OpenAI folks are idiots."

OpenAI absolutely should be getting in the hardware game; Ive is a mix of status acquisition and unicorn, and is not the only person/team/company you'd need to make a quality hardware product. But on balance I'd pay 2% of every company I ever had any financial engagement with to get Mr. Ive doing its design. I mean srsly.
by triceratops | 2025-05-21 18:41:54+00:00
I haven't read much Friedman but his logic behind

> regulating negative harms is a short-sighted and ineffective means of achieving the policy aim of protecting minorities

still makes no goddamn sense. I take back the racism accusation until I've read more of his work but

> people would over time choose to integrate as they found mutual advantage

is still some dumb shit. If letting minorities shop or work in your store drives away the majority there's no "mutual advantage". There never will be. You're counting on, or rather praying, for hearts and minds at large to change in order to get voluntary integration. That could take generations, or it may never happen.

If people can't be nice on their own, maybe they need the stick (government regulation) until they learn.
by ch4s3 | 2025-05-21 18:41:55+00:00
> every business should optimize as much as utterly possible even if this results in exploitation, because the market will accept exploitation until it can't and correct.

I don't thing that's a correct assessment. He talks a lot about the need to follow laws an cultural norms and the importance of society setting normative guardrails for behavior. Moreover he point our I believe correctly that a lot of the worst behavior of businesses stem from monopoly power.

> In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result'

I think it only appears that way if you take small quotations like this out of context.
by godelski | 2025-05-21 18:42:02+00:00
I wonder if 2025 will be the year of Linux.

Windows has turned itself into spyware. Apple is too expensive and going the same way.

Meanwhile the user experience of Linux has dramatically increased. Put on a good skin and most people wouldn't notice the difference. You don't need to reply that you can, I know you can. You're on HN. But most people just use their computer for the browser and most people can't tell Chrome from Firefox. Most people get their lockin by their tech friend or child. Really, Microsoft's only lockin remains Office.

It won't be a complete shift but the signs of growing userbase is there. Would be a huge win for open source! If you haven't tried Linux in a few years try giving something like PopOS a go or if you want to say you use Arch then try EndeavourOS. Both are very stable, latter slightly less.

Edit: enfuse was right, I should have suggested EndeavourOS instead of Manjaro.
by DaSHacka | 2025-05-21 18:42:04+00:00
This is why I use a dedicated account to scrape servers, since I unfortunately need my main to interact with(/run) communities unavailable elsewhere.

FWIW, I haven't exactly been careful with it (oftentimes scraping 2 servers at once, and downloading all attachments) and have never had an account get banned.

The only time I got 'banned' in any capacity was when I hammered the internal JSON API to get information about server's invite links, and even then it was only an automated IP ban from Cloudflare for a couple days. Although, it was an unauthenticated API.
by gambiting | 2025-05-21 18:43:40+00:00
I mean, I don't think I agree - like most things with AI, the scale is just unprecedented, because producing more content costs very very little. When previously you had an occasional budget production made without any care for it, whether it's an audio story or an illustrated book, nowadays I encourage you to just open Spotify and search for "kids stories" - I'd wager that 90% is AI generated, with the same kind of storylines, illustrations posted by accounts with no history or a real name - it's just slop designed to extract whatever money they can by absolutely flooding the platform with this. Budget productions always existed, this didn't(imho).
by asadotzler | 2025-05-21 18:43:51+00:00
For Ive, it often was. Ever thinner MBPs? Why, if not for appearance given the weight didn't change. No ports on PRO computers? Why, if they didn't bother his aesthetic sensibilities. Charging your mouse disables its use because the ports on the bottom? Why if not to hide the port for looks? He spent most of his time at Apple trying to make things pretty. Your comment may be true for "design" in the abstract, but as someone who spent plenty of time studying design and architecture, let me assure you, many of the people I studied with who are now industry veterans never cared about much more than aesthetics, even in architecture where engineering and building science are major factors. Again, sure, theoretically true for "design" but hardly true for Ive.
by delusional | 2025-05-21 18:44:01+00:00
I should probably clarify that I'm not against CO2 emissions taxes. What I am saying is that we shouldn't get bogged down with the discussion of "fairness" and "paying for a shared resource" rhetoric. Down that road lies an infinite discussion.

What we should do instead is start at the other end. Envision a world that would be sustainable, that we would want to live in, and decide which incentives have to exists for us to get there, fairness be damned.
by reify | 2025-05-21 18:45:04+00:00
A book review

no-more-tears-johnson-johnson-alzheimers-health-care-book-review/682856/

However if we are really talking "America's Johnson and Johnson Problem"

How about, who decided to put asbestos in talcum powder used by Families worldwide.

Group action with 3,500 claimants alleges company knew its talcum powder products contained dangerous asbestos

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/feb/04/johnson-and...

as well as 13,000 + claimants in the USA.

Ovarian Cancer and “Tainted Talc

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6461309/

what a lovely trustworthy company! not.
by hintymad | 2025-05-21 18:45:46+00:00
> EU is maliciously anti-wealth, even if you fund it yourself, they will actively cripple you with nonsensical regulations and taxes to make sure your company does not take off.

I'm a little cynical about this. Apparently EU has lots of wealthy people and they get to keep their wealth for generations. It's just that we don't necessarily even know who they are or how they keep generating wealth. Per Taleb in his book Skin in the Game:

"Consider that about ten percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top one percent and more than half of all Americans will spent a year in the top ten percent[1]. This is visibly not the same for the more static –but nominally more equal –Europe. For instance, only ten percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago; more than sixty percent of those on the French list were heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are really even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries.[iii]"

[1] 39% of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 % of the income distribution, 56 % will find themselves in the top 10%, and 73% percent will spend a year in the top 20 %.

[2] The type of distributions –called fat tails –associated with it made the analyses more delicate, far more delicate and it had become my mathematical specialty. In Mediocristan changes over time are the result of the collective contributions of the center, the middle. In Extremistan these changes come from the tails. Sorry, if you don’t like it but that is purely mathematical.

[ii] HBR article by Joan williams https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-t...

[iii] Ref http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/from-rags-t...

[iv] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/piketty-and-pare...
by westurner | 2025-05-21 18:45:47+00:00
Aren't there stable astral radio signal sources detectable with ng quantum sensors; such as Rydberg antenna arrays?

How many astral signals does a receiver need to fix to determine the time of day on earth (~theta) given lat/long?

How many astral signals does a receiver need to fix to determine lat/long/altitude given the current time?

How many astral signals does a receiver need to fix to determine to infer the current time, given geometrically-impossible triangulation and trilateration solutions given the known geometry of the cosmos and the spherical shape of the earth?

There is a regular monotonic tick in quantum waves; but not a broadcast planetary time offset/reference?

"Simple Precision Time Protocol at Meta" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39306209 :

> FWIW, from "50 years later, is two-phase locking the best we can do?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37712506 :

>> TIL there's a regular heartbeat in the quantum foam; there's a regular monotonic heartbeat in the quantum Rydberg wave packet [photoionization] interference; and that should be useful for distributed applications with and without vector clocks and an initial time synchronization service

"Quantum watch and its intrinsic proof of accuracy" (2022) https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev...

..

Re: ntpd-rs and higher-resolution network time protocols {WhiteRabbit (CERN), SPTP (Meta)} and NTP NTS : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40785484 :

> "RFC 8915: Network Time Security for the Network Time Protocol" (2020)
by microtonal | 2025-05-21 18:46:05+00:00
I had the first generation on a MacBook 12" and had no issues at all. Then I got the second generation on a MacBook Pro (I think this was still without the dust seals) and it was one big misery. A small speck of dust would make a key feel bad or get stuck. I was so happy when I could finally get rid of the stupid device. Never had issues with Apple Scissor switches thereafter.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-21 18:46:13+00:00
It's a pretty common turn of phrase on "lefty" (Western, English, very online, progressive) parts of the internet. I've always found it silly because it takes some pretty interesting nuanced problems (how do you give credit to folks who executed Ive's vision, many who probably boldly innovated to create what they did? How do you realistically situate Ive's flaws given his aura?) and wrings the nuance out of it by polarizing the readers (you're either with labor or you're with capital, pick your side of the picket line!)

But then these days lefty and righty parts of the Western English-language internet are all polarized and beating on common enemies is part of their conversational language. I think for a while HN was small enough that it resisted this polarization but at its current size there's no escaping it.
by penguin_booze | 2025-05-21 18:46:31+00:00
Entropy tends to increase over time (or, so I heard). The cultural analogue of that would be that all cultures--given the prevalence of internet, and on top of that, the US being one of the "loudest"--will either become or approach that of the US. And it'll bring along everything that's good and bad. That means, decadence, greed, gluttony, enshittification, are unavoidable, however unlikely and alien they seem at present time. In less generous terms, the sick tend to infect the healthy, more than the latter can heal the former.
by ch4s3 | 2025-05-21 18:48:31+00:00
He makes the argument that if your freedom depends on the largess of the majority then it is loosely held and precarious.

> is some dumb shit. If letting minorities shop or work in your store drives away the majority there's no "mutual advantage"

That's not the argument he's making. He argues that it is always more expensive to be a racist, and that absent the legal framework of segregation then people will by financial necessity begin to do business across the color line which will change their preferences over time. He points out that historically there was a time when people would refuse to do business with Quakers, but that over time the free market won out and that discrimination or affect of taste no longer exists.

Again, I think you can reasonably disagree but it isn't obviously stupid to observed that racism incurs an extra cost and markets reward you for not being irrational in that way.
by asadotzler | 2025-05-21 18:48:56+00:00
I have a blind friend that's been getting value from the Meta Ray-Ban spectacles. He used to have spectacles that let a human see where he was going and offer suggestions/directions/descriptions/etc. but replaced those with this somewhat more private solution and found various compelling (in his descriptions to me) use cases. I personally think AI is going to land on "coding" and "accessibility" successfully and fail in most other domains.
by vel0city | 2025-05-21 18:49:02+00:00
I'm happy to have this setting. It's a great setting and I appreciate Signal adding it.

However, if an attacker has the ability to directly query the Recall database, they almost certainly have access to read all your Signal messages on your device. The locations where Recall files live are even more protected and isolated than your %APPDATA%\Roaming\Signal directory is.

Everything running as you on your computer has full control of all your Signal messages and your identity assigned to the device. This is untrue of your Recall data, which from last I saw required a lot of finagling to get the permissions right for you to access it raw.
by ecohubmap | 2025-05-21 18:49:34+00:00
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by bityard | 2025-05-21 18:49:35+00:00
I always found solar farm engineering intensely interesting and looked seriously into becoming an electrician as a second career as something to "retire into" once I got sick of working in tech. And like you say, it turns out it's not something you can just make a lateral move into, no matter how quickly you can learn and how hard you're willing to study. "Becoming an electrician" is a young person's game.
by threeducks | 2025-05-21 18:49:36+00:00
More like 700 € if you are lucky. Prices are still not back down from the start of the AI boom.

I am hopeful that the prices will drop a bit more with Intel's recently announced Arc Pro B60 with 24GB VRAM, which unfortunately has only half the memory bandwidth of the RTX 3090.

Not sure why other hardware makers are so slow to catch up. Apple really was years ahead of the competition with the M1 Ultra with 800 GB/s memory bandwidth.
by patrickmay | 2025-05-21 18:50:15+00:00
> I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary.

I strongly agree. This echoes the cartoon about using LLMs to write and then summarize emails (https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html).

If someone doesn't care enough about my time to compose a well-written email, with a tl;dr at the top if necessary, then I see no reason to care about what they've generated.
by mmooss | 2025-05-21 18:50:23+00:00
I agree with Signal here and love their commitment. Strangely (to me) they do 'recall' things in other ways:

* They have a message retention setting, 'Disappearing messages'; it works on message correspondents' devices too (if Ali sets Disappearing messages' to '1 day' for the chat with Barry, and then texts Barry, 1 day later Signal deletes the message on both Ali's and Barry's devices).

However, 'Disappearing messages' applies only to text messages. For every voice and video call, Signal retains a record of the date and time and the participants, and Signal saves it on the devices of each participant. Beyond a doubt, Signal's developers are well aware of the value of such metadata - as valuable as call content, in different ways - and the need for confidentiality (if you aren't familiar with that particular issue, I promise that every security professional is).

I'm shocked that they do it. What about a human rights dissident who is arrested - or whose phone is stolen - their phone won't show any sign of the text messages but it shows everyone they called and when, implicating all those other people and putting them at risk, and also evidence against the phone's owner. And even if they are disciplined and manually delete each of those records - afaik you can delete each call record one at a time - the other call participants' phones still retain the records. There is nothing someone can do to protect themself.

Better security here doesn't seem hard to implement. Also, I think having different settings for text messages and for voice/video calls makes retention settings more confusing for users. Many will believe they are safe without realizing the risk of this metadata - they trust the experts at Signal to understand these things and keep them safe - and many will assume everything disappears. Just have one setting for all data and metadata in the chat.

* Also, afaik if you delete the entire correpondence with someone - delete their entire chat history and delete them from the Signal address book - Signal retains information on them, such as settings for that chat. It seems that an attacker could identify all the deleted correspondents; again, there's no way to protect yourself.