MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by klibertp | 2025-05-05 11:07:44+00:00
> It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving.

No. That's how it should be, but the reality looks different: it has value because it shows that someone spent 3+ years doing what they were told to do, enduring all the absurdities they were subjected to in the meantime. Whatever means they used to cheat don't matter, since they still worked on what someone told them to and produced results satisfying the expectations.

There are, perhaps, institutions where learning and problem-solving are seen as the most important while "following orders" and "staying in line" are deemphasized. For the students of all the others, putting up with an utterly absurd environment is often one of the biggest barriers to learning. Yet, it's a requirement without fulfilling which you can forget about graduating. Hence my conclusion: the diploma from most learning institutions certifies you as a good corporate drone - and that's enough of a signal in many situations, so why bother trying to fix it?
by K0balt | 2025-05-05 11:07:56+00:00
So, it’s not the local strength of the gravitational field, but the overall mass that matters? How does that work? I mean, if distance/ intensity doesn’t matter, than distance is irrelevant? That seems extremely counterintuitive.

I thought that since you could get into areas where the field was arbitrarily intense, that it would be able to provoke significant relativistic effects.

I had assumed that the small mass would make tidal forces more problematic than with a larger one, but if the distance/intensity of the field isn’t a factor, but only the overall mass… wouldn’t that mean that we could utilize black holes at arbitrarily long distance to provoke those effects, so it would just be a universal constant based on the mass of the universe, and there would be no relativistic effects on a relative basis?

What am I missing here?
by UncleEntity | 2025-05-05 11:08:24+00:00
From my testing the robots seem to 'understand' the code more than just learn how do thing X in code from reading code about doing X. I've thrown research papers at them and they just 'get' what needs to be done to take the idea and implement it as a library or whatever. Or, what has become my favorite activity of late, give them some code and ask them how they would make it better -- then take that and split it up into simpler tasks because they get confused it you ask them to do too much at one time.

As for debugging, they're not so good at that. Some debugging they can figure out but if they need to do something simple, like counting how far away item A is from item B, then I've found you pretty much have to do that for them. Don't get me wrong, they've found some pretty deep bugs I would have spend a bunch of time tracking down in gdb, so they aren't completely worthless but I have definitely given up on the idea that I can just tell them the problem and they get to work fixing it though.

And, yeah, they're good at writing tests. I usually work on python C modules and my typical testing is playing with it in the repl but my current project is getting fully tested at the C level before I have gotten around to the python wrapper code.

Overall its been pretty productive using the robots, code is being written I wouldn't have spent the time working on, unit testing is being used to make sure they don't break anything as the project progresses and the codebase is being kept pretty sound because I know enough to see when they're going off the rails as they often do.
by cess11 | 2025-05-05 11:08:28+00:00
You should avoid SSRI:s adjacent to MDMA use. The hypothesis is that by blocking the serotonin transporter you'd avoid dopamine getting reabsorbed into serotonin vesicles, but there is very little evidence that this would work and there are obvious risks.

SSRI:s will give you a strong tolerance against serotonergic drugs and it will take a long time to lower that tolerance, months, maybe a year or two. As far as I know it hasn't been studied scientifically but I've seen people get quite uncomfortable experiences from MDMA and 5-HT2a-psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, those) after being off SSRI medication for several months, that I amateurishly attribute in part to downregulation of serotonin sensitivity.

A more acute risk is MAO inhibitors, which are sometimes prescribed as antidepressives. You're more likely to suffer acute damage or die from a combination of MDMA and an MAOI than with an SSRI, though neither is a good idea.

The Bluelight forums are a decent source of harm reduction advice, https://www.bluelight.org/community/forums/. Be aware that some participants in the discussions have problems with risky or abusive use, or give bad advice. Stickied guides tend to be of high quality, however.
by scsh | 2025-05-05 11:09:50+00:00
I actually feel very strongly that code is very much written for us humans. Sure, it's a set of instructions that is intended to be machine read and executed but so much of _how_ code is written is very much focused on the human element that's been a part of software development. OOP, design patterns, etc. don't exist because there is some great benefit to the machines running the code. We humans benefit as the ones maintaining and extending the functionality of the application.

I'm not making a judgement about the use of LLMs for writing code, just that I do think that code serves the purpose of expressing meaning to machines as well as humans.
by pm3003 | 2025-05-05 11:09:59+00:00
Armies had a lot of more or less professional infantrymen, be they in the retinue of a lord or knight (and they could be peasants even if a peasant would generally have no reason to go to war, and the lords would have few motivations/legal means to constrain serfs to go), mercenaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_company), or common-law prisoners (a bit as the Russians did in Ukraine).

Free families would often have to send someone to war if the local lord called.
by dark-star | 2025-05-05 11:10:14+00:00
The magic happens in the "analyze -v" part. This does quite a long analysis of a crashdump (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...)

After that, all that is required is interpreting the results and connecting it with the source code.

Still impressive at first glance, but I wonder how well it works with a more complex example (like a crash in the Windows kernel due to a broken driver, for example)
by bayindirh | 2025-05-05 11:10:28+00:00
> ... for a physical device with a memory card, that you attach to your computer and it appears as a printer to the computer and when you print to it, the device instead creates a PDF on its memory card. I think.

Actually, it doesn't matter. Install an operating system to any computer (from OrangePi Zero to a CRAY-1, doesn't matter), install a "virtual" PDF printer and share from the network. It'll appear as a printer. It'll print to a folder local to that machine, not yours. It's again the same thing (this is the magic of the network, actually).

IIRC from administering my parents' Windows PC, the OS now has Print to PDF capability built-in, but IDK whether that virtual printer is installed with Office, but it's out of the box.
by tpmoney | 2025-05-05 11:12:18+00:00
> Do you actually think that an LLM can take, say, a Harry Potter book as an input, and give it a grade in such a way that everybody will always agree on?

No, but I also don't think a human can do that either. Subjective things are subjective. I'm not sure I understand how this connects to the idea you expressed that doing various tasks with automation tools like LLMs prevent you from "internalizing" the data, or why not "internalizing" data is necessarily a bad thing. Am I just misunderstanding your concern?
by buran77 | 2025-05-05 11:12:46+00:00
Are you asking if any company, institution, or political party documented asking their subordinates to commit illegal acts in order to provide cover for the head honchos?

Generally no but when you look into scandals like Dieselgate, Enron, Lehman Brothers and others you'll see a pattern of lower level employees being pressured to sign off on misleading documents that the higher ups could just sell as "real". Work in any company or institution above a certain level and you'll see it every day.

It's a test for loyalty, it's a way to select a successor, and very importantly a way to subsequently guarantee that loyalty and keep the ambitious deputies in check. Every large organization is a pyramid scheme of avoiding accountability and passing it on to the lower level.
by cess11 | 2025-05-05 11:12:56+00:00
Someone else said that all amphetamines are likely to be neurotoxic the same way MDMA is. I responded that they don't have to be.

Why did you take this as an invitation to do a purely theoretical exercise in listing possible mechanisms for neurotoxicity? At the very least you ought to have anchored your reasoning in actual risky MDMA use, what people actually do, instead of just ranting out words that could scare a layperson. I.e. behaviours that are common, like combining MDMA with alcohol, or dopaminergic psychedelics like LSD and 2C-B, or forgetting to drink water, or whatever that isn't pseudo-academic stuff like 'sped up redox cycling of dopamine quinones'.

I also think you should have taken the time to show that you have an understanding of why millions of people disagree with you. In my opinion it would also be prudent to compare the risks you see with other neuronal risks, like living in an environment with ICE exhausts or having kids and suffering sleep deprivation for years on end or just plain old poverty. The latter is shown to, on average, have detrimental effects on the brain that can be clearly visible in medical examinations, unlike sporadic, responsible use of MDMA.
by card_zero | 2025-05-05 11:13:23+00:00
I keep a journal. I write in it when there's something on my mind. I don't force myself to write in it every day, or at all, that would be ludicrous. Sometimes I write in it all of the time. Deep thoughts about life get indiscriminately mixed in with movie reviews, shopping lists and the fact that the name of the guy who unblocked the drains was Nigel. I write more than I read. Sometimes I search it for practical information (what was his name again?) which is why I keep it digital.

So if I really want to, I can find out how I was generally feeling in, say, 2006, and what sort of questions were on my mind and what ideas I had. Usually the answers are: pretty much the same, and stupid ones, kind of like today but worse. So it turns out that I don't want to review my journal much. But I only know that I don't want to because I have the option, so it has a reassuring function, and writing helps me think in the first place.

When it comes to photos, though, I'm with Ray Davies:

People take pictures of the Summer

Just in case someone thought they had missed it

And to prove that it really existed

People take pictures of each other

Just to prove that they really existed

Don't show me no more, please
by CableNinja | 2025-05-05 11:13:28+00:00
I just recently dabbled in STT as a way to control my computer. Unfortunately, i dont know if i will continue working on it, because it quickly revealed that our current GUI configuration and how we operate our systems, just dont "flow" well with Speech to Text and operations one might expect. I think id need some additional ML or something, in order to even partly go any further forward in that project.

Sure, I can add to the program I have currently to make it handle "any" task, but, with how we currently operate computers, and view content, there is not a way to avoid touching the keyboard and mouse entirely. Tbh im not even sure what i could propose to improve the gui for controlling the system star trek style.
by llm_nerd | 2025-05-05 11:13:33+00:00
Trump is likely saying this because the new Prime Minister of Canada is visiting tomorrow, and Canada has been fairly successful building a "Hollywood North" industry -- lots of good filming locations, lots of talents that are indistinguishable from Americans, and tax credits on top.

This is 100% targeted at Canada, and trying to threaten destroying the Canadian film industry as another lever against Canada.

And it is laughably silly. Even in Canada alone, "Hollywood" nets far more than it ever spends here[1]. And of course worldwide media is something that the US has an enormous trade surplus. It's yet another harebrained bit of nonsense from the extremely smooth, simpleton mind of Trump and his greasy used-car salesman, carnival barker Howard Lutnick.

What Trump is really achieving in all of these declarations is making the rest of the world ask why do we accept Hollywood controlling the film or music industry, or Silicon Valley controlling the tech industry, or NYC the financial industry, etc? The end result of this is going to be massive decentralization and lowered importance of US industry leadership.

[1] Not to mention that the tax credits quite literally subsidizes the industry. And FWIW, I am wholly against tax credits for film productions, and much like paying a sports team to build a stadium, the accounting of the supposed benefit just doesn't make any sense.
by naikrovek | 2025-05-05 11:15:19+00:00
that doesn't matter; if you make your cache usage smart and your branches predictable, the CPU will take advantage of that and your program will run faster. It is in the interests of the system and CPU designers to make sure this is the case, and it is.

If you do the things which make your code friendly to the CPU cache and the branch predictor, when it comes time for your code to run on the CPU, it will run faster than it would if you did not do those things.
by Pamar | 2025-05-05 11:15:45+00:00
Maybe your point is valid for other situations, but believe me, letting someone getting on a plane after their names has been removed from the Flight Manifest (passengers list) will have very bad consequences for everyone involved.

Starting from the Captain deciding the plane will not depart until the police has taken care of the situation (assuming they find out before taking off, which is quite probable if the seat had been reassigned to someone else).
by unsupp0rted | 2025-05-05 11:18:19+00:00
Most non-American movies are slop, melodramatic vaudeville, or tear-jerking gut-punches. Most American movies are slop too, but America can afford to swing at more pitches and consequently get more hits.

Have you ever tried to watch Korean movies from the last 20 years? It's all melodramatic romance-crime-poverty slop, with the rare Kim Ki-duk or Bong Joon Ho in there to balance it out. And that's a country with a wonderful reputation for quality film-making.

I mean you get zombies on a train and that's a fun popcorn flick, but it's forgettable. It's no Tremors, Twister, or Independence Day.

In Indonesia for every The Raid there's 999 poorly acted, poorly shot melodramas with a thin well-trodden story.

And don't get me started on "let's yell at each other for 120 minutes" Russian cinema.

American movies are by far the most watchable, especially when you don't feel like going on a heart-wrenching journey of despair, which is all international cinema excels at.
by chaostheory | 2025-05-05 11:19:28+00:00
Yes, I completely disagree with this post for this very reason. Who cares if the photos are “generic”? Also this post doesn’t even include videos. To cheat yourself out of a 2D Time Machine just tells me that you’re still young. A better discussion would be what would be the ideal device for capturing memories that also allow you to live and participate in the moment?
by mapt | 2025-05-05 11:19:33+00:00
It ended humanity's existence? No?

Not yet? Okay. Good. In fact, great! I like existing.

For now.

"Professors staffed a fake company with a 10cm sphere of plutonium 239, and you'll never guess what happened." Egg on their face, I'm sure.

Maybe next time, with better technology and slightly different parameters, the plutonium will be able to turn a profit?
by graemep | 2025-05-05 11:21:12+00:00
> losing the battle would result in their home being pillaged and their family enslaved or raped.

Only true in certain times and places, mostly sacking besieged towns cities where it was done in order to pressure the defenders of the next siege to surrender with terms rather than fight to the end.

Not all historical societies had slavery. It declined hugely in medieval Europe - the Normans abolished it in England, for example (people forget this because of the revival of slavery in early modern times, and of course its continuation in other cultures) not long after they conquered the country.
by robotbikes | 2025-05-05 11:21:24+00:00
I have a horrible time editing my own work. Decision paralysis and what not, but I did have the idea that a good way to practice would be editing the content of LLM generated fictional narratives. I think the point that many are making that LLMs are useful as cognitive aids that augment thinking rather than replacements for thinking. They can be used to train your mind by inspiring thoughts you wouldn't have came up with on your own.
by tremon | 2025-05-05 11:22:28+00:00
by which different jurisdictions could have an overall collaborative framework and experiment with different approaches

Is that like different countries inside the EU implementing their own laws and drawing from that experience to influence the shape of EU laws? Or how neighbouring countries (like DACH, Benelux, Scandinavia or the Iberian peninsula) use regular international cooperation to shape cluster-local policies without involving the entire Union?

No, we don't have any of that here.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-05 11:23:10+00:00
Unfortunely they are common enough to keep lawyers and book publishing businesses going with dictionaries "evaluation => real meaning", exactly for that little help to go though it and validate its correctness.

Many employeers profit from foreigners that aren't well versed in these nuances, and have to be educated this is a thing.

An example for others not used to German work market,

https://www.karriereakademie.de/arbeitszeugnis-formulierunge...

Just go through the site with your favourite translation tool.
by light_hue_1 | 2025-05-05 11:23:27+00:00
All of this is absurdly complicated. Exactly what I would expect from a new student who doesn't know what they're doing and has no one to teach them how do you engineering in a systematic manner. I don't mean this as an insult. I teach this stuff and have seen it hundreds of times.

You should look for "post training static quantization" also called . There are countless ways to quantize. This will quantize both the weights and the activations after training.

You're doing this on hard mode for no reason. This is typical and something I often need to break people out of. Optimizing for performance by doing custom things in Jax when you're a beginner is a terrible path to take.

Performance is not your problem. You're training a trivial network that would have run on a CPU 20 years ago.

There's no clear direction here, just trying complicated stuff in no logical order with no learning or dependencies between steps. You need to treat these problems as scientific experiments. What do I do to learn more about my domain, what do I change depending on the answer I get, etc. Not, now it's time to try something else random like jax.

Worse. You need to learn the key lesson in this space. Credit assignment for problems is extremely hard. If something isn't working why isn't it? Because of a bug? A hopeless problem? Using a crappy optimizer? Etc. That's why you should start in a framework that works and escape it later if you want.

Here's a simple plan to do this:

First forget about quantization. Use pytorch. Implement your trivial network in 5 lines. Train it with Adam. Make sure it works. Make sure your problem is solveable with the data that you have and the network you've chosen and your activation functions and the loss and the optimizer (use Adam, forget about this doing stuff by hand for now).

> Unless I had an expert guide who was absolutely sure it’d be straightforward (email me!), I’d avoid high-level frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch and instead implement the quantization-aware training myself.

This is exactly backwards. Unless you have an expert never implement anything yourself. If you don't have one, rely on what already exists. Because you can logically narrow down the options for what works and what's wrong. If you do it yourself you're always lost.

Once you have that working start backing off. Slowly change the working network into what you need. Step by step. At every step write down why you think your change is good and what you would do if it isn't. Then look at the results.

Forget about microflow-rs or whatever. Train with pytorch, export to onnx, generate c code for your onnx for inference.

Read the pytorch guide on PTSQ and use it.
by JanSchu | 2025-05-05 11:24:20+00:00
This is a compelling take and something that's going to get increasingly relevant as agentic browsing matures. The idea of Agent Access Tokens (AATs) feels like a natural evolution of API keys mixed with browser headers — but with the economic layer built in from the start.

Some thoughts:

You're describing a new protocol layer, almost like a “robots.txt meets OAuth meets Stripe” for agents. It could allow site owners to expose structured data (APIs or structured text) and monetize access. That’s huge. It flips the current scraping arms race into an opportunity.

Revenue models would indeed be disrupted. A site’s monetization might shift from CPM/CPC ads for human attention to pay-per-query or tiered subscriptions for agent access. Kind of like how OpenAI or Google charges for API usage.

Interfaces become optional. You'd optimize for semantic structure, not aesthetics. That’s both terrifying and liberating as a dev. Imagine a site that’s just: “Here’s what we know, here’s how to query us.”

Adversarial blocking is the fallback strategy (and already happening — just ask GPTBot), but it’s a short-term play. If agents become the new UX layer for many tasks, sites will have to engage somehow — or risk total disintermediation.

One risk I see: centralization. If only a few agent providers get whitelisted, or if the billing standard becomes a walled garden, we might end up with another App Store-like gatekeeper situation.

Curious: How would you see AATs being issued — per-agent, per-session, or tied to identity in some verifiable way?
by scotty79 | 2025-05-05 11:24:41+00:00
You never eaten a steak from a pan? Or you just never used any additional fat under the steak, which technically makes it grilling? Sorry, I'm not a native speaker and I thought frying is anything you do on a pan with no cover. I guess there's also searing but I thought it was kind of frying.

I found a recipe for skillet-fried steak: https://www.thepioneerwoman.com/food-cooking/recipes/a9744/p...
by Smaug123 | 2025-05-05 11:24:53+00:00
Teaching isn't blatting someone's mind with the Correct Answers and checking whether the overwrite took. Instead, you empirically build a model of the student's own world model, then examine the model to see where it fails to conform to reality, and construct ways to fix it. The example from TFA was consistent with "this is university coursework", which is fertile ground for a tutor to identify such errors! It's not like the student should be receiving a yes/no response and nothing else; there will presumably be comments on the incorrect answers.