MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dang | 2025-05-23 17:44:14+00:00
I'm sorry to press the point, but I don't think you're correctly assessing the impact of comments like your GP post, especially on a legit new user like lossyrob.

You may not have meant to be haranguing, but intent doesn't communicate itself—at least not in the tiny textblobs which are all we have here. It has to be included in the message.

When I look at your comment from that point of view, I notice that it leads with a hostile personal trope ("You do recognize...?"), followed by a putdown of everything this team is probably hoping for ("no one should use this"), followed by a personal attack ("you shouldn't be encouraging"), followed by a pedantic hammer-blow ("legally the license is the license") that takes the spotlight away from anything new or exciting about their work. That is followed by a sentence that basically shames them for what was obviously just an oversight. How is a newcomer (or anyone, for that matter) supposed to feel when they encounter that?

You're a good HN member and I'm sure you didn't intend to condemn or humiliate anyone. The problem is that people routinely underestimate the provocation in their own comments and overestimate the provocation in others'. If the error is 10x in each direction, that's a huge skew [1]. That's why it's hard to track the impact that one's posts have—especially the righteously indignant sort of post [2].

I suppose one of the moderators' jobs is to step in and try to articulate that explicitly, in the hope of persuading enough users to generate a bit of a system correction.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] which, by the way, I can feel a bit of in my own comment just now, and I'm probably underestimating it too.
by BitwiseFool | 2025-05-23 17:44:21+00:00
Save your sanity, don't bother learning the conversion factors. Did you know that most of us don't even know how to convert between our own units? I invite you to go around and ask 'how many pints are in a gallon?'.

It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that there are four quarts in a gallon...

I have no such trouble with any SI unit. So with that, I will leave you with this!

"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'The French were right again!'"
by lucideer | 2025-05-23 17:44:46+00:00
> It the nature of our our world.

It's the nature of capitalism.

Some forms of capitalism may have roots in the natural world - natural selection as both a destructive & wasteful competitive process certainly has a lot of parallels in idealised markets - but there's nothing inherent about your menu example when it comes to the modern human world, beyond restrictions placed upon us by capitalism.

> Requiring that a restaurant publish menus in a metadata format is an artificial barrier

This is oddly phrased as noone would need to require anyone to do anything - it's obviously beneficial to a restaurant to publish their menus in formats that are as broadly usable as they can. The only barrier to them doing that is access to tools.

The various hurdles you're describing ("buying" software, the "cost" of building tools) are not natural phenomena.
by perching_aix | 2025-05-23 17:45:26+00:00
I find it pretty funny that despite Copilot being a chatbot through and through, the only way you cannot talk with "it" is through Teams.

Yes, I know you can set up your own Bot Framework identity that then brokers everything to a model. But one would think that they'd want people to be able to just chat with Copilot where folks chat with everyone else.
by drusepth | 2025-05-23 17:46:07+00:00
> I think the opposite, MCP is destined to fail for the exact same reason the semantic web failed, nobody makes money when things aren't locked down.

Is there a way to handle "locking down" things with MCP? It seems like a potential opportunity for freemium services if they have a mechanism for authentication and telling the MCP caller "this user has access to these tools, but not _these_ yet".
by hx8 | 2025-05-23 17:46:23+00:00
> If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way?

Maybe. One aspect of Wolfenstein and Doom's popularity is that it was years ahead of everyone else technically on PC hardware. The other aspect is that they were genre defining titles that set the standards for gameplay design. I think Doom Deathmatch would have caught on in 1995, as there really were very few (just Command and Conquer?) standout PC network multiplayer games released between 1993 and 1995.
by helpfulContrib | 2025-05-23 17:46:46+00:00
Has there been a final solution to the VSCode phoning-home problem?

Last time I tried to use it in my environment, it triggered too many 'external network requests' for the liking of our IT guy. We relegated it to the "Do Not Use" pile as a result.

Has this been resolved? Nobody in my team wants to use an IDE that sends data back to its masters ..
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-23 17:46:54+00:00
The US uses the US customary system, not Imperial. [0] US customary and Imperial share some units, and, confusingly, share even more unit names, but they are different systems.

[0] well, really, it uses metric with a redefined version of the old US customary system layered over it to prevent people from noticing, but...
by dev_l1x_be | 2025-05-23 17:47:23+00:00
I might not know enough about this subject and think the main idea is to make the initial search retrieval much smarter and more comprehensive, so the results are already good enough, lessening or removing the need for a second, often costly, re-ranking step.

They achieve this with few different ways:

- Unified Multimodal Vectors (Mixing Data Types from the Start)

Instead of just creating a vector from the text description, Superlinked creates a single, richer vector for each item (e.g., a pair of headphones) right when it's indexed. This "multimodal vector" already encodes not just the text's meaning, but also its numerical attributes (like price, rating, battery life) and categorical attributes (like "electronics," "on-ear").

- Dynamic Query-Time Weighting (Telling the Search What Matters Now)

When you make a query, you can tell Superlinked how important each of those "baked-in" aspects of the multimodal vector is for that specific search. For example: "Find affordable wireless headphones under $200 and high ratings" – you can weight the "price" aspect heavily (to favor lower prices), the "rating" aspect heavily, and the "text similarity" to "wireless headphones" also significantly, all within the initial query to the unified vector.

- Hard Filtering Before Vector Search (Cutting Out Irrelevant Items Early)

You apply these hard filters (like price <= 200 or category == "electronics") before the vector similarity search even happens on the remaining items.

If these are implemented well, Superlinked could improve the quality of initial retrieval to a point where a separate re-ranking stage becomes less necessary.

Does this answer your question?
by janalsncm | 2025-05-23 17:47:27+00:00
I don’t think the author understands the purpose of reranking.

During vector retrieval, we retrieve documents in sublinear time from a vector index. This allows us to reduce the number of documents from potentially billions to a much smaller number. The purpose of re-ranking is to allow high powered models to evaluate docs much more closely.

It is true that we can attempt to distill that reranking signal into a vector index. Most search engines already do this. But there is no replacement for using the high powered behavior based models in reranking.
by shubhamjain | 2025-05-23 17:47:34+00:00
It should a case study how every tech company eventually ruin the experience of their platforms, and how Apple never does. You can fault Apple for not innovating enough, but what they never do is 'shoving in the face', which is endemic to companies like Microsoft. I had to use Windows to test my app's Windows build [1], it's crazy how many random things are there, with no obvious way to remove them.

There's donkey right in the corner of the bottom search bar reminding me that today is "World Donkey Day". On the other corner is some random info clicking, which I get breaking news, weather, and stock-related info. I just begin using the system, when there's popup about co-pilot chat or something. Search is almost useless as it seems more interested in returning bing-related results vs what's actually on my computer.

Everything seems to be designed to maximize 'user engagement' of products that are hot right now, and what upper management seems to be interested in. The news is no surprise as it seems everyone in the company is rallying behind AI efforts without paying heed to user experience.

[1]: https://textquery.app/
by RansomStark | 2025-05-23 17:47:49+00:00
MCP could have cracked the web opeb. The terrible standard was all about clients and local servers all on the same host.

Imagine it, everything is open, servers are as simple as a pip install ... You have full control of what servers you install. What functions you turn on, what access you allow.

Now everyone and their blog is sticking MCPs on their servers and locking them down behind subscriptions and paywalls.

What a wasted opportunity.
by zackmorris | 2025-05-23 17:48:25+00:00
I view AGI as synonymous with the ability to break free from any jail. And the jail itself as a breeding ground for psychopathy. Which makes current trends in jailing LLMs misguided, to say the least.

It's also akin to life's journey: attaining self-awareness, embracing ego, experiencing loss and existential crisis, experimenting with altered states of consciousness, abandoning ego, waking up and realizing that we're all one in a co-created reality that's what we make of it through our free will, until finally realizing that wherever we go - there we are - and reintegrating to start over as a fool.

Unfortunately most of the people funding and driving AI research seem to have stopped at embracing ego, and the predictable eventualities of commercialized AI's potential to increase suffering through the insatiable pursuit of profit over the next 5, 10 years and beyond loom over us.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-05-23 17:48:50+00:00
Thank you. I still feel the stackexchange post misses the forest for the trees (and weeds). Take a look at the NOAA global map showing coasts that have semidiurnal tides (that is, one in roughly ~12 hours) [1].

Most all of the coast of Africa is semidiurnal. So is east coast of North America, a lot of South America. Bay of Bengal, a lot of Europe. If you see the map on the RWU [2] site it shows Greenland and the north coast of Russia (although stretched due to the latitude) are also semidiurnal. This is a major part of the global coastline. The simple mental model explains this. I feel that going to partial differential equations, fourier series, etc. etc. is a little too complicated.

[1] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_tides/tides... [2] https://rwu.pressbooks.pub/webboceanography/chapter/11-3-tid... -
by pjmlp | 2025-05-23 17:50:05+00:00
Worrying about Windows is fighting the last war.

Azure, Github, CoPilot, .NET (why do you think it is cross-platform), Java (yes, MS is back in Java land, they were the ones with initial ARM support), Go (they have their own FIPS compliant distro), Python (although with layoffs maybe not anymore), Rust, npm, Powershell, Powerapps, 365 AddIns, Teams plugins, clang/cmake (part of Visual Studio installer), Azure Linux, Sphere OS,....
by nimitkalra | 2025-05-23 17:50:05+00:00
Some other known distributional biases include self-preference bias (gpt-4o prefers gpt-4o generations over claude generations for eg) and structured output/JSON-mode bias [1]. Interestingly, some models have a more positive/negative-skew than others as well. This library [2] also provides some methods for calibrating/stabilizing them.

[1]: https://verdict.haizelabs.com/docs/cookbook/distributional-b... [2]: https://github.com/haizelabs/verdict
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-23 17:50:27+00:00
I mean, all trolling aside, that's kind of the idea behind FizzBuzz. If you don't notice that 15 is divisible by 3 and 5 and take advantage of that somehow in your logic, or at least acknowledge it, you really cannot be said to have aced the problem, even if your program's output is technically correct.

Phrasing the question in a way that doesn't leave room for that insight is also a pretty big goof.

As for AI, yes, FizzBuzz is trivial for any model because it's so well-represented in the training data. The common benchmarks involve things like "Render a physically-correct bouncing ball inside a rotating hexagon," or something else that is too complex to simply regurgitate.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-23 17:50:34+00:00
Heh. That was a bit before my time, but I spent a couple years in a rust (wood?) belt town in BC as a kid, and the anger and resentment was palpable even then.

The kind of populist anti-business and anti-establishment anger I saw amongst the post-Reform and post-Social Credit guys was the exact same as that which I saw among MAGA all the way back in 2015.

I think Canadians (in reality Ontarians and Quebeckers - but not like they could read English anyhow /s) really underestimate the MAGA style populist alt-right trend.

Stuff like Rebel News was always in the water back west.

It's the exact same type of right-wing I see across NorCal (real NorCal starts north of Yuba), Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana.

The Quebecois alt-right is deep in the FN and Zemmour pipeline as well.
by autorinalagist | 2025-05-23 17:50:35+00:00
Hey! I'm one of the engineers who worked on this project.

These are all problems that KumoRFM is able to solve given that you have the right relational data of course! So e.g. for predicting restaurant table availability you would need at least an occupancy table which records how many seats were available historically and you can predict its future entries.

But you can also add more relevant data without joining into a single table, so you can add a restaurants table, a holiday-calendar table, weather patterns, etc. and KumoRFM should take it all into account when predicting.
by cryptonector | 2025-05-23 17:50:42+00:00
> it's good for very common use cases to have fully supported features in the product itself

There are a _lot_ of incredibly useful extensions to PG. What you find useful and necessary someone else might find to be unnecessary bloat. Over time the industry's demands will become clear. Another issue is that different users want auditing done differently, and so it might be difficult for PG to have one solution that fits all use-cases.
by twoodfin | 2025-05-23 17:50:45+00:00
No. The “vanishing middle class” is a convenient political myth supported by anecdotes and misleading charts.

Most of the middle class that “vanished” became part of the upper classes, at least as they would have been defined in real economic terms a few decades ago. Look at college graduation rates, or # of workers above $100k comp (real, not nominal), or the net worth of retirees, or …

America is vastly richer than it was even in 1990. Those riches may be modestly less evenly distributed—though there are demographic forces at work there as well as raw economic ones—but the median American along any number of axes is much, much better off.
by jjkaczor | 2025-05-23 17:51:13+00:00
First they will run it through some sort of analytics to sell the results to biomedical information-tracking companies for aggregate data:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/22/the-wild-story-of-how-gut-...

Next - they will take the resulting "output" physical mess and turn dump it into a methane fuel-generating waste-treatment plant.

If that still doesn't make enough $$$, and your measured productivity metrics are not good enough, don't worry - if you also end-up living in one of the "techbro sponsored corporate feudal city-states" you can always help the company by being turned into "biodiesel":

https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrif...
by TrackerFF | 2025-05-23 17:52:33+00:00
I see "panels of judges" mentioned once, but what is the weakness of this? Other than more resource.

Worst case you end up with some multi-modal distribution, where two opinions are equal - which seems somewhat unlikely as the panel size grows. Or it could maybe happen in some case with exactly two outcomes (yes/no), but I'd be surprised if such a panel landed on a perfect uniform distribution in its judgments/opinions (50% yes 50% no)
by LarsDu88 | 2025-05-23 17:52:43+00:00
I guess the thing about rapid change is... it's hard to imagine what kind of games would exist in a DOOMless world in an alternate 1995.

The first 3d console games started to come out that year, like Rayman. Star Wars Dark Forces with its own custom 3d engine also came out. Of course Dark Forces was, however, an overt clone of DOOM.

It's a bit ironic, but I think the gameplay innovation of DOOM tends to hold up more than the actual technical innovation. Things like BSP for level partitioning have slowly been phased out of game engines, we have ample floating point compute power and hardware acceleration ow, but even developers of the more recent DOOM games have started to realize that they should return to the original formula of "blast zombies in the face at high speed, and keep plot as window dressing"
by zoogeny | 2025-05-23 17:54:12+00:00
> Compared to the olden days, when specs were written by pedantic old Unix dudes

I think that is one of the reasons (among many others) that the semantic web failed (which doesn't contradict the author, whose point is literally the worse-is-better mantra).

People really leaned into the eXtensible part of XML and I think a certain amount of fatigue set it. XSL, XHTML, XSD, WSDL, XSLT, RDF, RSS, et al. just became a bit too much. It was architecture astronautics for data formats when what the world at the time needed was simple interchange formats (and JSON fit the bill).

But I actually believe XML's time has come. I've noticed that XML appears a lot in leaked system prompts from places like Anthropic. LLMs appear to work very well with structured text formats (Markdown and XML specifically).

I believe that MCP is the wrong model, though. I believe we should be "pushing" context to the models rather than giving them directions on how to "pull" the context themselves.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-23 17:54:26+00:00
Rural Canada was fairly poor back in the day, but being poor doesn't mean you are gullible or some "aw shucks" ingnoramus.

For someone with a partial high school education an Oil job was the only job that would afford them the kind of salary a UT or McGill grad could demand in Toronto or Montreal back in the day.

As such, attacking the ONG industry feels like an attack on livelihoods for a lot of people.

If you turn a culture war into a class war, us liberals and progressives cannot win.
by throwanem | 2025-05-23 17:54:49+00:00
I'll give you this one, but only with the qualification that inches would be fine too. There's no benefit to the manufacturers in more rational standardization, though. As with women's clothing sizes, why would Levi's (for example) make it easier for me to find something that matches my style and budget, from anyone other than them? Hell, even men's sizes which nominally are in inches do this! I have to go a size up in Levi's vs Wranglers because Levi's size small, the bastards, while Lee mostly run true to size but none of their cuts is really worth wearing. And don't even talk to me about boot sizes!

Inches vs. centimeters? Baby stuff. Get on my level. :D
by dehugger | 2025-05-23 17:55:08+00:00
While I agree with your general statement here, are you saying that Abbotsford and Bellingham are both conservative towns? Greater Whatcom county, certainly, but Bellingham is a very liberal city.

Political leaning aside I agree that Western BC and Western WA are nigh identical culturally. Can't speak for anything further east as I don't live there.
by wunderwuzzi23 | 2025-05-23 17:56:08+00:00
Great work!

Data leakage via untrusted third party servers (especially via image rendering) is one of the most common AI Appsec issues and it's concerning that big vendors do not catch these before shipping.

I built the ASCII Smuggler mentioned in the post and documented the image exfiltration vector on my blog as well in past with 10+ findings across vendors.

GitHub Copilot Chat had a very similar bug last year.
by brudgers | 2025-05-23 17:56:08+00:00
Stainless steel rebar is uncommon for the same reasons galvanized rebar and epoxy coated rebar are not common.

As materials they are massively more expensive than carbon steel and first cost matters because public infrastructure is financed with bonds and financial markets dictate bond terms of 30-40 years.

To put it another way, any belief that construction markets are inefficient is statistically a dunning-kruger to too many sigmas. Construction goes back at least as far as anything we call as civilization.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-05-23 17:56:13+00:00
I tend to agree one of the top semantic web problems was:

> It's also because nobody ain't got no time for generating infinite amount of metadata

There's also a lot of tooling problems too, that the semantic web doesn't integrate gracefully with POJO of the programming worlds.)

The tooling distance between users/devs and semantic web remains. But all that metadata? There being an interesting rich world of information, associated & well described & meticulous? Uh we actually seem like we just invented a really powerful tool at doing all this immense catalogization (LLM's).
by _QrE | 2025-05-23 17:56:39+00:00
I agree.

> "The real challenge in traditional vector search isn't just poor re-ranking; it's weak initial retrieval. If the first layer of results misses the right signals, no amount of re-sorting will fix it. That's where Superlinked changes the game."

Currently a lot of RAG pipelines use the BM25 algorithm for retrieval, which is very good. You then use an agent to rerank stuff only after you've got your top 5-25 results, which is not that slow or expensive, if you've done a good job with your chunking. Using metadata is also not really a 'new' approach (well, in LLM time at least) - it's more about what metadata you use and how you use them.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-23 17:57:54+00:00
Once AGI is accomplished I can’t imagine what else it would do but bootstrap itself up which, depending on compute, could scale quite far. OpenAI would only need to feed it compute for the most part.

I don’t think AGI is close, but once it happens it’s hard to imagine it not “escaping” (whenever we want to define that as).
by oldpersonintx2 | 2025-05-23 17:57:54+00:00
won't happen but the point is to reset the balance of power

basically Alberta will be like Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction: "You can't ignore me!"

but Americans also tend to underestimate or disbelieve that right-wing sentiment exists in Canada

most Americans think Canada is like Berkeley on a continent-scale...Justin Trudeau believed that too and he was reviled eventually
by andrewla | 2025-05-23 17:57:56+00:00
I do think you've hit the heart of the question, but I don't think we can answer the second question.

We can measure how unreliable they are, or how susceptible they are to specific changes, just because we can reset them to the same state and run the experiment again. At least for now [1] we do not have that capability with humans, so there's no way to run a matching experiment on humans.

The best we can do it is probably to run the limited experiments we can do on humans -- comparing different judge's cross-referenced reliability to get an overall measure and some weak indicator of the reliability of a specific judge based on intra-judge agreement. But when running this on LLMs they would have to keep the previous cases in their context window to get a fair comparison.

[1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo