MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nickpsecurity | 2025-05-05 16:17:45+00:00
While the others are correct, I'm with you in the sense that I don't know if what they claim is true. I've also found others, like one in Singapore, that didn't use it on data that was as legal as news reports claimed. It might turn out to have problems.

There is benefit to using them, though. For one, they've tried really hard to be legal. That sets a positive example, shows good faith if they were sued, and reduces risk for those using them (good faith on our part). Also, one can be sure that they can ditch or replace any outputs in the long term if they're ruled illegal. So, we try not to use the A.I.'s in a way where losing access to them seriously damages our business.

That's the best I can offer until legal reforms happen.

If training, one can train it in Singapore on material you he or she has legal access to. Their law pretty much let's you use anything for AI purposes so long as you legally can access it yourself. To further reduce the risk, they should crawl it themselves, too, taking care to avoid risky sources.
by lrock1 | 2025-05-05 16:18:00+00:00
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by tverbeure | 2025-05-05 16:18:39+00:00
I've been doing more measurements after some discussions on discord after publishing the blog post. There's definitely some kind of interleaving going on, but even when applying a square wave at the input (that gets displayed perfectly fine on the scope CRT) there is a lot of noise on the ADC input that can't be explained away. I will update the blog post tonight after doing more measurements.

Some people have also suggested deliberate addition of a pseudo-random signal that gets removed after sampling to counteract some CCD issues. But I don't know how that would work either.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-05-05 16:18:47+00:00
> actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.

I don't see it as a bad thing really. Can't say about all professions but in mine (software engineering) I've seen many professionals who has decades of experience and still do things poorly, take bad decisions and make outright incorrect statements.

There's nothing wrong with politely asking questions and consistently challenging the logic shared by professionals. Maybe you'll learn something from them, maybe you'll learn that they are incompetent. Either way, some useful information.
by jdiff | 2025-05-05 16:18:50+00:00
There are clear factual errors in the underlying assumptions of what was stated about water fluoridation. Those are simply table stakes for having a discussion about anything at all. If one thinks that water fluoridation is useful "just for a few seconds," that it's not done outside of the United States, that it's a replacement for toothpaste, that it's a vital chemical, or that we don't fortify other foods, then they do not know enough about the topic to talk about it, let alone hold the opinion that they know better.

If someone came in with a curious mindset, that'd be one thing. But this is someone walking into a room with an agenda (get rid of fluoride) and a shocking lack of knowledge about that agenda.
by msl | 2025-05-05 16:19:19+00:00
If you happen to have Randal Munroe's what if? [1] on your bookshelf, look up the chapter titled "Sparta". It should convince you that the story of arrows blocking the sun is probably not true.

If you don't have it, you could try to do the math yourself. Munroe assumes that 1) an arrow intercepts 40 cm² of sunlight, 2) an archer looses 8 to 10 arrows a minute and 3) each arrow spends an average of three seconds in flight. You could adjust those numbers to taste, but I would not expect the conclusion to change.

[1] https://xkcd.com/what-if/
by paxys | 2025-05-05 16:20:14+00:00
"I went on a weekend trip and didn't invite friend A, so I hope friend B keeps it a secret and doesn't tell anyone I was there" is the kind of social dynamic that people grow out of in high school. If you are having trouble with it as an adult then it isn't really Instagram's fault. People talk to each other and share stuff, and sometimes they talk about you, both online and offline. Just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people. They are adults as well, and care about it less than you think.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-05 16:20:28+00:00
Last time they fought, it was google vs. the publishers, and it resulted in the scanning and archiving of all of those books in the first place.

Neither of them died, though, both parties just kept all the books from the public and used them for their own purposes, while normal people had to squirrel them away and trade them illegally. It's the Tech Cartels vs. the Copyright Trolls. It'll end up as a romance.
by alganet | 2025-05-05 16:21:07+00:00
Are we doing free will versus determinism?

That's a fun discussion. I'll play free will. Let me use the classic:

We already know that sensing is related to consciousness. What no one was able to prove is that is all there is to it.

Some might say it's a lame disguise for defending the existence of the soul, but that's a lame accusation.

The angle of unfeasibility just neutralizes the whole argument. This is not a spaghetti monster in the garage argument, humans feel consciousness first hand. It's not about the existence of it, it's about proving it.

Believing it's an illusion (emergent phenomena, quantum, etc) implies belief as much as the opinion that it is not.

Did I miss anything?
by alex1115alex | 2025-05-05 16:21:09+00:00
Our team is filled with language learning nerds. Something we found while learning Chinese and being in China is that one of the hardest parts of language learning are the uncommon words.

For example, when a native speaker says something like:

"The manufacturing happens on 6th floor",

We'll know the words for

"The [unknown] happens on the 6th floor",

but not the word for "manufacturing".

Our strategy is to fill these gaps, and only these gaps. This way, we can learn uncommon words faster over time without having to rely on full-on translation as a crutch.
by amlib | 2025-05-05 16:21:37+00:00
I can arrange a series of bricks in many ways to try and build a wall but that doesn't mean I will automatically get a good result if my process (like a ML training algorithm) doesn't precisely arrange then in a manner that produces a rigid wall with the desired characteristics. In the same vein you can have a fancy neural network arranged by some fancy LLM training algorithm with gobs of data about a subject but current methods likely won't produce anything with the depth of "understanding" that a human can do. It's a crumbly wall that falls once you do any real inspection or put any real load into it.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-05 16:22:15+00:00
The Secretary of the Army is adding right-to-repair provisions to its procurement contracts.

“Identify and propose contract modifications for right to repair provisions where intellectual property constraints limit the Army's ability to conduct maintenance and access the appropriate maintenance tools, sofiware, and technical data - while preserving the intellectual capital of American industry. Seek to include right to repair provisions in all existing contracts and also ensure these provisions are included in all new contracts.”
Show HN: We Asked 10 LLMs – A Daily Game Where You Guess What AI Thinks
by arbayi | 2025-05-05 16:22:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a simple daily game called WeAsked10LLMs. It's inspired by Family Feud and Wordle.

Each day, we ask an open-ended question (like “Name a programming language beginners often learn”) to 10 different AI models. We collect their answers and build a list. The more models gave the same answer, the more points that answer is worth.

User goal: guess the answers AI gave, get points for each correct guess, but you only have 3 chances to make a mistake. Share your results on X.

It’s like Wordle + Family Feud, but with LLMs.

I vibe-coded the first version and will keep improving it. It’s open source — would love feedback or ideas!

To try: https://weasked10llms.vercel.app/ Repo: https://github.com/baturyilmaz/weasked10llms
by wirehack | 2025-05-05 16:22:17+00:00
> Is there a way to run it locally/self-host?

Yes our github page has README for all MCP servers and clients. You can checkout https://github.com/Klavis-AI/klavis.

> Are there discovery endpoints to list the available servers?

Yes. https://docs.klavis.ai/api-reference/mcp-server/get-all-serv.... And we are adding more MCP servers.

> Testing and Eval

Yes it is early access now. If you are interested, shoot me an email at xiangkaiz@klavis.ai and we can talk more.
by tverbeure | 2025-05-05 16:22:48+00:00
This whole exercise started because I wanted to see if it's possible to add a sniffer to the memory chips of the TDS 684B so that I can use it as the analog frontend of a USB scope. It's not possible because of this CCD trick.

I've also looked at the existence of CCD memory, but it doesn't seem to be a thing anymore. I didn't find any such modern chips.
by indymike | 2025-05-05 16:22:53+00:00
Agincourt was interesting because mud (a combination of rain and fresh plowed fields) reduced infantry and cavalry mobility. The opening cavalry charge made the muddy battlefield worse, and the combination of mud and stakes on the ground injured the horses. The French were heavily armored, causing men-at-arms to sink up to their knees in mud. English longbowmen were able fire arrows into the french men-at-arms who were literally stuck in the mud until they ran out of arrows. The decisive moment was when English archers ran out of arrows and attacked the exhausted French with the hatchets and mallets they used to make and drive the stakes into their defensive positions.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-05 16:23:08+00:00
That's not really true. Models train (in greatly simplified way) by being shown an excerpt and being told to guess the next token from the excerpt. They push around their weights until the token they output matches the next token in the excerpt. Then the excerpt is no longer needed. You can think of it like the article is loaded, the LLM plays this token guessing game through it, then the article is discarded. On the face of it this is what happens, but it gets hairier depending on how exactly this process is done. But it is seemingly not far removed from how humans consume content (acquire, read, discard), hence the legal blur.
by epcoa | 2025-05-05 16:24:00+00:00
What is an arbitrary TCP port? Ports in isolation from an IP address aren't inherently arbitrary, they're nothing, and the IP:port pair is arbitrary. Once you allow connections to any host on the internet the port doesn't really matter - you can do whatever nefarious shit over port 80. And not allowing apps to connect to external internet servers seems pretty limiting.
by klibertp | 2025-05-05 16:25:16+00:00
You might live in another country where the situation is different, or maybe my experiences are outdated (20 years later, they might be). What I remember is unfairness and corruption, feudal-like relationships, tons of wasted time on things I didn't sign up for and things I already knew but couldn't say I know for fear of retaliation. I was still better than people going to private institutions: on top of all that, they were also extorted for money at every turn. ...thinking about it, yeah, I really hope my experience is outdated.
by whs | 2025-05-05 16:26:22+00:00
To add on this point, in my interaction with AWS employees it seems that

- The account manager and the enterprise support TAM can view a list of all resources on the account, including metadata like resource name, instance type and cost explorer tags. Enterprise support routinely present a monthly cost review with us, so it is clear that they can always access this information without our explicit consent. They do not have the ability to view detailed internal information about it though, such as internal logs.

- When opening support case, the ticketing system ask for resource ARN which may contains the name. It seems that the support team can view some data about that object including monitoring data and internal logs, but potentially accessing "customer data" (such as ssh-ing into an RDS instance) requires explicit, one off consent.

- I never opened any issues about IAM policy, so I don't know if they see IAM role policy document

- It seems that the account ID and account name is also often used by both AWS' sales side and reseller's side. I think I read somewhere that it is possible to retrieve the AWS account ID if you know S3 bucket or something, and when exchanging data with external partner via AWS (eg. S3, VPC peering) you're required to exchange account ID to the partner.
by scrlk | 2025-05-05 16:26:27+00:00
> It'd be fun to have a book of tricks from this era.

Though it isn't a book, the Hewlett-Packard Journal is a gold mine for this type of content: https://web.archive.org/web/20120526151653/http://www.hpl.hp...

E.g. An 8-Gigasample-per-Second, 8-Bit Data Acquisition System for a Sampling Digital Oscilloscope (October 1993): https://web.archive.org/web/20120526151653/http://www.hpl.hp...
by triceratops | 2025-05-05 16:26:39+00:00
> there is also a principle that you can have ephemeral copies as part of handling and processing the work.

I'm not aware of this principle. Where is it spelled out?

> Also the result of that case was self-contradicting

I agree the verdict was a travesty. An innovative business went to ridiculous lengths to stay on the right side of the copyright mafia (data centers with tiny individual TV antennas for each subscriber FFS!) while providing a better product and experience. They still had the hammer brought down on them.
by Cerpicio | 2025-05-05 16:26:43+00:00
Just curious, when you say you do LEGOs, you mean buy a set and follow the instructions (which is fine and what I assume people mean when they talk about LEGOs)? Or do you mean sit with a pile of LEGOs and come up with your own ships/cars/toys? When I was a kid (70's/80's) we would just get boxes of bricks and make our own things, but it seems like pre-built sets are the most popular thing now. And yes we have plenty of pre-build sets in our house, but I feel like kids are missing out on the free-style aspect.
by stevenAthompson | 2025-05-05 16:26:47+00:00
The purpose of copyright is it progress the arts and sciences. Not to guarantee profit. Guaranteeing profit is just the way we encourage people to progress the arts and sciences.

That is why so called derivative works are allowed (and even encouraged). If copyrighted material is ingested, modified or enhanced to add value, and then regurgitated that is legal, whereas copying it without adding value is not legal.

If derivative works weren't deemed acceptable copyright would have the opposite of it's intended effect and become an impediment to progress.
by elbasti | 2025-05-05 16:26:57+00:00
Last year I took a smartphone holiday for 4 months (switched to a dumbphone). It was a fantastic time and I regret "falling off the wagon" and getting a smartphone again.

I noticed a huge number of benefits, but one of the most surprising was that it forced me to confront a number of difficult decisions.

There were a few times in which I was bored (waiting at the passport office, sitting on a plane) in which I started to think about decisions I had to make that were very difficult in ways that caused me anxiety: firing a person I'm good friends with, shutting down a company, stuff like that.

I realized that ordinarily I would simply refuse to engage with the decision: I'd get on my phone or "get busy" somehow and so simply postpone thinking about the issue indefinitely.

But when you're stuck at the passport office for 2 hours with nothing to do, you can't but help think about the thing that is top of mind, anxiety be damned.

For someone that is prone to anxiety around certain topics (conflict avoidance, "disappointing" people, etc) having times in which I was forced to engage with the topic had truly enormous benefits.
by pmarreck | 2025-05-05 16:27:03+00:00
> pointing out the incredibly anti-social behaviour of wanting to outsource socializing

Excellently and succinctly stated.

I guess I was considering it an adjunct to socializing, or a filter on who to socialize with. Not a substitute. Have you ever spent a few minutes talking to someone only to realize that you had nothing in common? Have you ever met someone you had things in common with but it was at the very end of an event when there was no more time (or when it would be too awkward or too soon) to exchange contact info with? Well, this tech might have captured those.

Another example- There are people in the world who literally cannot stand having their beliefs get poked and prodded, and who in fact react violently if this poking and prodding (which is really just "curious probing") includes evidence against something they believe. I had a woman actually scream at me at a cocktail party once when I challenged her blank-slate hypothesis by citing Hassett/Siebert/Wallen (2008) (notably, the experimental conclusions from this study have since been challenged numerous times, which wasn't the case when that occurred years ago- I'm not here to defend it, only to point out an example). It would have been wonderful if I could have avoided that embarrassment by filtering out people who cannot tolerate a difference of evidence-backed opinion and gone straight to the people who love to debate stuff. Picture an AI whispering into my tiny earpiece, "this person, whose name is April, will likely not react well to the heretical poking and prodding you usually enjoy doing at these things."

> No more of that time wasting! I could be hustling!

LOL. Fair enough. As a friend recently pointed out to me, "if you really want efficiency in government, you'll end up with an autocratic dictatorship." Perhaps "optimizing the hell out of certain things" ruins them, or at least passes some point where the on-balance total cost is too high.

I'd love to "run the experiment" in real life!
by p_ing | 2025-05-05 16:27:07+00:00
There's this radical new invention. It's called...

Pen and paper.

It will work BETTER than your system at allowing you to actually remember stuff! Amazeballs! Near-zero emissions! Requires zero watts of electricity! Substitutes as emergency TP! Bet your LLM can't do that!

Or just solve the problem permanently and don't date.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-05-05 16:27:24+00:00
"Oracularizing AI" has a lot of mileage.

It's not too much to say that AI, LLMs in particular, satisfy the requisites to be considered a form of divination. ie:

1. Indirection of meaning - certainly less than the Tarot, I Ching, or runes, but all text is interpretive. Words in a Saussurian way are always signifiers to the signified, or in Barthes's death of the author[2] - precise authorial intention is always inaccessible.

2. A sign system or semiotic field - obvious in this case: human language.

3. Assumed access to hidden knowledge - in the sense that LLM datasets are popularly known to contain all the worlds knowledge, this necessarily includes hidden knowledge.

4. Ritualized framing - Approaching an LLM interface is the digital equivalent to participating in other divinatory practices. It begins with setting the intention - to seek an answer. The querent accesses the interface, formulates a precise question by typing, and commits to the act by submitting the query.

They also satisfy several of the typical but not necessary aspects of divinatory practices:

5. Randomization - The stochastic nature of token sampling naturally results in random sampling.

6. Cosmological backing - There is an assumption that responses correspond to the training set and indirectly to the world itself. Meaning embedded in the output correspond in some way - perhaps not obviously - to meaning in the world.

7. Trained interpreter - In this case, as in many divinatory systems, the interpreter and querent are the same.

8. Feedback loop - ChatGPT for example is obviously a feedback loop. Responses naturally invite another query and another - a conversation.

It's often said that sharing AI output is much like sharing dreams - only meaningful to the dreamer. In this framework, sharing AI responses are more like sharing Tarot card readings. Again, only meaningful to the querent. They feel incredibly personalized like horoscopes, but it's unclear whether that meaning is inherent to the output or simply the querents desire to imbue the output with by projecting their meaning onto it.

Like I said, I feel like there's a lot of mileage in this perspective. It explains a lot about why people feel a certain way about AI and hearing about AI. It's also a bit unnerving; we created another divinatory practice and a HUGE chunk of people participate and engage with it without calling it such and simply believing it, mostly because it doesn't look like Tarot or runes, or I Ching even though ontologically it fills the same role.

Notes: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signified_and_signifier

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
by firefoxd | 2025-05-05 16:27:45+00:00
The social etiquette argument has been thrown away with the bath water. You are now the weirdo with something to hide when you are not on Instagram or Tiktok.

The term I like is Social Cooling, the subtle way in which people change their behavior because they are both present in person and online. Have you ever heard some use the term "unalive" in person? It's as if they are protecting themselves from an algorithm, as if the conversation will be posted online.
by BizarroLand | 2025-05-05 16:27:48+00:00
My guess is they decided it was "gross" and so they'd rather suffer.

This way they get the benefit of complaining about their suffering without criticism because it's a social faux pas to tell a person to undergo a medical procedure just as much as it's frowned upon to mock someone for suffering from a medical illness, even though the fix for their medical condition is getting an enema and sticking a couple of pills up their hee-hoo.