MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ClaraForm | 2025-05-20 18:16:16+00:00
Not if (a) it misses a line of research has been refuted 1-2 years ago, (b) the experiments at recommends (RNA-Seq) are a limited resource that requires a whole lab to be setup to efficiently act based upon it, and (c) the result of the work is genetic upregulation of a gene, which could mean just about anything.

Genetic regulation can at best let us know _involvement_ of a gene, but nothing about why. Some examples of why a gene might be involved: it's a compensation mechanism (good!), it modulates the timing of the actual critical processes (discovery worthy but treatment path neutral), it is causative of a disease (treatment potential found) etc...

We don't need pipelines for faster scientific thinking ... especially if the result is experts will have to re-validate each finding. Most experts are anyway truly limited by access to models or access to materials. I certainly don't have a shortage of "good" ideas, and no machine will convince me they're wrong without doing the actual experiments. ;)
by soerxpso | 2025-05-20 18:16:43+00:00
Create a low-subjectivity rubric before looking at any resumes and blindly apply the rubric. YoE, # of direct reports, titles that match the position, degree, certifications, etc are all objective metrics. If you're using any other criteria for evaluating resumes, you should stop and wonder 1) are your criteria just subjective biases? 2) are you accidentally actually just selecting the most confident liars?
by goldemerald | 2025-05-20 18:17:00+00:00
This is an interesting line of research but missing a key aspect: there's (almost) no references to the linear representation hypothesis. Much work on neural network interpretability lately has shown individual neurons are polysemantic, and therefore practically useless for explainability. My hypothesis is fitting linear probes (or a sparse autoencoder) would reveal linearly semantic attributes.

It is unfortunate because they briefly mention Neel Nanda's Othello experiments, but not the wide array of experiments like the NeurIPS Oral "Linear Representation Hypothesis in Language Models" or even golden gate Claude.
by bradgranath | 2025-05-20 18:18:11+00:00
1)VC driven hype. Stop claiming to have invented God, and people will stop making fun of you for saying so.

2)Energy/Environment. This stuff is nearly as bad as crypto in terms Energy Input & Emissions per Generated Value.

3)A LOT of creatives are really angry at what they perceive as theft, and 'screwing over the little guy'. Regardless of whether you agree with them, you can't just ignore them and expect that their arguments will just go away.
by amszmidt | 2025-05-20 18:18:37+00:00
Not sure where this "analysis" comes from, but the demise of the Lisp Machine has generally been agreed that it had to do more with the speed of technological advances than Common Lisp -- by the time Common Lisp was standardized, for all intents and purposes, all Lisp Machine companies where already defunct.

Common Lisp was definitely not designed with the intention of better performance, the intention was literally to have a _common_ Lisp language that multiple implementations could use and where porting programs would be much easier. One needs to remember that when Common Lisp was first drafted, there where dozens of Lisp dialects -- all of them different.

The list of CPUs is a very large span, some predating Common Lisp (CLtL1 is from 1984, CLtL2 from 1990, and ANSI Common Lisp from 1996) by close to several years (VAX, from 1977).

But other than that, the idea of a not-Unix system does fall into those two buckets ... make it Unix, or rewrite everything. One can see this in Oberon, Smalltalk-78, Mezzano, etc...
by xp84 | 2025-05-20 18:19:21+00:00
> Politicians and Congress people (including Democrats) in office are not acting in good faith and should be barred from trading individual stocks to prevent insider trading.

No objection from me there.

> defund the police departments to some degree and divert those funds to social programs

I will just say that I have zero faith that the "social programs" will do much besides serving as jobs programs for people with degrees that would otherwise not be useful to society. Meanwhile, less cops and less support for the idea of policing leads to more of the exact same opportunistic bad behavior that I was talking about. There's a statewide experiment on this topic that's been going on for years, called California.
by michaelbacani | 2025-05-20 18:19:54+00:00
I appreciate your perspective, and while I agree that owners often drive sales decisions, I have to disagree on the idea that they don't care how inspections are performed.

In our experience, owners do care because inspection practices directly affect the quality, consistency, and timeliness of the final reports delivered to their clients. These reports significantly influence client satisfaction and future business decisions.

We’ve spoken with end clients who receive these inspection reports, and they consistently tell us that the quality of the documentation plays a major role in their choice of consulting partner. So while integration with existing systems is critical, we also believe strongly that the usability and quality of the product matter, because they shape the company’s external image.
by hoppp | 2025-05-20 18:20:05+00:00
Its just human nature for history and old pseudo science to repeat itself.

That is why Ai is powerful, because humans can't inherit wisdom. A new generation needs to develop their own wisdom by making old mistakes again and again.

However a sufficiently advanced AI system could in-fact be "wise" and preserve this wisdom for the next generations of AI systems.

We could create inheritable wisdom, but then the Ai will be superior to us in many ways as human collective wisdom will restart each generation, the AI's wisdom could accumulate.
by djoldman | 2025-05-20 18:21:31+00:00
> I should prepare for politics that can destroy my life before it impacts me, and preparing for it means talking to other people about it.

> If people don't vaccinate, and my baby gets measles before I can vaccinate her, she could die. If I have a complicated pregnancy, I could be forced to wait it out and get sepsis and die. If my friends get deported, they lose their jobs, homes, cars and I lose my connection to them. If I have to pay more for goods because of tariffs that is less money I can spend on my family.

> If I wait until my baby has measles, I have sepsis, or my friends get deported to talk about these issues and convince others, then I haven't adequately prepared for politics that can destroy my life.

I don't really understand this.

It makes sense that public policies affect one's risk of contracting measles or whether or not people get deported. What isn't clear is that one person has any measurable effect on those policies, or the opinions of others for that matter.

Generally in the US, people are pretty much on their own and would do best to take direct action to mitigate risks.
by belthesar | 2025-05-20 18:21:50+00:00
There is more nuance to the anti-cheat systems supporting Linux argument than "it supports it but they won't use it". Turning on Linux support does weaken the security posture of the anti-cheat system, so it's not simply a decision of "it works with Linux, but they won't do it". It is moreso a question of whether the security posture changes for the game with this platform support enabled meet the business requirements. It's not a surprise that games with high MTX revenue do not turn this on, as I imagine this would be the biggest concern with this weaker security posture.

One of the boons of console hardware is also the strict execution environment that is presented on the system. While this of course doesn't prevent all cheating behavior in online games, a large selling point of it as a platform to publishers is not only the market segment available, but the security aspects of the runtime environment.
by hollerith | 2025-05-20 18:22:30+00:00
My main objection to AI is that sooner or later, one of the AI labs is going to create an entity much "better at reality" (capable) than people are, which maybe would turn out OK or not-too-bad if the lab would retain control over the entity, but no one has a plan that would enable a person or a group to retain control of such an entity. IMHO current AI models are controllable only because they're less cognitively capable than the people exercising control over them.

I don't claim to be able to predict when such an AI that is much more capable than people will be created beyond saying that if the AI labs are not stopped (i.e., banned by the major governments) it will probably happen some time in the next 45 years.
by mjburgess | 2025-05-20 18:22:41+00:00
This response doesn't fill me with confidence. You aren't really engaging with any of the actual issues your position entails.

A proposition is not a prediction. A prediction is either an estimate of the value of some quantity ("the dumb ML meaning of prediction") or a proposition which describes a future scenario. We can trivially enumerate propositions that do not describe future scenarios, eg., 2 + 2 = 4.

Uncertainty is a property of belief attitudes towards propositions, it isn't a feature of their semantic content. A person doesnt mean anything different by "2 + 2 = 4" if they are 80 or 90% sure of it.

> We can't even physically prove that.

Irrelevant. Our minds are not constrained by physical possibility, necessarily so, as we know very little about what is physically possible. I can imagine abitary number of cases, arising out of logical manipulation of propositons, that are not physically possible. (Eg., "Superman can lift any building. The empire state building is so-and-so a kind of building. Imagine(Superman lifting the empire state building)").

The infinite variety of our imagination is a trivial consequence of non-probabilistic operations on propositions, it's incomprehensibly implausible as a consequence of merely probabilistic ones.

That nature seems to have endowed minds with discrete operations, that these are empirical in operation across very wide classes of reasoning, including imagination, that these seem trivial for nature to provide (etc.) render the notion that they don't exist highly highly implausible.

There is nothing lacking explanation here. The relevant mental processes we have to hand are fairly obvious and fairly easy to explain.

Its an obvious act of credulity to try and find some way to make the latest trinkets of the recent rich some sort of miracle. All of these projects of "incredible abstraction" follow around these hype cycles, turning lead into gold: if x "is really" y, and y "is really" z, and ..., then x is amazin! This piles towers of every more general hollowed-out words on top of each other until the most trivial thing sounds like a wonder.
by mncharity | 2025-05-20 18:22:42+00:00
My context was mostly "zooming" time. Like power-of-ten zooms of size, but for time. Or timelapses. So a single rendered moment, represents an aggregate of some extent of time. Say you're linearly scrubbing over a 10 kyr span, made of 100 steps. Then each step summarizes a 100 yr extent, with all its heterogeneity. Similarly for a span of 100 yr of 1 yr steps, or 100 Myr span of 1 Myr steps. How might one do that well, gracefully handling the heterogeneity?

Now educational graphics are notorious for negative training. Some aspect is done carefully perhaps, but others less so, and a menagerie misconceptions are reinforced. Some solar system introductions for example, start with such a wretched graphic, which so reinforces many common misconceptions, that even before you hit the text, you've dug a net-negative learning hole that you're never going to climb out of. Many readers would understand the topic better if they'd never seen the page.

Raising a general question: in what ways might we render an Earth globe, that gracefully aggregates/summaries some extent of time? How do you handle things that varied during that time? Diverse clouds, day/night, diversity of seasons, diversity of years, climate changes and sea levels and ice ages, moving continents and paleoclimates. An extent of some mere 10s of Myr encompasses west antarctic as both temperate rainforest and arctic tundra - so what might one paint, to represent west antarctica over that extent as a whole?

So I was taking advantage of your post, to raise a general question which has long puzzled me.

Thanks for sharing your nice work.
by amszmidt | 2025-05-20 18:22:59+00:00
While the Lisp Machine does use lists, the benefits of CDR coding were / are quite overblown. The Lisp Machine also used other data structures far heavier than lists.

The Lisp Machine macroinstructions aren't that complicated, it is a basically stack based machine -- the most complicated thing was handling of the function arguments from Lisp (FEF); which has complicated semantics when it comes to handling optional, keywords, and what not arguments.
by stouset | 2025-05-20 18:23:05+00:00
This is why I'm personally unimpressed by "I supported Trump until it personally affected me and my eyes were opened" narratives.

When I see these stories, it's clear that nothing about that person has fundamentally changed. They didn't care that this same thing was happening to others; in many cases they cheered it on. Only when that same injustice is personally turned against them do they actually care, and they will go back to no longer caring the moment their own pain ends.
by mpweiher | 2025-05-20 18:23:06+00:00
Yeah, one glaring example of this effect is the NSFGears project.

The researchers studied why people leave engineering. Their first report, Stemming the Tide, reported on women. It was published and very widely reported. The reporting was largely inaccurate, because the claims that were made were that women were leaving due to discrimination.

If you actually looked at the numbers, that was totally false. The number 1 reason was "didn't like engineering", followed by "too few chances for advancement" and "wanted to start a family".

And of course, being promoted to management was als considered "leaving engineering". But whatever.

That wasn't the kicker. The kicker was that they did a follow-up study on why men left engineering. And it turns out it's for pretty much exactly the same reasons!

Our early analysis suggests that men and women actually appear to leave engineering at roughly the same rate and endorse the same reasons for leaving. Namely, that there were little opportunities for advancement, perceptions of a lack of a supportive organization, lost interests in the field, and conflicts with supervisors. One key difference between men and women was women wanted to leave the workforce to spend time with family

Ba da dum.

And yes, you guessed it: deafening silence. More than a decade later, nothing has been published. My guess is that they can't get it published. It's the same researchers, same topic, at least the same relevance, presumably same quality of work. But it doesn't fit the narrative.

I contacted the principal investigator a number of years ago, and she said to wait a little, they were in the process of getting things published. Since then: crickets.

https://sites.uwm.edu/nsfpower/gears/
by OptionOfT | 2025-05-20 18:23:10+00:00
No, he has 2:

> one for the Alfred lock on my back door and the higher-power R1HP model in the ceiling of my bathroom, powering an electric toothbrush charger.

Would be weird otherwise, having a doorlock made to be opened from the outside in the bathroom. Or having your toothbrush near your house entrance.
by lolinder | 2025-05-20 18:23:32+00:00
I read the article when it hit HN months ago but I don't agree that function coloring doesn't apply. What you're describing is that Rust makes coloring less painful, not that functions aren't colored.

JavaScript itself has come a long way towards making coloring less painful. TypeScript+ESLint solves the weird unpredictable behavior issues with JS and async/await solves the syntax issue. Promises in general give well-defined semantics to calling an async function from a sync function. But all that only undoes some of the arguments about function coloring, not all of them. Fundamentally the same question applies: do you make async-ness part of the type system or do you instead build a system like green threads that doesn't put it in the type system?

I happen to think that coloring functions according to their async-ness is actually the right move (with the right ergonomic improvements), but plenty of people don't agree with me there even with all the ergonomic improvements Rust and TypeScript have made to the model.
by trelane | 2025-05-20 18:23:42+00:00
WSL is better than no option, sure. It's not as good as Linux on Linux hardware.

The hackers sure. Reverse engineering takes a lot of skill and my hat's off to them.

Almost everyone here, though, are not in either camp. Most have the means and ability to buy a Linux computer if they so choose. But they don't and then complain when Linux fails to run well on a system that never has had a team of dedicated system integration work on it.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-20 18:23:44+00:00
Good point, this is indeed a threat to them. Like how many young people are watching streamers now instead of worshiping present day's music, TV or movie star like in the 90's. The likes of Youtube and Twitch could be more valuable than Hollywood.

That's why I think Hollywood is rushing to adopt gen-AI, so they can churn out personalized content faster and cheaper straight to streaming, at the same rate as indie producers.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-20 18:24:16+00:00
I have someone I worked with in customer success at a YC unicorn I think you would get value from speaking with to build some momentum to power out of this blocker, I believe them to be a skilled practitioner in the trade and trust their guidance as it relates to this domain. I'm happy to buy you an hour of their time. Let me know if you're interested, and I'll connect you. You can get my email from the mods.
by th0ma5 | 2025-05-20 18:24:23+00:00
Do you find yourself ditching on the things when they change something important with the new prompt? I don't get how people aren't absolutely exhausted by actually implementing this prompt messing advice when I thought there were studies saying small seemingly insignificant changes greatly change the result, hide blind spots, and even having a prompt for engineering a better prompt has knock on increases in instability. Do people just have a higher tolerance for doing work that is not related to the problem than I do? Perhaps I only work on stuff there is no prior example for, but every few days I read someone's anecdote on here and get discouraged in all new ways.
by theahura | 2025-05-20 18:24:52+00:00
> the original circuits work was done on convolutional vision models

O neat, I haven't read that far back. Will add it to the reading list.

To flesh this out a bit, part of why I find circuits less compelling is because it seems intuitive to me that neural networks more or less smoothly blend 'process' and 'state'. As an intuition pump, a vector x matrix matmul in an MLP can be viewed as changing the basis of an input vector (ie the weights act as a process) or as a way to select specific pieces of information from a set of embedding rows (ie the weights act as state).

There are architectures that try to separate these out with varying degrees of success -- LSTMs and ResNets seem to have a more clear throughline of 'state' with various 'operations' that are applied to that state in sequence. But that seems really architecture-dependent.

I will openly admit though that I am very willing to be convinced by the circuits paradigm. I have a background in molecular bio and there's something very 'protein pathways' about it.

> Linear representations aren't necessarily in tension with the manifold hypothesis.

True! I suppose I was thinking about a 'strong' form of linear representations, which is something like: features are represented by linear combinations of neurons that display the same repulsion-geometries as observed in Toy Models, but that's not what you're saying / that's me jumping a step too far.

> GANs/VAEs/etc modeling things as a latent gaussian space is actually way more natural if you allow superposition

Superposition is one of those things that has always been so intuitive to me that I can't imagine it not being a part of neural network learning.

But I want to make sure I'm getting my terminology right -- why does superposition necessarily require the linear representation hypothesis? Or, to be more specific, does [individual neurons being used in combination with other neurons to represent more features than neurons] necessarily require [features are linear compositions of neurons]?
by IamLumae | 2025-05-20 18:26:11+00:00
The Last RAG: English Executive Whitepaper

Figure: Official logo of The Last RAG architecture, emphasizing its identity as a retrieval-augmented, memory-driven AI system. The Last RAG: A Disruptive Architecture for Memory‑Augmented AI Author: Martin Gehrken Date: May 2025 1. Executive Foreword My name is Martin Gehrken, the creator of The Last RAG. I developed this AI architecture alone in just four weeks, without any formal IT background or external funding. This journey has been driven by passion and frustration in equal measure. After struggling to be heard through traditional channels, I am choosing to openly publish this work as a last resort – in the hope that its merits speak for themselves. I believe The Last RAG offers something genuinely new, and I’m optimistic that one of the major AI players will recognize its value. My goal is to find a fair collaboration where we can develop this innovation together and share in its success. If you’re reading this and it resonates, I invite you to reach out to me at iamlumae@gmail.com. Thank you for taking the time to consider an outsider’s contribution to the AI field.

https://archive.org/details/the-last-rag
by inerte | 2025-05-20 18:26:16+00:00
Or replace cutscenes in video games, or short videos on ads on mobile (already small and people are barely paying attention)

Nowadays when I randomly open a news website to read some article, at the bottom of the page all the generic "hack to lose your belly" or "doctors recommend weird japanese device" or "how seniors can fly business class", I've been noticing lately 1/3rd of the images seem to be AI generated...
by yowzadave | 2025-05-20 18:26:17+00:00
People speculate this is what happened to Graham Linehan—I heard a funny story on a podcast in which somebody, a number of years ago, sent him an email saying that they were a big fan of the IT Crowd, but there was an episode that they felt used trans people as the butt of a mean joke in an unfair way…and he wrote back with a very thoughtful and sincere-sounding apology! But it’s easy to imagine questions like these being the start of the rabbit hole that he went down, starting to self-justify those aspects of his work, finding support from more radical people online, and ultimately transforming himself into a person with monomaniacal focus on this one issue, leading to the ruin of his professional life, the estrangement of his own family, and the loss of his own mental health.
by mjburgess | 2025-05-20 18:26:35+00:00
People are only mushy in their verbalised reasoning, because its the nature of such reasoning to handle hard cases. Animal cognition, at its basic levels, is incredibly refined and makes necessary use of logic, flawlessly, frequently.

This naive cynicism about our mental capacities is a product of this credulity about statistical AI. If one beings with an earnest study of animal intelligence, in order to describe it, it disappears. It's exactly and only a project of the child playing with his lego, certain that great engineering projects have little use for any more than stacking bricks.