MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Tainnor | 2025-05-30 01:34:05+00:00
My pet peeves when it comes to undecidability:

1. People saying "sure, problem A may be undecidable but it's decidable for instance X". That's not how the concept works - if you restrict the a problem to a specific instance (in the sense of having a decider for the intersection of A and {X}), then it will always be decidable because either the Turing Machine that always outputs true or the Turing Machine that always outputs false is a decider (it doesn't matter that we don't know which one). I know what people are trying to say - "just because a problem is undecidable it doesn't mean you can't solve specific instances" - but this is arguing against a misconception of what decidability means.

2. "Decidability doesn't matter because real-world computers have finite memory". Yeah, but if your solution to problem X involves running an algorithm until you've run through all possible 2^N configurations for N=the size of your memory, you haven't really practically solved it either in any way that anyone would want to use.
by em-bee | 2025-05-30 01:34:19+00:00
again, i don't want to make the claim that my beliefs are in some way better. that would be hubris, and that's a big reason why i want you to do your own research.

but here are a few points that relate to the current discussion:

science and religion must be in harmony. that is, they should not contradict each other. if there is a contradiction (in any specific point) then one of them is probably wrong. to resolve that difference science needs to do more research and religion needs to get a better understanding of the claim. perhaps there is an interpretation that can explain the discrepancy.

religion must be the cause of unity, harmony and agreement. if it is the cause of discord and hostility, if it leads to separation and creates conflict, the absence of religion would be preferable.

there will be a time when humanity will learn to live without meat. but today is not the time yet. that doesn't mean i'd believe that being a vegan today would be wrong, but rather that not everyone lives in a position where they can afford to give up meat because they have nothing to replace it with.

most religions are ill-equipped to deal with the problems we are facing today. religions need to adapt and renew themselves to be able to address the questions we are having today. the return of jesus plays a critical role here.

independent investigation of the truth. everyone should do their own research and study of religion. we can't leave that to priests or other studied leaders. those played a role in times when people where illiterate and depended on others to do the studying for them.

this is why i am hesitant to tell you what i believe, or what you should read, because in discussions like this it easily comes across as telling you what you should believe, as the example you are quoting shows. but that is precisely what i don't want to do, because that would be wrong. you need to find your own answers. that doesn't mean that i think reading the bible would be wrong. it's just not enough. you should also read about all the other religions, at least the major ones, if only to get a better understanding about the different beliefs that the people in this world today are holding. it is probably not necessary to read all the holy writings of each religion, at least not unless one of them piques your interest and you want to learn more.
by josh_s | 2025-05-30 01:34:20+00:00
We are in agreement with the burden. Perhaps my point was not well made:

At the time farmers were being made destitute by industrialization we also invented the modern education system. This was a massive societal investment to compensate for the reduced number of farmers needed.

There needs to be a similar level of commitment to establishing a viable future for those displaced by AI. So see no indication that this investment will happen.
by inopinatus | 2025-05-30 01:34:22+00:00
If you tell a LLM that its last effort was bad, it won't give you a better outcome. It will get worse at whatever you asked for.

The reason is simple. They are trained as plausibility engines. It's more plausible that a bad diagnostician gives you a worse outcome than a good one, and you have literally just prompted it that it's bad at diagnosis.

Sure, you might get another text completion. Will it be correct, actionable, reliable, safe? Even a stopped clock. Good luck rolling those dice with your health.

In summary, do not iterate with prompts for declining competence.
by rubit_xxx17 | 2025-05-30 01:36:44+00:00
I’m excited about this book and appreciate your work!

One thing that was distracting was the large title font when I tried to view this site in portrait mode on mobile, as some of the letters are cut off. If that could be fixed, it would help ensure people stay engaged and read it.

You could also potentially use an LLM or something like Grammarly to help proofread it (not edit it).

This is very cool!
by exodust | 2025-05-30 01:36:51+00:00
Don't forget bird flu killed chickens in the millions recently, either by the disease or by culling. Kids and anyone who likes these animals were saddened even distressed. Knitting chickens may have started from an expression of respect and admiration for the chicken when so many were being destroyed.

Having been around backyard chickens a bit, including those with funny names, they do have individual "personality". When they die of old age, or because a hawk gets into the chicken coop, it's a sad day.
by blibble | 2025-05-30 01:37:06+00:00
this is not an example that works in your favour (other than maybe in the US, which has a banking system 25 years behind the rest of the world)

in most countries branches are closing at an ever increasing rate explicitly because of technology

https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/6000-bank-branches-clos...

every new bank in the UK founded in the last 10 years has no branches at all
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-30 01:37:19+00:00
> if we're doing "the image generators don't get details right", it would seem to be there a lot simpler examples than OPs

There are different sorts of details though, and the distinctions are both useful and interesting to understanding the state of the art. If "man drinking coke" produces someone with 6 fingers holding a glass of water that's completely different from producing someone with 5 fingers holding a can of pepsi.

Notice that none of the images in your example got the function key placement correct. Clearly the model knows what a relatively modern keyboard is, and it even has some concept of a vaguely retro looking mechanical keyboard. However indeed I'm inclined to agree with OP that it has approximately zero idea what an "IBM model F" keyboard is. I'm not sure that's a failure of the model though - as you point out, it's an ancient and fairly obscure product.
by rayiner | 2025-05-30 01:38:47+00:00
Setting rules and regulations for elections isn’t “voter suppression and disenfranchisement.” That’s just activist propaganda to delegitimization elections. David Shor, a top Democrat voter researcher, conducted millions of interviews after the 2024 election and found that if everyone had voted, Trump would’ve won by almost 5 points: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202...

The intense high quality polling that’s been done since Trump won in 2016 has completely dismantled the notion of “voter suppression.” It’s the left’s version of illegal immigrants voting.
by parpfish | 2025-05-30 01:38:59+00:00
> Everyone is so mobile and connected online, they never have to break the ice and talk to those around them

one of the unexpected consequences of social media is that people have been conflating being informed with being connected.

asking "what have you been up to?" was to be a nice easy opening into a conversation that lead to connection.

but thanks to broadcast updates on social media, your friends already know what have you've been up to, so they can delude themselves into thinking that they've maintained a relationship because they know superficial details.

but a relationship isn't built on updating a list of superficial facts. it's built by having a conversation
by kfreds | 2025-05-30 01:39:00+00:00
Hi! I used to think that the product should speak for itself, only grow by word of mouth, and that it was wrong to do any advertising. Part of me still thinks that.

On the other hand we ran a very political advertising campaign one-two years ago when we protested a new EU law proposal. We plastered Stockholm's airport in billboards targeting EU politicians and journalists. We published a book and sent copies to several hundred politicians. It was quite a success. Incidentally our office was raided by the Swedish police a month later - the first time in 14 years.

I really appreciate your feedback. Are you able to pinpoint more exactly why you feel that our advertising undermines trust in our brand? Is it simply the fact that we're advertising at all?

Our marketing team works hard to ensure that our advertising doesn't make security guarantees we can't keep, or sell the product through fear-mongering. I feel that we've found a set of advertising messages that work, but clearly it still causes some unease and skepticism.

Perhaps it's simply a worry that we'll change because Mullvad is growing up and is no longer an obscure underdog?
by losteric | 2025-05-30 01:41:16+00:00
This is incredibly fatalistic.

I lived under all of this, plus two immigrant parents with no community / role modeling, isolated in suburbia as a kid with a chronically online 20s.

Yeah that nurturing left its mark. Yet I learned to see it, and learn new patterns. In my 30s I have deep friendships. Younger, older, men, women, nb. Most are still shallow, my energy is limited, but even there sometimes we touch into depth when it comes to relationship or existential stuff.

Rewrite your programming.
by Dove | 2025-05-30 01:41:24+00:00
Oh, I don't know. They seem like a lot more "honk" than "bonk". ;)

I get that they have a lot of aggression and deterrence going for them. But in a fight between a goose and a human, the human is mostly risking bites and bruises while the goose is risking death.

I put them in a similar category of threat as scorpions. Of course I don't want to fight -- getting hurt is inconvenient. But if we do fight, I'm not really concerned about which of us is going to win.

Sure, humans should worry about crazy geese. Geese have a lot more reason to worry about crazy humans!
by akshay_trikha | 2025-05-30 01:42:00+00:00
I've had this same thought that it would be nice to have an AI rubber ducky to bounce ideas off of while pair programming (so that you don't sound dumb to your coworkers & waste their time).

This is my first comment so I'm not sure how to do this but I made a BYO-API key VSCode extension that uses the OpenAI realtime API so you can have interactive voice conversations with a rubber ducky. I've been meaning to create a Show HN post about it but your comment got me excited!

In the future I want to build features to help people communicate their bugs / what strategies they've tried to fix them. If I can pull it off it would be cool if the AI ducky had a cursor that it could point and navigate to stuff as well.

Please let me know if you find it useful https://akshaytrikha.github.io/deep-learning/2025/05/23/duck...
by refulgentis | 2025-05-30 01:42:07+00:00
>> Eventually you may hit trademark protections.

> Then the law is broken.

> Utilizing trademarked characteristics to promote your own product without permission is an issue.

It sounds like you agree with parent that if your product reproduces trademark characteristics, it is utilizing trademarked characteristics. Just about at what layer you don't have responsibility. And the layer that has responsibility is the one that profits unjustly from the AI.

I'm interested if there's an argument for saying only the 2nd party user of the 1st party AI model, selling AI model output, to a 3rd party, is intuitively unfair.

I can't think of one. e.g. Disney launches some new cartoon or whatever. 1st party Openmetagoog, trains on it to make my "Video Episode Generator" product. Now, Openmetagoogs Community Pages are full of 30m video episodes made by their image generator. They didn't make them, nor do they promote them. Inuitively, Openmetagoog a competitor for manufacturing my IP, and that is also intuitively wrong. Your analysis would have us charge the users for sharing the output.
by munificent | 2025-05-30 01:42:13+00:00
I've become a lighter sleeper as I've gotten older, but generally fall asleep pretty quickly. I don't think it's from any chronic lack of sleep. It's mostly a matter of probably lucky genetics and also actually taking my sleep hygiene really seriously which very few people do. I:

* Try to stick closely to a regular sleep schedule.

* Keep my bedroom very dark and cool.

* Don't lay in bed and stare at a screen a lot. I try to build a mental association with my bed and sleep.

* Try to get some amount of physical exercise in the day and get out of the house. I find it's much harder to fall asleep if I didn't have a full-feeling day.

* Hydrate well throughout the day, but not right before sleep. (Not as much a problem when you're younger, but as I've gotten older, my bladder increasingly is the limiting factor for sleep length.)

* Pay attention to my anxiety. If I have thoughts keeping me up, I get up and write them down. That helps my brain feel like it doesn't have to stay alert and remember them.
by epistasis | 2025-05-30 01:43:40+00:00
I'm not even sure if the fire was bad. It was visible, surely, and people are scared of the unknown. But the preliminary results are that there's nothing unusual on the soil:

https://www.countyofmonterey.gov/home/showdocument?id=139505

Metallic taste in the air was the worst symptom that people reported, and people here were complaining of metallic taste in the air, 40 miles away, upwind from the site, for months. So unless something really shocking comes up in the report this month I think battery fires are mostly a concern for insurance companies and fire code to protect fire fighters and other structures. IMHO building below grade and dumping dirt seems to be massive overkill; just separate containers and don't stack them so that a lower fire spreads to multiple upper containers, and things are probably fine.
by physicles | 2025-05-30 01:44:15+00:00
One data point: I took the first few chapters of Genesis literally until age 27. I also went through college as a physics major. I’m sure I embarrassed myself in debates with my atheist lab partner.

I loved science from when I was really young, read every book in my school library’s J523/Astronomy section, including Cosmos in 3rd grade. But I also went to church every week with my family, read through the entire Bible in middle school, and believed that my faith would crumble and I’d go to hell if I ever gave up the belief that the Bible was 100% true and literal.

I also chose to keep emotional distance from non-Christian friends. They might lead me astray.

I remember an exchange with my mom (who was a teacher, mostly at Lutheran schools) during a car ride when I was maybe 6 or 7. I was excitedly talking about the big bang or something, and she said “yes, but we know from the Bible that the earth is 6,000 years old, right?” “Yes,” I answered, and in that moment I believed it. I didn’t feel conflicted: the Bible must be true, so someday I’d figure out in what sense the science was true too.

As I got older, I sustained this by basically hand-waving away the less intuitive explanations for an old earth. There are plenty of books out there for helping people do just that. Maybe the speed of life was different in the past. What can we really say with certainty about evolution? That kind of thing.

The beginning of the end was the day I learned about dendrochronology: tree rings. They’re too simple to hand-wave away. Soon after, I lost my faith.

Another huge area of cognitive dissonance: we prayed all the time, we talked about “miracles”, but I never heard any really credible evidence for one. It took some serious introspection, while still a Christian, to discern whether I actually believed in them or not.
by ivape | 2025-05-30 01:44:16+00:00
Lanier mics already have an interesting form factor:

https://www.amazon.com/PQRQP-Microphones-Microphone-Reductio...

With an always on mic that can pick up a wake word, that's aesthetic and discreet, you can have a Jarvis-like access to AI. The problem is I can't see how they would sell everyone on carrying around another brick along with our phone. We may be looking at a suite of devices that are more like clothing, such as a lanier mic that you clip on, a lapel pin, something that wraps around and sits behind your collar like a clip-on tie, small buttons that act as cameras, and finally a backback (Jetpack!?) that acts as the "brick".

If we want to get totally out there, then just start selling clothes that incorporate all of that. It can be the early form of the cybernetic suit. We haven't even explored why we can't just have computers in the thick part of our sneakers, which would be completely unobtrusive compared to what we've got going on now days.

If it's just a "brick", then why not just be a phone? I'd expect the brick to do some amazing things like know where I am in the room, recognize hand gestures, voice, and so on, but again, we're almost back to a phone.

---

But the answer might quite simple. We haven't had a brick that has 30 days+ of battery power and always online. Such a brick doesn't have to do anything but pass along API calls to OpenAI servers and get back API results. Business-wise, it makes the most sense. If a brick like that can be a discreet part of my clothing, that would be perfect (thinking belt buckle like a Power Ranger).
by programjames | 2025-05-30 01:45:19+00:00
Just from the title I knew Keenan Crane was the advisor. He has some really good YouTube video explanations for most of the concepts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZbuKOxH71o

This work is one of those things that feels like the completely obviously right way to do things in retrospect, and why hasn't anyone implemented this before? It helps that the authors explain it very intuitively, slowly building up the tools to run like stars.

Something I don't see mentioned is that this would be pretty useful for training a physics-based model, specifically a neural ODE. Since the mean squared error scales as O(1/N), to converge you need O(1/Loss) evaluations per point. If you were using a grid approach, the cell size would need to be O(sqrt(Loss)) in size, and the running time couldn't be better than O(1/(Loss * log(Loss))) in two dimensions. To be fair, it probably takes O(1/log(Loss)) time for each Monte Carlo simulation, so it's no worse to use the grid. But, if you go up to three or more dimensions, this method still has the same running time while the best grid method takes at least O(# grid cells) = O(1/Loss^(d/2)) time.
by podlp | 2025-05-30 01:45:28+00:00
I wrote an article comparing Cloud Phone and Opera Mini. It’s impressive what Opera Mini enabled, given it’s been frozen in time for roughly a decade. You’d think with SSR, more websites could support it. Despite coming preinstalled on hundreds of millions of phones, it doesn’t represent proportional traffic since navigating on these devices is so difficult

https://developer.cloudfone.com/blog/cloud-phone-vs.-opera-m...

Disclaimer: I work at CloudMosa, the company that makes Cloud Phone
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-30 01:46:58+00:00
Not sure if it's cultural collapse per se. Maybe to some individuals it's vapid, but it's just tapping into the natural human instinct to fit into a community (or as we colloquially call it: "fashion").

It doesn't necessarily signal the end of days, but ideally we participate in communities and societies while understanding why we do what we do. Not because "This person did it".
Ask HN: Launched image AI SaaS, struggling with initial traffic
by rikies | 2025-05-30 01:47:36+00:00
I've just launched [web app ghibli style ai](http://zacose.com/), and I'd love to get some advice from this community.

It's a tool that transforms user photos into the charming Ghibli art style. I've tried to make it accessible by offering some free credits for people to try it out.

Here's what I've done so far to get the word out and attract users:

backLink Building: I've started building some backlinks and plan to continue this effort.

SEO - Keywords: I used Ahrefs to identify relevant keywords with medium difficulty and search volumes over 10K.

On-Page SEO: I've optimized the landing page, focusing on the title, meta description, header tags, and keyword density.

Content Marketing: With some AI assistance, I've written and published about six blog posts targeting long-tail keywords related to the main topics.

It's been about a week since launch, and while a few people are using it (which is exciting!), overall traffic is still very low.

As a newcomer to building and promoting websites, I'm sure there's a lot I don't know. I'd be incredibly grateful for any suggestions or insights you might have on what I could be doing better or other avenues I should explore to get more eyeballs on the app.

Thanks so much in advance for any help~~
by parpfish | 2025-05-30 01:47:52+00:00
counterpoint:

back in the long-long ago when i was online dating, the biggest boon it provided was that it gave you a space where you knew that it was okay flirt and that your intentions would not be misunderstood. you never had to guess if it would be a creepy time/place to flirt. you never had to worry about your intentions being misunderstood as "just being friendly". if somebody was on this app/website, they were looking to flirt and if you approached them everybody was clear that you were flirting.

doing something similar with friendship could be great.
by nulld3v | 2025-05-30 01:48:21+00:00
Interesting, I bought a parametric speaker (from Kickstarter of all places [1]), it too uses piezoelectric emitters.

My understanding: DML speakers directly emit audible sound by vibrating at the resonance frequency of a material. Parametric speakers emit ultrasonic waves and control how those waves interfere using phased-array techniques, the interference is what produces sound.

It produces completely different results compared to DML: The sound quality is not good, interference just can't produce the full spectrum of audible frequencies.

In return, you gain extreme control over directionality: the interference only happens in midair or when the ultrasonic waves hits something solid, the speaker itself is mostly silent. It's actually "too directional" for me to use, the beam is still audible after multiple bounces off of solid objects: I was hoping to use it in a office as a sort of "personal speaker", but after the beam strikes my head and I hear sound, a part of it is reflected and bounces off the ceiling and floor repeatedly, causing the speaker to be audible at the opposite end of the floor.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1252022192/focusound-th...
by ecshafer | 2025-05-30 01:48:37+00:00
I think this is a good idea but I think to get it really going good you need to have a social club. The old ethnic, religious an society social clubs all had a common factor of a club house. You could go to the American Legion, or Elks, or Masons, or Knights of columbus or Polish club or whatever at any time when you were a member you had old timers hanging out and doing things regularly. Youe event schedule will also need to be at least weekly to keep up close contact to build up connections.