MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alganet | 2025-05-15 22:44:35+00:00
Let's be constructive then.

Do we have science to support that internet in its current state is safe? What do we need to understand it? Is it even in the realm of feasibility?

There is a lot of media articles about the dangers of social media. Are all of them pseudoscience lies then? If these sorts of posts encourage hysteria about online content, isn't that the same as causing harm?

Maybe the act has loopholes to allow for some US Great Wall analogue (that seems to be what the article implies). What are those? Can it be reformed to ensure safety without creating a curtain of censorship?

So many interesting, relevant, questions to make.
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 22:44:52+00:00
LLM content is banned everywhere on Stack Overflow, in both questions and answers, by policy, since mere days after the public announcement of ChatGPT (because it was immediately causing a huge problem): https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831

Moderators (actual elected moderators, the two dozen or so that exist for ~29 million user accounts and ~24 million non-deleted questions) went on strike in mid 2023, largely because the site staff/owners interfered with their ability to remove such content (an overwhelmingly popular policy with strong community consensus): https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425000 and this decision propagated across the Stack Exchange network (as most SE sites had adopted similar policies): https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/

A large fraction of the userbase is explicitly opposed to helping LLMs out in any way whatsoever. I personally have ceased contributing new question or answer content, and only edit existing posts. I contribute new content on Codidact (https://software.codidact.com/) instead (disclosure: I have recently become a moderator there).
by yieldcrv | 2025-05-15 22:44:53+00:00
what's more important to me is how quickly can you trade your hat, how quickly can you determine the marketable value of your hat for selling, how close in value can you buy that hat for the same price you sold it, how many hats can you buy or sell at that price?

and that's where hats fail in all metrics to cryptocurrency and how cryptocurrency satisfies my criteria for money
by Buttons840 | 2025-05-15 22:45:21+00:00
I've been trying to get ChatGPT to write some Emacs Lisp for me and it sucks. Few things are better documented than Emacs. There's several hundreds of pages of documentation, and several million lines of Elisp, but apparently that's not enough.

And I'm not asking for some beautiful architecture from ChatGPT, I'm just asking for simple hacks that get the job done. Elisp is designed to make simple hacks easy, but not easy enough for ChatGPT I guess.

Like, I asked it to make a command which would move the "mark" and the "point" so that the full line was selected. If a selection covered only part of a line, I wanted the selection to expand to cover the full line. To do this, all you have to do is move the mark and the point so that they surround a line. ChatGPT couldn't do it. It would only move the point, but not the mark, it wouldn't do anything with the mark. I explicitly told ChatGPT "no, you have to set both the point and the mark correctly", and then it wrote even more code that only adjusts the point, but not the mark--it would move the point to the beginning of the line, and then move the point to the end of the line, never touching the mark--it's stupid.
by drewg123 | 2025-05-15 22:47:07+00:00
I tend to be of the opinion that for modern general purpose CPUs in this era, such micro-optimizations are totally unnecessary because modern CPUs are so fast that instructions are almost free.

But do you know what's not free? Memory accesses[1]. So when I'm optimizing things, I focus on making things more cache friendly.

[1] http://gec.di.uminho.pt/discip/minf/ac0102/1000gap_proc-mem_...
by pron | 2025-05-15 22:48:09+00:00
> I think we can increase the TLC model checker throughput to 1 billion states per minute (1000x speedup) by writing a bytecode interpreter.

Truffle [1] can convert an interpreter to a JIT compiler -- there's no need to invent bytecode, and instead of an interpreter you get compilation to native, and it's easy to add intrinsics in Java; optimisations can be added gradually over time. This would probably be the most effective strategy, even in general, and certainly compared to cost.

[1]: https://www.graalvm.org/latest/graalvm-as-a-platform/languag...
by jjeaff | 2025-05-15 22:49:21+00:00
I'm not an expert, but I have learned that FDA approval is not actually necessary for treatments and drugs. Your doctor has a lot of leeway when it comes to treatment but she of course experiences more risk of accusations of malpractice when prescribing off label drugs or unapproved treatments. insurance will also rarely cover treatment that is not FDA approved. the requirement for FDA approval generally has more to do with your legal ability to market the drug, treatment, or product.
by rpdillon | 2025-05-15 22:49:30+00:00
The article is actually pretty interesting. The only one mentioned is Curl, and that's because of abuses by uneducated developers using AI with no idea of what they're doing.

I actually think that's the central thesis of the article, especially the last example that discusses the LLVM compiler project getting raked over the coals after not engaging with a non-developer that had used AI to make pull requests, and admitted he had no idea what the code did.

Buried in the middle of the article is a paragraph that I think sums up the main point well.

> More broadly, the very hardest problem in open source is not code, it’s people — how to work with others. Some AI users just don’t understand the level they simply aren’t working at.

The point being that without a good programmer, AI is not very useful.
by anonymousiam | 2025-05-15 22:49:31+00:00
A poor workaround to a problem created by unnecessary restrictions. Stalking is already illegal, so why are the tags crippled in the first place? This "feature" severely limits the usefulness of tags for tracking stolen items. Why not just sell some tags that don't alert everyone to their presence? Police and intelligence agencies have those already, so who are we protecting?
by PessimalDecimal | 2025-05-15 22:49:37+00:00
I'm very happy to see this!

A few years ago I tried making some contributions to the TLC codebase. It was definitely "academic code," lacking tests, reinvesting basic structured instead of using them from libraries, and largely the work of a single contributor with seemingly no code reviews for commits. I was motivated to try to help improve things and wanted to get a sense for what that would be like by sending a small PR to get a feeling for working with the code owners. They basically stonewalled me. It was odd.
by neilv | 2025-05-15 22:50:41+00:00
> If we're being honest with ourselves, [...]

Funny idiom: anyone who disagrees is not only wrong, but also has the moral failing of being dishonest with themselves? :)

> [...] vintage cars [...] Maybe you drive them to and from the job interview to leave a certain impression upon the interviewer.

Self: . o O ( Hands-on. Bro. Culture fit. )

Interviewer: . o O ( Drives old car. Needs money. Safe to lowball. )
by sfink | 2025-05-15 22:50:53+00:00
There is a strong hunger for Gattaca.

Heck, if parents could provide a trust fund for their kids in a way that their kids couldn't piss it away, they'd be all over it. (I'm sure this exists to varying degrees.)

Look at what wealthy parents already do to get their kids into colleges or out of jail. I think it's ridiculously naive to think that we parents wouldn't jump at the chance to write generational wealth into our kids' genes.

(This is not an argument that developing this capability is a bad thing and should be stopped.)
by Animats | 2025-05-15 22:52:37+00:00
Because it doesn't help against DDOS attacks, with bogus request sources.

It's a good mitigation when you have legit requests, and some requestors create far more load than others. If Github used fair queuing for authenticated requests, heavy users would see slower response, but single requests would be serviced quickly. That tends to discourage overdoing it.

Still, if "git clone" stops working, we're going to need a Github alternative.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-05-15 22:52:43+00:00
That sounds great, kudos to them too!

The only times I set foot in the Fortran world is when some Julia-related development [1] [2] happens, and then I peruse some surrounding links and related projects - so I have very little familiarity with GNU Fortran myself.

[1] https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/update-on-prima-a-jul... [2] https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-julia-back-end-for-lfo...
by jsheard | 2025-05-15 22:54:02+00:00
I keep seeing users of the AI-centric VSCode forks impotently complaining about Microsoft withholding their first-party extensions from those forks, rather than using their newfound AI superpowers to whip up open source replacements. That should be easy, right? Surely there's no need to be spoonfed by Microsoft when we're in the golden age of agenic coding?
Show HN: Hyprsqrl – open-source revolut you can self-host (live iban/sepa/ACH)
by ben_talent | 2025-05-15 22:54:07+00:00
Hi HN! Ben here from hyprsqrl, and I just open-sourced something we’ve been quietly running in production:

*hyprsqrl is a self-hostable bank.

Think Revolut (if you know it), but every line of code is MIT/AGPL, you can run it on your own box, and the crypto bits stay hidden under the hood.

---

### Why we built it Moving money between USD and EUR still means wire fees, surprise freezes, and “call your bank” hoops. Fintechs like Revolut help—until their pricing changes or a regulator knocks.

hyprsqrl aims for the resilience of self-hosting *without* forcing users to study crypto. Two recent shifts made that finally doable:

* *wallet abstraction UX is catching up*—passkey login support is coming next week (good-bye seed phrases) * *one-API on/off ramps* (AlignLabs today) let us bridge SEPA ↔ stablecoin and ACH ↔ stablecoin cheaply

Right now we lean on Privy for auth + wallet orchestration, but the plan is to drop it as soon as passkeys land and minimize third-party dependencies across the board.

---

### What’s live today * IBAN & SEPA inbound → auto-minted USDC/EURC on-chain * ACH payouts (live AlignLabs environment) * Next.js dashboard for balances, transfers, audit log * In production moving real money since May 2025

---

### What’s next * *passkey auth* replacing Privy (in review) * *earn module* (yield on idle balances) nearly done * *pots / budgeting allocations* work but getting another design pass * extra fiat ramps for redundancy * smoother one-click self-hosting (docker works now but could be simpler)

---

### How to try it * GitHub: https://github.com/different-ai/hyprsqrl * Live app: https://hyprsqrl.com — spin up a IBAN/ACH in seconds

Self-hosting still painful, but the rails are live—give it a whirl!
by godelski | 2025-05-15 22:54:56+00:00
I'm not sure if there's a great universal book. Generally you learn this through the formal education and as parts of textbooks. I mean there are dedicated topics like Bayesian Experimental Design (might have "Optimal" in there) and similar subjects, but I'm not sure that's what you're looking for. One point of contention I've had when in grad school (CS) was about the lack of this training for CS students, especially in data analysis classes and ML. I'm not surprised students end up believing "output = correct".

These are topics you can generally learn on your own (maybe why no consolidated class?). The real key is to ask a bunch of questions about your metrics. Remember: all metrics are guides, as they aren't perfectly aligned with the thing you actually want to measure. You need to understand the divergence to understand when it works and when it doesn't. This can be tricky, but to get into the habit constantly ask yourself "what is assumed". There are always a lot of assumptions. Definitely not something usually not communicated well...
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-15 22:55:09+00:00
> You seem to be under the impression that AI needs more than all recorded human knowledge up until 2024 to reach the same level as an average SO contributor.

Replacing the average SO cobtributor isn't adequate to replace SO, and AI is able to “replace” SO effectively only since major models have gotten not only SO-as-training-data but web search (including SO) for immediate grounding.

And without SO or something like it with active human contributions it’ll have even more trouble replacing the value SO would provide for new questions and new domains where it will neither have SO traijing data nor SO query-time-search-results to use to synthesize answers.
by zmmmmm | 2025-05-15 22:55:16+00:00
I think a better reason autism is a bad example is that part of its definition is that it is a consequence of fundamental brain structure and development (differentiating it from other psychological disorders which are acquired and more malleable). These aren't things you will "undo" with some gene edits. The whole brain has developed in a different way. Short of re-growing them a new brain you aren't going to change that (assuming you wanted to).
by frollogaston | 2025-05-15 22:55:17+00:00
About optimization, I feel like NumPy is meant to be a de facto standard and reference implementation. It covers all use cases with decent efficiency, not the fastest way possible. There are more limited drop-in replacements that use more CPU parallelism or GPU if NumPy isn't fast enough for your use case. Just wish it were clearer which NumPy build I'm installing, cause apparently `pip3 install numpy` on my Mac gave me something built with the worst flags possible.

About >2 dimensions, I always found this confusing in NumPy but just chalked it up to >2 dim arrays being inherently confusing. Maybe there really is a better way.
by traverseda | 2025-05-15 22:55:46+00:00
No, like 90% of video games could in theory be played 100 years from now.

If you can't answer that question, why should I trust your for 3 years? Or 10?

Here's a list of lost video games. Hard to prove it's complete of course. https://lostmediawiki.com/Category:Lost_video_games
by virtualritz | 2025-05-15 22:55:55+00:00
The obvious answer is more public transport infrastructure & bike lanes.

If you think population density is an excuse for public transport infrastructure not coping or need for more people owning cars I suggest taking a long hard look at e.g. Japan to have that hypothesis reality-checked.

I'm btw. not saying you did, just reading between the lines.

As I wrote in an earlier reply to parent, NYC hasn't managed to even build ring Metro lines around its city center – since a century!

And that is for one reason and one reason only: not nearly enough (political) pressure from the public to improve public transport infrastructure.

And that in term gets us to the root cause again: the US can't imagine itself without cars.

This is not a critique. It's just an observation that is very plain to see if you grew up in Europe (and possibly many other places, too).

When/if that changes, ever, the above things will just happen naturally.
by dubeye | 2025-05-15 22:56:09+00:00
my business has a similar revenue curve, and of course LLMs are a big cause, but it's more to do with me being distracted from moving with the times. I just didn't fancy the fight and saw enough value in the curve to let it follow ranged decline

I'm assuming the owners of stack felt similar? Don't know anything about them so could be easily wrong
by foldr | 2025-05-15 22:57:28+00:00
'Analogous in the morphology sense' is actually a more specific concept than 'similar'. But either way, we still don't know if they're analogous, or similar, or whatever term you prefer.

Anyone who actually understands both LLMs and the human brain well enough to make confident claims that they basically work the same really ought to put in the effort to write up a paper and get a Nobel prize or two.
by threeseed | 2025-05-15 22:57:32+00:00
Cloud providers aren't going to care too much about this.

I have worked for many enterprise companies e.g. banks who are trialling AI and none of them have any use for something like this. Because the entire foundation of the IT industry is based on trusting the privacy and security policies of Azure, AWS and GCP. And in the decades since they've been around not heard of a single example of them breaking this.

The proposition here is to tell a company that they can trust Azure with their banking websites, identity services and data engineering workloads but not for their model services. It just doesn't make any sense. And instead I should trust a YC startup who statistically is going to be gone in a year and will likely have their own unique set of security and privacy issues.

Also you have the issue of smaller sized open source models e.g. DeepSeek R1 lagging far behind the bigger ones and so you're giving me some unnecessary privacy attestation at the expense of a model that will give me far better accuracy and performance.
by PessimalDecimal | 2025-05-15 22:57:33+00:00
Agreed.

But I wonder if the logic of model checking is actually amenable to vectorization. I suspect not really, even for something basic like checking safety properties where you could try to shard the state space across cores. There is still likely to be some synchronization that is needed that eliminates the benefits. A cheaper way to test it would be to look to vectorize on the CPU first.

For a pure hardware based speedup, if there is effort to transcompile TLA+ specs to C++, there could then be a further step to transcompile that to say Verilog and try to run the model checking on an FPGA. That _might_ pay off.
by dekhn | 2025-05-15 22:58:02+00:00
Cells are already able to edit their own DNA. Examples include the yeast mating switch, in which the "active" gene is replaced by one of two templates, determining the role the yeast plays in mating (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mating_of_yeast#Mechanics_of_t...)

Further, your immune system does some clever combinatorial swapping to achieve diversity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination). The generated diversity is then screened by the immune system to find highly effective antibodies that bind to specific foreign invaders.

Doing something actually interesting from an engineering perspective makes for fun science fiction, but as always, the specific details in that story would be a very unlikely outcome.
by BSTRhino | 2025-05-15 22:58:29+00:00
Yes, I think it is super important that Easel games last forever and that has always been the plan. My long term plan is to create a standalone version of Easel that you can run on your server forever, regardless of what happens to Easel itself.

I'm not yet sure of the details of how an escrow service might work, but honestly, I would be willing to look into it, that could be a good answer. I really do plan on Easel as a platform lasting forever. This is my life's work as much as it is yours.
by hackyhacky | 2025-05-15 23:00:53+00:00
> One of the greatest travesties of our modern times is that political conversation somehow robs people of the capacity to read and listen, because another person being wrong seemingly trumps any requirement for either.

This is a criticism that you should take to heart. I addressed your previous comment: you said that DEI is performative, and I explained how it wasn't; and you said that DEI is partisan, and I explained how it wasn't. Are you able to read and listen, or are these virtues that you love to extoll only when it suits you?

Or you could take the lazy way out.
by tizzy | 2025-05-15 23:01:48+00:00
Bringing up these points when talking about improving urban transit is harmful.

These points always appear in reaction to urbanist policy and all of a sudden care about the minority transit user.

The problem is that the assigned proportion of road space is unfairly weighted to cars and is impossible to shift because people often say things like “cars make it easier to shift things around” and “some people have mobility issues”. Yes, this is true. What is also true is that people with mobility issues can more likely ride (cheaply) modified bikes than drive motor vehicles and people regularly haul heavy loads on cargo bikes (couches, refrigerators) in places where bike infrastructure makes it safe to do so.

If you care about speed in a densely populated city, you’d bike or walk. Flip it around; comfort isn’t the only reason why people prefer to use a car over walking or cycling. You said it yourself already, it’s because you can literally get hit by a car all because drivers won’t give up 1 lane out 4 for a segregated bike path that would stop you getting hit by a car.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-15 23:01:49+00:00
> "Oh, this test doesn't pass... let's just skip it," it sometimes says, maddeningly.

Here is a wild idea. Imagine running a companion, policy-enforcing LLM, independently and in parallel, which is given instructions to keep the main LLM behaving according to instructions.

If the companion LLM could - in real time - ban the coding LLM from emitting "let's just skip it" by seeing the tokens "let's just" and then biasing the output such that the word "skip" becomes impossible to emit.

Banning the word "skip" from following "let's just", forces the LLM down a new path away from the undesired behavior.

It's like Structured Outputs or JSON mode, but driven by a companion LLM, and dynamically modified in real time as tokens are emitted.

If the idea works, you could prompt the companion LLM to do more advanced stuff - eg. ban a coding LLM from making tests pass by deleting the test code, ban it from emitting pointless comments... all the policies that we put into system prompts today and pray the LLM will do, would go into the companion LLM's prompt instead.

Wonder what the Outlines folks think of this!
by bigyabai | 2025-05-15 23:02:12+00:00
The internet cannot be made safe. For as long as you consider information a hazard to it's users, the internet will enable people to freely spread ideas harmful or intelligent. This happens today, it happened in the past, and it will continue into the future barring some radical redesign of the internet's protocols.

Legislature like this puts the tiny side-effects first ("think of the kids!") while conveniently neglecting to acknowledge the ways it stifles democratic process and individual rights. If a similar law was passed regulating libraries this way, voters would universally agree that it's a pants-on-head stupid decision.