MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whack | 2025-05-26 23:30:55+00:00
The past year has been strange. Back in 2016, there was so much opposition to Trump. Even after he was elected and granted tremendous power, the other "elites" were staunchly opposed to him and spoke out against him. This despite the fact that the worst thing you can say about DJT in 2017 is that he is an uncouth man.

Fast forward 8 years, and the things we know about DJT today are so much worse than anyone imagined in 2017. He tried to subvert our nation's democracy and political stability. He summoned a mob of rioters, stood idly by while they assaulted our leaders in congress, and eventually pardoned all of them. He has been convicted of multiple felonies, and found guilty in civil court of sexual abuse. People from his own previous administration have called him out as being corrupt and incompetent, and seven Republican senators voted to impeach/convict him.

And yet, despite a jaw-dropping list of unforgivable offenses from the past few years, he enjoys more support today than he did in 2020. From people as smart as Zuck and Andreesen.

It really is true what they say about the fragility of political norms. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, there's no putting it back.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-26 23:31:06+00:00
Online forums for difficult medical conditions are full of ChatGPT copy-and-paste responses right now. LLMs are the tool of choice for people who want answers and want them now. Much like this article claims, a popular usage is to prompt the LLM to get a more optimistic interpretation about a specific supplement or treatment.

This is a really difficult problem because these people are often very sick and not getting the answers they want from their doctors. Previously this void was filled by alternative medicine doctors and quacks selling supplements. Now ChatGPT has arrived and has convinced a lot of them that they have a super-human AI at their fingertips that can be massaged to produce any answer they want to hear.

It’s painful to try to read some of these forums where threads have turned into endless “here’s what ChatGPT says” pasted walls of text, followed by someone else trying to counter with a different ChatGPT wall of text.

This isn’t unique to LLMs. There is a huge market for grossly exaggerating the conclusions of scientific studies. Podcasters like Huberman and Dr. Rhonda Patrick are famous for taking obscure studies with questionable conclusions and extrapolating to “protocols” or supplement stacks for their fans to follow. I often get downvoted when I mention fan-favorite podcasters by name, but I think by now many listeners have caught on to the way they exaggerate small studies into exciting listening material.
by h4kunamata | 2025-05-26 23:31:59+00:00
SEO as we knew it gone forever, Google push with its AI drove everything to shit.

I used to use Germini and it was pretty good, then it went downhill with wrong answers and I just couldn't trust it anymore.

That is where I crossed Perplexity ( https://www.perplexity.ai/ ), it is surprisingly solid and the best part of it: the sources. It even helped to learn Python.

It does mention all the sources it used for that answer, so in doubt, you can cross check which is something Gemini failed miserably to do so. There is very minimal "wrong answers" and in doubt, cross check it.

I went De-Google years ago with GrapheneOS and everything, I still use Google dot com to check stores reviews because unfortunately, no other search engine provides that info. There are websites only for that but it is not remotely close to Google reviews left by folks.
by Thorrez | 2025-05-26 23:32:08+00:00
I was confused because I thought Minecraft was originally Java, but that is Javascript. Wikipedia explains:

>On 7 May, 2019, coinciding with Minecraft's 10th anniversary, a JavaScript recreation of an old 2009 Java Edition build named Minecraft Classic was made available to play online for free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft
by hamaluik | 2025-05-26 23:32:41+00:00
You should try building one for yourself, I did [1] and it’s easier than you’d think. I made mine just a basic numpad but I really like the idea of turning it into a tool to enter math symbols.. guess I know what my next project is, thanks for the inspiration!

1: https://blog.hamaluik.ca/posts/custom-numpad/
by ants_everywhere | 2025-05-26 23:33:31+00:00
> Studies like this should make it evident that LLMs are not reasoning at all. An AI that would reason like humans....

Humans don't reason either. Reasoning is something we do in writing, especially with mathematical and logical notation. Just about everything else that feels like reasoning is something much less.

This has been widely known at least since the stories where Socrates made everybody look like fools. But it's also what the psychological research shows. What people feel like they're doing when they're reasoning is very different with what they're actually doing.
by proc0 | 2025-05-26 23:33:35+00:00
Absolutely, they're being hyped to the extreme talking about how it's AGI in the next two years, yet I cannot get one of them to generate a jar with no lid. It just creates the lid every single time, but that's just an example. They succeed at many things, but they fail so hard at such simple things that it casts a huge shadow on the times it does succeed.

Because they work with statistics and averaging training data, it makes sense that certain things it will have copied correctly, and others it will have completely mixed up and it cannot process properly. The problem is that they are literally being sold as reasoning models, and AI that can be just like a junior developer. These comparisons are borderline irresponsible as it could be driving a bubble that will burst and affect millions of people.
by threecheese | 2025-05-26 23:34:10+00:00
I’ve thought about something similar, after having been burned twice by rosy outlook from real estate agents (USA). The issue is there’s no incentives for a tool like this. A pre-sale inspection is really just to protect “the deal” from being unwound, and to check boxes where there is regulation or if one or the other party could be sued post-sale. Neither the selling or buying agent would want a tool that will prevent a deal, and a homeowner may not see the value given they are already paying a ton of cash to their agents. You would need to monetize via some side channel, or convince the buyer to pay you - the non-competitive MLS status quo of US realty would never permit you to partake in a transaction. Or, sell to those who have been burned (Id be a client if I ever can stomach buying a new home again).

Some ideas for your tool: - noise - neighbors with farm animals (increasingly popular in suburban areas, and local regs haven’t caught up wrt noise), or neighbors who have been reported or fined for animal neglect or noise violations (for example, pets that live outside where homes are close enough for this to be a meaningful noise problem). Problem neighbors in general, which is subjective but probably easy to find outliers. - traffic patterns, utilization by Waze drivers, speeders, prevalence of stop signs per intersection, if the street is used by emergency personnel or is close to a fire or police station - frequency of nearby construction via permit applications - inspector reviews - US inspectors have little oversight and typically protect themselves from damages contractually, it would be good to know which ones regularly flag things like roof leaks or don’t have exclusive relationships with real estate agents (which queers their incentives wrt buyers - “use my guy, he’ll give you a deal” gets contracts signed quickly) - prevalence of rentals or Airbnb in the area, renters aren’t bad of course but a buyer may want to know there’s a higher density of residents than appears, and all the knock on effects this could cause like traffic, trash, noise, new faces, non-owner residents engaging in risky behavior etc.

I’d considered a device that could be nailed to a nearby telephone pole, like a raspberry pi with a sensitive mic and some presence sensing, with a few days of battery life. A technology version of “hang out in this neighborhood for a bit and give me the low-down that the sellers may want to hide”.
by pdpi | 2025-05-26 23:35:03+00:00
Something the article mentions in passing is Java’s “package private” being the default.

For the longest time, I believed that this was dumb, and that the default should’ve been private. Over time, my style has changed a fair bit, and these days I tend to think of packages, rather than classes, as the more important unit of code, and I find that package private was probably the right choice.
by JadeNB | 2025-05-26 23:35:05+00:00
> So don't accredit universities that want to turn into degree mills.

This is way outside the scope of something that a faculty member who is, as the article says, trying to teach has any hope of implementing within a reasonable time frame. Of course the ideal is that faculty, as major stakeholders in the educational institution, should ideally be active in all levels of university governance, but I think it is important to realize how much of a prerequisite there is for an individual professor even to get their voice heard by an accrediting body, let alone to change its accrediting procedures.

That's setting aside the fact that, even if faculty really mobilized to make such changes, in the absolute best case the changes would be slow to implement, and the effects would be slow to manifest, as universities are on multi-year accreditation cycles and there would need to be at least a few reputable universities that were disaccredited before others started taking the guidance seriously. Even if I were willing to throw everything into the politics of university governance, which would make my teaching suffer immensely, I'm not willing to say that we'll just have to wait a decade to see the effects.
by cassianoleal | 2025-05-26 23:35:11+00:00
> In dicatorships there is no opportunity to speak out.

There is always opportunity to speak out.

In dictatorships, it usually costs more energy, money and sometimes lives. It tends to culminate in revolutions, and then the system changes.

In censored quasi-democracies like what we see in "the west", it tends to culminate in being ignored and the status quo being maintained or gradually worsened. Alternatively, you may become a pariah and either have to self-exile [0] or suffer years of isolation and torture [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Asylum_applicat...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Imprisonment_in...
by sensanaty | 2025-05-26 23:35:32+00:00
I was allowed to use calculators during my A-level Math/Physics/Chem exams, but knowing what to punch in was half the battle. Hell, they even give you most of the formulae on the very first page of the exam sheet, but again, application of that knowledge is the hard part.

Point being, the fundamentals matter. I can't do mental arithmetic very well these days because it's been years since I've practiced, but I know how it works in the first place and can do it if need be. How is a kid learning geometry or calculus supposed to get by and learn to spot the patterns that make sense and the ones that don't without first knowing the fundamentals underlaying the more complex concepts?
by Giviberidze | 2025-05-26 23:35:56+00:00
AI Memes via API is super simple: you send a prompt (like “When you deploy on Friday”) and we generate a meme image + caption within ~5 seconds. You can integrate it alongside our Meme API, and optionally add a “Generate” button if a user can’t find a meme they like.

As for monetization, our GIF API, Sticker API, and Meme API can optionally serve programmatic or direct ad campaigns between or around content (e.g., in search results or trending feeds). We share the ad revenue with partners, so if your app has decent usage, it can become a new revenue stream. We position as the best GIPHY alternative and Tenor alternative.

You can get a free API key at https://partner.klipy.com — happy to support if you decide to try it out!

This is our api page https://klipy.com/api
by delichon | 2025-05-26 23:36:37+00:00
“You asked her what color a house was and she said, ‘It’s white on this side.’” “That’s right.” “She didn’t assume that the other side was white, too… and a Fair Witness wouldn’t.” -- Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

An LLM is an abstraction machine, it mashes together anything that is nearby in a high dimensional space. Its statistical model is its source of truth. For a Fair Witness AI reasoning needs to supplant statistics. Which I'm guessing can get weird fast. LLMs are really good at being suggestible. For this we need the opposite.
by gdhkgdhkvff | 2025-05-26 23:36:39+00:00
Made a “machine learning movie recommendation” website. It went through some relevant questions and had you select some of your favorite movies to base the recommendation off of. Then it “calculated” and finally recommended Weekend at Bernie’s to everyone regardless of what you answered. Then gave you an option of another movie, which was always Weekend at Bernie’s 2.

I had no specific reason to build it other than I thought it would be funny.
by nagaiaida | 2025-05-26 23:36:59+00:00
personally, i like that raku goes the other way, with exported bits of the interface explicitly tagged using `is export` (which also allows for the creation of selectably importable subsets of the module through keyed export/import with `is export(:batteries)`/`use TheModule :batteries`, e.g. for a more featureful interface with a cost not every user of the module wants to pay).

it feels more natural to me to explicitly manage what gets exported and how at a different level than the keyword used to define something. i don't dislike rust's solution per se, but if you're someone like me who still instinctually does start-of-line relative searches for definitions, suddenly `fn` and `pub fn` are separate namespaces (possibly without clear indication which has the definition i'm looking for)
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-26 23:38:01+00:00
And where is your evidence of this? Can you even prove this for a single query/response pair? Can you trace the genesis of the signals travelling through the neural network and prove to me via the structure that no reasoning was performed at all? You don't. You arrived at this claim with NO evidence.

How do you arrive at a claim without evidence? There's a word for it. It's called an Hallucination. Humans, like LLMs, have trouble saying "I don't know."
by Hashex129542 | 2025-05-26 23:38:11+00:00
Streaming is different concept than Downloading.

Streaming:

1) In remote, The server will provide chunks of data. Each chunk has predefined length.

Even in Text format you have to identify each chunks to process. `Transfer-Encoding: chunked` HTTP header for example.

> No local streaming in remote computer.

2) In local storage system you can stream any length of data from Storage Drive to RAM

Downloading:

1) In remote, The client will request chunks of data. You can request any length.

You don't need to identify the chunks. You can append the downloaded data without any process.

> There is Local streaming. The remote computer actually streams data from it's storage to RAM.

2) In local copying from peripheral device is also called Downloading. I've seen Downloading label in micro-controller burner.

Presenting, Storing or Deleting the either one data is your choice. Not only stream; also you can watch, listen, read the downloaded content also without storing it into actual drive or without finishing the download. It's all actions nothing to do with techniques behind the terms.
by carlosjobim | 2025-05-26 23:38:14+00:00
Loss of privacy? That your name is on your ticket? Then don't go, or reach out to the organizers and let them know you are a person who needs special protection and they will accommodate you and your entourage.

Your name is on your bus card also, and your airline ticket, but I don't hear anybody complaining about loss of privacy for that.

Employee training on validation? They look at the ID and see if the name matches the name on the ticket. Anybody can do that without any training.

> Scalpers have helped me out several times when I didn’t hear about an event until the last minute, so I don’t always think of them as an enemy to eliminate.

They helped you by screwing over other people. You do not have higher value than any other person. Besides, organizers can save expensive last-minute tickets without needing scalpers.
by hannofcart | 2025-05-26 23:38:45+00:00
This feels like is a side stepping of Epicureus where the primary focus of refutation revolves around trying to explain away "evil" as that which is perpetrated by human beings upon one another.

Perhaps, if you replace "evil" with "suffering", you get a more expansive view of the Epicurean argument.

And if you feel the expansive version is too amorphously defined to refute effectively, you could just replace "evil" with just "plague" or "earthquakes". For eg.

"Is God willing to prevent plagues but not able..."
by Salgat | 2025-05-26 23:39:09+00:00
Similar to other compression methods, it uses keyframes (which are saved frames that exist throughout the video) as the starting point, after which the next frame is a diff of that until you reach the next keyframe. It seems to generate keyframes when the compression drops below a certain level (at which point you might as well just store the compressed frame instead of the bloom bitmap).

https://github.com/ross39/new_bloom_filter_repo/blob/4798d90...
by corimaith | 2025-05-26 23:39:12+00:00
>Not so long time ago people could move from country to country relatively freely

The well-off rich and upper middle-class could move from country to country relatively freely, or immigrants who intended not to look back. Which puts a strong pressure on self-selection on the type of people coming into a country.

That time isn't now, with cheap airfares and the internet, it's much more easier for anyone to come in, often with no intention of integration and bringing their own sectarian politics in. When the time comes, how many of these immigrants do you think will fight for their host country? Especially if said host country make likely come into conflict with their homelands.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-26 23:40:11+00:00
One of my friends went down a path of using ChatGPT to validate his belief that his alternative medicine approach was better than what his doctors recommended.

He had a whole host of tricks to work around ChatGPT’s protections or cautious replies. He’d strip out the cautions because he thought it was just OpenAI’s lawyers forcing disclaimers into the model. If he didn’t get the answer he wanted, he’d just retry or rephrase until he did.

I think the other half of the problem is that LLM users can be very good at pushing the LLM into doing confirmation bias. It’s much easier when you can hit the retry button with no side effects, unlike a human who will recognize what you’re trying to do when you keep asking different variations of a question until you get the answer you want.
by westurner | 2025-05-26 23:41:20+00:00
Photons certainly appear to have a real physical location with 1e9 FPS imaging capabilities:

"Visualizing video at the speed of light — one trillion frames per second" (2012) https://youtube.com/watch?v=EtsXgODHMWk&

But is there an identity function for a photon(s), and is "time-polarization" necessary for defining an identity function for photons?
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-05-26 23:41:22+00:00
>processes by which the car is assembled

Jesus man, stop. What industry are you in?

Because if it isn’t automotive, just stop. And if it is automotive, have your managers send you to a plant.

It’s like you think someone is turning wrenches to assemble your car :D short version… wrenches are not allowed in major production lines of any brand.
by momoschili | 2025-05-26 23:43:20+00:00
Contrary to the prior commenter, there is definitely significant engineering going toward this, but it's not clear or likely that photonic computing will supplant electronic computing (at least not anytime soon), but rather most seem to think of it as an accelerator for highly parallel tasks. Two major ways people are thinking of achieving this are using lithium niobate devices which mediate nonlinear optical effects via light-matter interaction, and silicon photonic devices with electrically tunable elements. In the past there was a lot of work with III-V semiconductors (GaAs/InAs/GaN/AlN etc) but that seems to have leveled off in favor of lithium niobate.

Photonics has definitely proved itself in communications and linear computing, but still has a way to in terms of general (nonlinear) compute.
by sokoloff | 2025-05-26 23:43:26+00:00
We bring our reusable bags in and reuse them ourself. They sit flat in the cart and don’t bother us while shopping.

I wouldn’t want to take a bag that someone else had used and was poorly cleaned, especially given how little trouble it is to just manage and reuse my own (including cleaning them ourself if we spill meat juice or something on them).

A Blue Rhino propane tank just has to hold propane; there’s no need for it to be particularly clean; as a result, I don’t care what tank I get in exchange.
by tetromino_ | 2025-05-26 23:44:07+00:00
She was on a tourist visa. I do not know whether the sausage was genetically modified - the customs agent confiscated it, so I did not get to meet it. Yes, she deliberately tried to conceal the sausage and lied that she had nothing to declare.

> You can't really be trying to say bringing an undeclared food item into the US is the same as intentionally smuggling genetic modified animals into the country?

I am saying precisely that. The reason why certain food items must be declared is that that those food items can contain various invasive microorganism species which have the potential to damage US agriculture and natural ecosystems.

And I am saying that this law was never enforced beyond a token slap on the wrist except in extraordinary egregious cases, which a frozen laboratory frog is not.
by proc0 | 2025-05-26 23:44:52+00:00
You can derive #3 from first principles of how the underlying gradient descent and backpropagation work. They approximate functions, therefore when it gets something wrong it means something went wrong with either the gradient descent or back propagation, or the training data.

We're not talking about getting a certain math question wrong (humans make mistakes like this). We're talking about ridiculous mistakes that are completely random and that humans would never make. I would even go as far to say that calling them mistakes is a stretch. The algorithm simply did not capture some mapping between the prompt and the output answer.

This is not how humans make mistakes. Humans build knowledge in some kind of logical knowledge tree, and mistakes arise from how this mechanism works (which we don't know exactly how, but we can certainly conclude it is completely different than transformers and LLMs). Most humans don't make random mistakes but rather something like logical mistakes.

tl;dr; It's clear to me LLMs make mistakes in such a way that exposes their simple underlying mechanism, as oppose to humans who make mistakes that contain rich layers of logical reasoning.