MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ykl | 2025-05-22 07:56:38+00:00
I had the incredible good fortune to cross paths with iq at Pixar; I was an intern while he was developing the Wondermoss procedural vegetation system for Brave. A bunch of us interns were already fans of his work from the demoscene world and upon learning this, he was kind enough to put together a special lecture for the interns on procedural graphics and the work he was doing for Wondermoss. That was one of the best and most mind-blowing lectures I've ever seen- for every concept he would discuss in the lecture, he would live-code a demo in front of us (this was before ShaderToy was a thing, so live-coding was something nobody had ever really seen before), and halfway through the lecture he revealed that the text editor he was using was built on top of his realtime live editing graphics system and therefore could be live-coded as well. One of the things he showed us was an early version of what eventually became the BeautyPi tech demo [0]; keep in mind that this still looks incredible today and iq was demoing this for us interns in realtime 14 years ago.

Wondermoss was a spectacular piece of tech. Every single forest scene and every single piece of vegetation in Brave is made using Wondermoss, and it was all procedural- when you'd open up a shot from Brave in Menv30, you'd see just the characters and groundplane and very little else, and then you'd fire up the renderer and a huge vast lush forest would appear at rendertime. The even cooler thing was that since Brave was still using REYES RenderMan, iq took advantage of the REYES algorithm's streaming behavior to make Wondermoss not only generate but also discard vegetation on-the-fly, meaning that Wondermoss used vanishingly little memory. If I remember correctly, Wondermoss only added like a few dozen MB of memory usage at most to each render, which was insane since it was responsible for like 95% of the visual complexity of each frame. One fun quirk of Wondermoss was that the default random seed was iq's phone number, and that remained for quite a number of years, meaning his phone number is forever immortalized in pretty much all of Pixar's films from the 2010s.

iq is one of the smartest and most inspiring people I've ever met.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9CZ9UgrcZU
by ben_w | 2025-05-22 07:56:58+00:00
I'm saying both human brains and LLMs are bad at knowing when they're unsure — it may not even be possible to make an LLM that's superhuman in this regard.

Most random humans have nearly constant confidence in their answers regardless of how much they know about a topic.

--

Hmm. Stream of consciousness thoughts here:

Problem is LLMs are very broad "System 1" thinking, no "System 2". Other kinds of model that combine LLM with a more logical module? Perhaps that could work.

And if so then I guess you could use the logical module to create tokens for an LLM to learn from? Eventually, but may be inefficient.

To work, logic module needs to know what LLM gets wrong, to create tokens for LLM to learn from; if you can do that, but fine tuning is slow and expensive and still errs, so why not keep the logic separate and just have it point out mistakes and have LLM regenerate answers a few times and if that doesn't work then say "IDK"?
by auggierose | 2025-05-22 07:57:16+00:00
Clarity is relative. You can be super clear, but if it goes against what the reviewer thinks they know, it will be perceived as unclear. You can also point to references that clear up any remaining doubt about how something is meant, but of course the reviewer will never check out these references.

In the end, getting a paper accepted is a purely social game, and has not much to do with how clear your science is described, especially for truly novel research.
by js8 | 2025-05-22 07:58:14+00:00
No, it's skepticism. I think proponents of that hypothesis should come up with some testable prediction, how is that supposed "loss of quality" affecting the distribution of possible LLM outputs. Then we can have debate on it's effects and relevance to existing human cultural output. (But I already ran over various options, and the above is the conclusion I came to.)
by holowoodman | 2025-05-22 07:59:15+00:00
Decibels are completely ridiculous. They are only useful if you are a cable monkey just adding and subtracting amplification/dampening factors. As soon as you need to do any kind of non-trivial conversion or computation, dB* is more of a hindrance to understanding and simplicity, because you will always need to look up in some strange table of dB weirdness. Integrate over a spectral power density in dB/Hz? You better convert that to real metric first... Need to solder in a capacitor/resistor/coil as a filter? Better convert to real metric first, because only some pre-made filters are specified in dB (and there are quite a few weird conventions, so you better convert to real metric and check first...).
by kazinator | 2025-05-22 07:59:19+00:00
The confusing thing about decibels is not the Watts versus Volts thing.

It is the following.

If you mix two identical signals (same shape and amplitude) which are in phase, you double the voltage, and so quadruple the power, which is +6 dB.

But if you mix two unrelated signals which are about the same in amplitude, their power levels merely add, doubling the power: +3 dB.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-05-22 07:59:41+00:00
The counterpoint would be the Debian-specific loss of private key entropy [1] back in 2008. While this is now a very ancient bug, the obvious follow-up question would be: how does Debian prevent or mitigate such incidents today? Was there any later (non-security, of course) incident of similar nature?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL#Predictable_private_ke...
by wiseowise | 2025-05-22 07:59:45+00:00
> Maximizing Kotlin usage does nothing for Jetbrains directly, just creates costs.

It brings mindshare and brand value. And it brings direct revenue in business contracts (I hope they get a hefty fee for supporting Google with Android Studio).

It is also investment in the future. How many student curriculums, courses, tutorials use IntelliJ over VSCode? And how many of them convert to IntelliJ later? IntelliJ is always seen as that heavy industrial combiner for professional workers compared to nimble and hype VSCode.

> And sure it brings people to IntelliJ, more importantly, it keeps them there.

I might be a vocal minority here, but it keeps nothing but resentment in me.

> It's kinda like describing Apple as short sighted for not giving away the source code to all their frameworks. Doing so would maximise usage but that's not their goal.

Apple is trillion dollar hardware company with completely locked down ecosystem with millions (billion?) of people using their products. They can do whatever the f*k they want and developers will dance to their tune.

The comparison you’re looking for is Borland. Delphi was once far more popular than Kotlin right now, and look how it ended up.
by liamwire | 2025-05-22 07:59:45+00:00
I read the entire essay. It comes across wholly uninspired. Some thoughts:

> But do the apologists even believe it themselves? Latham, the professor of strategy, gives away the game at the end of his reverie. “None of this can happen, though,” he writes, “if professors and administrators continue to have their heads in the sand.” So it’s not inevitable after all? Whoops.

This self-assured ‘gotcha’ attitude is pungent throughout the whole piece, but this may be as good an example as any. It’s ridden with cherry-picked choices and quotes from singular actors as if they’re representative of every educator, every decision maker, and it’s such a bad look from someone that clearly knows better. I don’t expect the author to take the most charitable position, but one of intellectual honesty would be nice. To pretend there isn’t, or perhaps ignore, those out there applying technological advancement, including current AI, in education in thoughtful, meaningful, and beneficial even if challenging to quantify ways, is obtuse. To decide there isn’t the possibility of those things being true, given their exclusion, is to do the same head-burying he ridicules others for.

…

> After I got her feedback, I finally asked ChatGPT if generative AI could be considered a gimmick in Ngai’s sense. I did not read its answer carefully. Whenever I see the words cascade down my computer screen, I get a sinking feeling. Do I really have to read this? I know I am unlikely to find anything truly interesting or surprising, and the ease with which the words appear really does cheapen them.

It may have well been the author’s point, but the disdain for the technology that drips from sentences like these, which are rife throughout, taints any appreciation for the argument they’re trying to make — and I’m really trying to take it in good faith. Knowing they come in with such strongly held preconceived notions makes me reflexively question their own introspection before putting pen to paper.

Ultimately, are you writing to convince me, or yourself, of your point?
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-05-22 08:01:26+00:00
I still remember the shock I felt when first 1 bitcoin >>> 1ozt. gold [0]

Exciting that we're creating a new global economy with reserves to be held in gold, bitcoin, & SDRs [1]; perhaps bankers will stop the past decades fighting against Keynes' true economic miracle proposal: issuance of the global Bancor [2], instead of this [always silly to me] petrodollar hegemony.

[0] disclosure: I HODL small amounts of each

[1] IMF's "Special Drawing Rights," which cannot be citizen-owned

[2] wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor
by atoav | 2025-05-22 08:01:55+00:00
There are better ways, if you optimize for ease of understanding and not ease of use.

dB-based units make working between parts of a circuit, different devices etc. a breeze because adding 6dB in one part and removing it in another will result in no change in level. This is something the totally uninitated use every day in audio applications (typically that would be dBFS).

What other system do you propose? One where clipping audio has a level of 100% (0dBFS) and the dialog of a movie has 10% (-20dBFS) while the background atmo has 0.003% (-50dBFS) and the noise of the recorder has 0.000001% (-120dBFS)?

You can probably see why we use a log scale here..
by curiousObject | 2025-05-22 08:02:54+00:00
Use a hardware wallet to protect you from malware on your own devices

Split your money into smaller amounts in separate addresses to protect yourself from a malevolent smart contract that drains all the funds in an address

Check the receiving address in a blockchain explorer. Does its past activity align with the purposes of the receiving address?

Send a smaller transaction first, and wait a a few minutes to see the results, if the fee is small enough to make that acceptable
by billconan | 2025-05-22 08:03:30+00:00
Thank you for sharing! I have a question about embedding versioning/migration. I'm not sure if this research solves it?

Say I want to build an app with embedding/vector search. Currently, my embeddings are generated by model A, that is not open source. Later, I find a better embedding model B, and my new data will be using this model B. Since A and B are two different vector spaces, how can I migrate A to B, or how can I make vector search work without migrating A to B?

Can your research solve this problem? Also，if all embedding models are the same, is there a point of upgrading the model at all? some must be better trained than others?
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-22 08:03:59+00:00
Well it's not just that but also the expectation that their wages will increase. The current government is only trying to drop the minimum wage (under the guise of minimum wage earners being losers/leeches which is a strange reasoning)

And very few Americans are actually unemployed. The disappearance of manufacturing is a process that started decades ago and most people have moved on to bigger and better things. So why would they be making more in a minimum wage factory job? They will be making less and without access to cheap Asian manufacturing they can do even less with it. I totally agree the idea of companies doing the right thing is wrong.

But yes the reasons we're doing better in Europe is that we're not giving free reign to companies and have good welfare systems. When people have less worries about their survival they spend more. Of course to Trump backers this is unthinkable because of 'socialism'. Yes it is socialist which is different from communism.

We do of course have similar problems (housing is a problem too and there is resentment of immigrants)

I think the problems here are less bad though because:

1) We don't have a two party system (except for the UK which is in a similar situation to the US). That means it's not a zero sum game. A loss for one isn't an automatic win for the other. So politics are more focused on the positive than kicking the other down. Also we don't have this powerful singular leader with the kind of power the US president has.

2) Right wing politics is more a religion than anything. Not in a god per se but in the narrative and leader. Its followers like being told what to believe. This works best on the poorly educated. We see the same here but because our education system is better (less difference in quality between poor and affluent areas), less people fall into that trap.
by lexandstuff | 2025-05-22 08:04:09+00:00
One of the realisations I've had recently is that the AI hype feels like another level from what's come before because AI itself is creating the "hype" content fed to me (and my bosses and colleagues) all over social media.

The FOMO tech people are having with AI is out of control - everyone assumes that everyone else is having way more success with it than they are.
by amenghra | 2025-05-22 08:04:09+00:00
If you want to visit Atlas (control room) or CERN’s first accelerator (a synchrocyclotron) just show up in the morning when the visitor center opens. The tour guides are often passionate scientists. The museum is worth visiting, you’ll get to see the first www server (Tim-Berner Lee’s nextcube). The live shows are well put together. And everything is pretty much free of charge.

The only thing I can think of that has a waiting period is if you want to visit the actual tunnels, you can only visit them in between experiments (every 10-20 years maybe even less often).

More info: https://visit.cern/
by Doxin | 2025-05-22 08:04:39+00:00
For some context on the scale of what's going on in the netherlands, see this article for some lovely photos[0]

Mind that these aren't startups either. These are old companies making money. My grandfather used to talk about working in greenhouses exactly like these.

[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/glowing-dutch-greenhou...
by svara | 2025-05-22 08:04:50+00:00
> makes me really doubt that the OP has any practical experience about the things they're talking about.

Maybe not, but you can get used to many odd things given enough experience.

I totally share the authors view. I don't usually have trouble grasping the definition of a unit, but dBs are just hilariously overloaded.

The same symbol can literally mean one of two dimensionless numbers, or one of who knows how many physical units.

That's not normal, something as basic as units is usually very cleanly defined in physics.

Someone in this comment section said it's not a problem because there's usually going to be a suffix that is unambiguous. If that were actually the case, you wouldn't see these types of complaints.
by zeruch | 2025-05-22 08:05:14+00:00
I'd start by asking an ugly, but critical question: how do you intend to keep it funded?

If you don't want to allow easy enshittification, what does that site/product look like, for which users, and what is the value prop that makes that appealingAND at what scale?

I think most YC folks only think in "webscale" and not in any niche or boutique upmarket way and that acts as a forcing function for how much and how fast something scales, which in turn influences so much of the rest of what you do around that.

I don't want to suggest what Friendster ought to be, but I do think you need to decide how you want to ascertain that, and then look into the "how"
by pedalpete | 2025-05-22 08:05:45+00:00
Thanks for this insight. I have already been planning an upcoming blog post about how sleep hygiene fits, and the angle is that I ignored sleep hygiene for years, and thought it was nonsense, but now I understand it creates the opportunity for good sleep, but it isn't good sleep in itself.

I don't think that is downplaying, I think it is clearly stating where and how it is beneficial, and where we pick up where sleep hygiene leaves off.

Updated: Now I see, you're saying the original post made sleep hygiene the enemy, I didn't intend it that way. Measuring sleep time is an antiquated idea, but that isn't sleep hygiene, unless you're suggesting sleep hygiene is responsible for our 8 hour a day mentality. Which I'd say it is probably lumped in with.
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-05-22 08:06:02+00:00
"Doing 'A' is wrong, to fix it you need to do 'A'" is not an idiotic statement. It's complete non-sense that no human has ever uttered.

But for LLMs these kinds of illogical statements are common.

LLMs don't think; what they do cannot be in good faith called "thinking" by any definition.
by t34t4hthh | 2025-05-22 08:06:17+00:00
Not OP, but yes! I've had the exact same "symptoms" my entire life.

- A faint multi-tonal background "hiss", only apparent during silence, never goes away but is quite relaxing. I'm hesitant to even call it tinnitus - Visual snow. I have early memories from at least 5 or 6, staring at the blue sky and noticing it's not pure (I see blue as everyone else, but with a very transparent layer of static)

I have attributed it to something "off" in the sensory filtering part of my brain
by DaSHacka | 2025-05-22 08:07:01+00:00
> Most often, 3/5 of the group would contribute jack shit, while the remaining people had to pick up the slack.

Never fear, nowadays 3/5 do squat with the 4th sending you largely-incoherent GPT sludge, before dropping off the face of the earth until 11:30PM on the night the assignment's due.

I've seen it said college is supposed to teach you the skills to navigate working with others moreso than your specific field of study. Glad to see they've still got it.
by karenkhine | 2025-05-22 08:07:12+00:00
Crypto memes have become a staple of the digital asset world, blending humor with market realities. From “HODL” and “When Lambo?” to Doge and Milady references, these memes often reflect investor sentiment and market cycles. They offer a light-hearted escape during volatility, while also building a sense of community across the crypto space.
by loveparade | 2025-05-22 08:07:36+00:00
I use LLMs to check solutions for graduate level math and physics problem I'm working on. Can I 100% trust their final output? Of course not, but I know enough about the domain to tell whether they discovered mistakes in my solutions or not. And they do a pretty good job and have found mistakes in my reasoning many times.

I also use them for various coding tasks and they, together with agent frameworks, regularly do refactoring or small feature implementations in 1-2 minutes that would've taken me 10-20 minutes. They've probably increased my developer productivity by 2-3x overall, and by a lot more when I'm working with technology stacks that I'm not so familiar with or haven't worked with for a while. And I've been an engineer for almost 30 years.

So yea, I think you're just using them wrong.
by alexdowad | 2025-05-22 08:08:12+00:00
There are absolutely times when one can get LLMs to "say something valuable". I am still learning how to put them to good use, but here are some areas where I have found clear wins:

* Super-powered thesaurus

A traditional thesaurus can only take a word and provide alternative words; with an LLM, you can take a whole phrase or sentence and say: "give me more ways to express the same idea".

I have done this occasionally when writing, and the results were great. No, I do not blindly cut-and-paste LLM output, and would never do so. But when I am struggling to phrase something just right, often the LLM will come up with a sentence which is close, and which I can tweak to get it exactly the way I want.

* Explaining a step in a mathematical proof.

When reading mathematical research papers or textbooks, I often find myself stuck at some point in a proof, not able to see how one step follows from the previous ones. Asking an LLM to explain can be a great way to get unstuck.

When doing so, you absolutely cannot take whatever the LLM says as 'gospel'. They can and will get confused and say illogical things. But if you call the LLM out on its nonsense, it can often correct itself and come up with a better explanation. Even if it doesn't get all the way to the right answer, as long as it gets close enough to give me the flash of inspiration I needed, that's enough for me.

* Super-powered programming language reference manual

I have written computer software in more than 20 programming languages, and can't remember all the standard library functions in each language, what the order of parameters are, and so on.

There are definitely times when going to a manpage or reference manual is better. But there are also times when asking an LLM is better.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-22 08:08:28+00:00
I still have mine, but it's languishing, I don't know what to do with it / how to get rid of it, it doesn't feel like trash. The Apple stores do returns but for this one you get nothing, they're just like "yeah we'll take care of it".

The screen started to delaminate on the edges, and its follow-up (a MBP with the touch bar)'s screen is completely broken (probably just the connector cable).

I don't have a use for it, but it feels wasteful just to throw it away.
by keiferski | 2025-05-22 08:08:38+00:00
These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles mostly just communicate to me that most people lack imagination. I have gotten so much value out of AI (specifically ChatGPT and Midjourney) that it’s hard to imagine that a few years ago this was not even remotely possible.

The difference, it seems, is that I’ve been looking at these tools and thinking how I can use them in creative ways to accomplish a goal - and not just treating it like a magic button that solves all problems without fine-tuning.

To give you a few examples:

- There is something called the Picture Superiority Effect, which states that humans remember images better than merely words. I have been interested in applying this to language learning – imagine a unique image for each word you’re learning in German, for example. A few years ago I was about to hire an illustrator to make these images for me, but now with Midjourney or other image creators, I can functionally make unlimited unique images for $30 a month. This is a massive new development that wasn’t possible before.

- I have been working on a list of AI tools that would be useful for “thinking” or analyzing a piece of writing. Things like: analyze the assumptions in this piece; find related concepts with genealogical links; check if this idea is original or not; rephrase this argument as a series of Socratic dialogues. And so on. This kind of thing has been immensely helpful in evaluating my own personal essays and ideas, and prior to AI tools it, again, was not really possible unless I hired someone to critique my work.

The key for both of these example use cases is that I have absolutely no expectation of perfection. I don’t expect the AI images or text to be free of errors. The point is to use them as messy, creative tools that open up possibilities and unconsidered angles, not to do all the work for you.
by babyent | 2025-05-22 08:08:52+00:00
Why are people so resistant to change lol just use the better stuff or migrate to it.

It’s software you are mostly using to build end user software. Gauge it by how well it works and serves the end user.

This is why AI is good. It will just force this SWE vintage to solve the problem at hand instead of over engineering or holding on to some traditionalist views of the language.