MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by garymarcus | 2025-05-12 21:18:25+00:00
If you think AI is “smart” or “PhD level” or that it “has an IQ of 120”, take five minutes to read my latest newsletter (link below), as I challenge ChatGPT to the incredibly demanding task of drawing a map of major port cities with above average income.

The results aren’t pretty. 0/5, no two maps alike.

“Smart” means understanding abstract concepts and combining them well, not just retrieving and analogizing in shoddy ways.

No way could a system this is wonky actually get a PhD in geography. Or economics. Or much of anything else.
by const_cast | 2025-05-12 21:18:44+00:00
The difference is we're humans, so we get special privileges. We made the laws.

If we're going to be giving some rights to LLMs for convenient for-profit ventures, I expect some in-depth analysis on whether that is or is not slavery. You can't just anthropomorphize a computer program when it makes you money but then conveniently ignore the hundreds of years of development of human rights. If that seems silly, then I think LLMs are probably not like humans and the comparisons to human learning aren't justified.

If it's like a human, that makes things very complicated.
by threeseed | 2025-05-12 21:19:07+00:00
You may want to look into DataMechanics who is another YC startup who tried something similar. They were acqui-hired by NetApp.

If I remember they focused on SME space because in enterprise you will likely struggle against pre-allocated cloud spend budgets which lock companies into just using GCP services. I've worked at a dozen enterprise companies now and every one had this.
by program_whiz | 2025-05-12 21:19:12+00:00
Sorry I should have responded to this comment, but I wrote a separate response in the parent thread. I didn't feel the pdf / paper was really trying to mimick spiking biological networks in all but the loosest sense (there is a sequence of activations and layers of "neurons"). I think the major contribution is just using the dot product on output transpose output, the rest is just diffusion / attention on inputs. Its conceptually a combination of "input attention" and "output attention" using a kind of stepped recursive model.
Show HN: Launched Badges-showcase launches on HN, Reddit and more, not just PH
by sundaywong | 2025-05-12 21:19:18+00:00
I built Launched Badges, a set of open-source React components to help builders showcase product launches on platforms like Hacker News, Reddit, X, Lovable, and more — not just Product Hunt.

Each badge is SVG-based, lightweight, and customizable — with support for dark/light themes, layout control, upvotes, likes, followers, or link-only modes. There’s also a landing page with an interactive playground, code snippet generator, and the ability to download badges instantly as SVG or PNG.

The idea came from noticing that Product Hunt isn’t the only (or best) fit for every launch — many products debut on Hacker News, Reddit, X, or even Facebook/Instagram, depending on where their audience is. I wanted a simple, reusable way to help celebrate those launches with consistent, shareable badges.

Would love your feedback, contributions, or feature ideas — and happy to add more platforms if there’s interest.

Homepage: https://launched-badges.lovable.app/

GitHub: https://github.com/wongsunday/launched-badges
by quantadev | 2025-05-12 21:20:08+00:00
Yes, some hash functions are intended to have collisions (like hash algorithms that are designed to put things into 'buckets' for searching for example). And you're correct to notice that by mentioning improbability of collision I'm talking about strong hashes in that sentence. But you can take my words literally nonetheless. When I say "hash" I mean all kinds of hashes. Strong and weak.

The existence of weaker hash algos actually moves you further away from your assertion (that semantic vectors are hashes) than closer to it. Weak hashes is about a small finite number of buckets in one dimension. Semantic vectors are an infinite continuum of higher dimensional space locations. These two concepts are therefore the exact opposite.
by cogman10 | 2025-05-12 21:20:19+00:00
> I didn't see a reluctance in federal labs to work with capable entrepreneurs

My reluctance is when we talk about fraud, waste, and corruptions in government, this is where it happens.

The DoD's budget isn't $1T because they are spending $900B on the troops. It's $1T because $900B of that ends up in the hands of the likes of Lockhead martin and Raytheon to build equipment we don't need.

I frankly do not trust "entrepreneurs" to not be greedy pigs willing to 100x the cost of anything and everything. There are nearly no checks in place to stop that from happening.
by vladms | 2025-05-12 21:20:24+00:00
My reply was directed to someone that seemed to suggest "there is not so much violence".

I think the first step to discuss a topic is to understand what is there. If the statement would have been "I am fine that police in the USA being (potentially) more violent than in Western Europe", I wouldn't have checked anything because everybody is entitled to an opinion. I did check though because I wondered "is it true that there is not much violence in the USA compared to Western Europe?". I can't say I am sure after searching 5 minutes, but it does look like there is a probability that it is the case.
by mrtksn | 2025-05-12 21:20:33+00:00
My office was right next to Barbican, I was going to rent a place there but I cheaped out. Still bitter about it.

The thing about Barbican is that it is an opinionated living complex. People who built it had an idea on how the urban living is supposed to be and sculptured that in concrete. Very few things are changeable there, that's why it also feels like a different time.

I enjoyed walking from my office to the tube and get amazed by this giant place everyday. Never seized to amaze me. I would occasionally go there and work at the public places, it was often empty enough to find corners or passages where I can just observer the life happening in distance.

Here's a couple of photos: https://dropover.cloud/09cb4c
by ModernMech | 2025-05-12 21:21:20+00:00
> overwhelmingly rejected.

As they should be. We shouldn't be spending a lot of our very limited and precious funding on counter science.

Some, sure. But if you're not rejecting an overwhelming number of proposals that go against established science, one has to question how established the science really is. How many flat earth researchers should we be funding each year? Or string theorists for that matter?

But you've moved the goalpost, I had responded to this:

> no room in the current model for the curiously ambitious scientists

You said "no room", implying it's not possible. My reply was that actually it's very possible and happens all the time. Is it the common case? No. But in my experience it's quite possible if you have the ability to reasonably articulate a plan. A lot of these "pie in the sky, go against the grain" proposals are also hopefully naive just from a project management and feasibility standpoint. Often times people will get denied funding and feel it's because their idea was just not appreciated, but really it's not the idea but the execution surrounding it that people don't have confidence in.

> How rude. My opinion is informed by my extensive personal experience and echoed by those in the thread.

Please read my reply in the context of your comment; you had not sourced your opinion to yourself; instead you had cited "others have pointed out", so I had wondered who those people were so I could post on their threads. If you had cited your personal experience, I would have taken you at your word.

> Who are you to challenge it?

FWIW, I also have extensive personal experience getting funded for projects which buck traditional norms, so we can kindly put our dicks away. If someone is not getting funded I consider it a persuasive skill issue. Sometimes it's just a luck issue. But lots of people, especially early career researchers, have a good idea but lack the ability to even articulate a clear vision of what their ideas are, and then blame that on others' inability to be persuaded.
by imiric | 2025-05-12 21:21:37+00:00
Good lord. The idea that a system that produces pseudo-random output without any semantic understanding can be relied on to give accurate health-related information is deeply flawed and troubling. It's one thing to use these things for finding patterns in data, for entertainment purposes, and for producing nonsensical code a human has to fix, but entirely different to rely on them for health diagnosis or advice. I shudder at the thought that a medical practitioner I go to will parrot whatever an LLM told them.

This insanity needs to be regulated yesterday.
by breakingcups | 2025-05-12 21:21:44+00:00
> Previously, a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, had testified that Meta allegedly modified torrenting settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," which seems to support authors' claims that some seeding occurred. And an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang appeared to show that Meta allegedly tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to "avoid" the "risk" of anyone "tracing back the seeder/downloader" from Facebook servers. Once this information came to light, authors asked the court for a chance to depose Meta executives again, alleging that new facts "contradict prior deposition testimony."
by LordDragonfang | 2025-05-12 21:22:43+00:00
Conversely, it's the scale, not magnitude. A single physical infrastructure failure can usually only harm a very limited number of people. A digital infrastructure breach can trivially harm millions.

Observing that each individual harm may not be worth the effort of suing over is evidence that the justice system is not effective at addressing harm in the aggregate, not evidence of lack of major harm.
by InitialLastName | 2025-05-12 21:22:48+00:00
> Funny story about that - "pre-booking" an Uber for a future date costs something like an additional 20% on top of the actual fare. Made that mistake once and never agai

Addendum from my funny story: It doesn't even really guarantee there will be a driver for you. A few years ago I "pre-booked" a car for an airport ride at an inconvenient time, only to have it cancelled as the driver was meant to show up. Luckily driver were more available than I expected they would be and I had another within a few minutes, but I could have been really screwed over.
by LexiMax | 2025-05-12 21:23:00+00:00
I think most people have lost their minds over the hypocrisy. For decades people have been raked over the coals for piracy, but now suddenly piracy is okay if your name is Facebook and you're building an AI model.

Either force AI companies to compensate the artists they're being "inspired" by, or let people torrent a copywashed Toy Story 5.
by toast0 | 2025-05-12 21:24:36+00:00
They are very interesting. IMHO, it's a nice compromise between making sure the artists are paid for their work, and giving them complete control over their work. Licensing for radio-style play is also compulsory, and terrestrial radio used to not even have to pay the recording artists (I think this changed?), but did have to track and pay to ASCAP.

As a consumer, it would amazing if there were compulsory licenses for film and tv; then we wouldn't have to subscribe to 70 different services to get to the things we want to see. And there would likely be services that spring up to redistribute media where the rightsholders aren't able to or don't care to; it might be pulled from VHS that fans recorded off of TV in the old days, but at least it'd be something.
by theultdev | 2025-05-12 21:26:02+00:00
You don't see how gate-keeping who can create software is authoritarian?

The distinction between creating virtual software and physical structures is fairly obvious.

Of course physical engineers that create buildings and roads need to be regulated for safety.

And there are restrictions already for certain software industries, such as healthcare.

Many other forms of software do not have the same hazards so no license should be needed, as it would be prone for abuse.
by perihelions | 2025-05-12 21:26:23+00:00
- "Several upcoming missions, including NASA’s DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging)"

DAVINCI is actually cancelled in the latest budget request. For obvious reasons, the NASA press office (the OP) won't talk about this. But 50% of NASA's science funding is gone.

https://spacenews.com/white-house-proposal-would-slash-nasa-...
by program_whiz | 2025-05-12 21:26:55+00:00
I would say one weakness of the paper is that they primarily compare performance with LSTM (a simpler recursion model), rather than similar attention / diffusion models. I would be curious how well a model that just has N layers of attention in/out would perform on these tasks (using a recursive time-stepped approach). My guess is performance will be very similar, and network architecture will also be quite similar (although a true transformer is a bit different than input attention + unet which they employ).
by geoffpado | 2025-05-12 21:27:16+00:00
Grocery stores everywhere have the ability to pull recalled products off their shelves pretty quickly. I did it fairly regularly at my first job as a shelf-stocker for a small local store in rural MO. Somehow we made it work, so clearly someone figured out how to deal with that "bureaucratic nightmare". I see no reason why hardware products that are on a list due to known issues would be any different.
by sedatk | 2025-05-12 21:27:27+00:00
I first heard about ICQ in 1997 too (UINs were still 6 digits at the time), but dismissed it because I thought it was ridiculous to make yourself always available for messaging. It didn't make any sense to me at all. But, the world had other plans. The next year, when all of my friends were using it, I could only get a 8-digit UIN.

Today, I can relate even more so than ever to my ICQ-skeptic self from 1997 though.
by const_cast | 2025-05-12 21:27:34+00:00
The reason those are allowed is because they don't compete with the source material. A thumbnail of a movie is never a substitute for a movie.

LLMs seek to be a for-profit replacement for a variety of paid sources. They say "hey, you can get the same thing as Service X for less money with us!"

That's a problem, regardless of how you go about it. It's probably fine if I watch a movie with my friends, who cares. But distributing it over the internet for free is a different issue.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-05-12 21:27:36+00:00
> How does this skill works?

I've been using computers for 40 years, have never installed and have always disabled malware scanners, and never had a virus. Maybe I'm special. But I'm not that special. There are 3 billion Android uses in the world, almost all of them don't have malware scanners, and almost all of them have never been infected by a malware. Ditto iPhone users.

To be fair, I haven't used Windows for the latter 1/2 of that 40 years. So maybe it's only Windows users who need to go around x-raying all data storages.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-12 21:27:50+00:00
Better: title should capture some core aspect(s) of [thing]. But may do so in a playful manner.

Say eg. some building / construction / architecture article could be titled "square shapes considered harmful". And then discuss architects known for buildings with rounded corners everywhere.

Personally, I don't see "audience likes it" as #1 priority. I prefer to make audience think, learn something, provide a new angle on something, or put out something that didn't exist before. Kind of like a movie that may not have a happy end, but viewers remember for the story, atmosphere, instant classic-potential, etc.
by antognini | 2025-05-12 21:28:01+00:00
Once you have the matrix implementation in Step 2 (Implementation 3) it's rather straightforward to extend your N-body simulator to run on a GPU with Jax --- you can just add `import jax.numpy as jnp` and replace all the `np.`s with `jnp`s.

For a few-body system (e.g., the Solar System) this probably won't provide any speedup. But once you get to ~100 bodies you should start to see substantial speedups by running the simulator on a GPU.
by latentsea | 2025-05-12 21:28:47+00:00
> The nail that sticks out gets hammered not because of a requirement that you conform, but because you’re not doing your responsibilities, so someone else has to do it.

Unfortunately, in practice it's ingrained by a tonne of instances of getting told off for minor infractions of seemingly very arbitrary rules, to the point where it's so ingrained that you just stop questioning it because it's not worth the energy to do so anymore.
by FlamingMoe | 2025-05-12 21:28:50+00:00
Good lord. The idea that a sleep‑deprived, bias‑prone mammal can be relied on to give accurate health‑related information is deeply flawed and troubling. It’s one thing to seek a human for empathy, small talk, or a routine vaccine, but entirely different to assume an overworked doctor will consistently out‑diagnose a modern data tool. I shudder at the thought that the practitioner I visit might simply repeat whatever a drug‑rep lunch pitch or outdated guideline left in their memory.
by sardines | 2025-05-12 21:29:06+00:00
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by dreghgh | 2025-05-12 21:29:17+00:00
Name any art gallery which you think is a major art gallery, ie of comparable or greater size and prestige to the Barbican art gallery and is 15 minutes from the Barbican center, including by public transport?

You can't, because there isn't one.

You made an incorrect statement, and now you're defending it, but without providing any example at all of what you are claiming exists. So it's a little bit cheeky to claim that I am shifting the goal posts.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-12 21:29:23+00:00
My girlfriend and I pounced on ICQ in that year. I wound up with UIN# 279866.

And then ICQ was invaded and subverted by Russia. I mean pervasively. Just like LiveJournal was, later on.

I have come to believe that these were simply psyops that were a bit less anticipated than TikTok was.

Imagine the power of Russian threat actors knowing when and where every kid was online and wanting to chat, and who all their friends were.
by ben_w | 2025-05-12 21:29:24+00:00
I very much appreciate all the ways we're improving our ideas of what "smart" means.

I wouldn't call LLMs "smart" either, but with a different definition than the one you use here: to me, at the moment, "smart" means being able to learn efficiently, with few examples needed to master a new challenge.

This may not be sufficient, but it does avoid any circular arguments about if any given model would have any "understanding" at all.
by Suppafly | 2025-05-12 21:29:32+00:00
>Sometimes, so sometimes it's copyright infringement.

So in those cases, the original authors might have a case. Generally you don't see these LLM doing that though.

>Doesn't help that it's explicitly for-profit and seeks to obsolesce and siphon value from it's training material.

Doesn't hurt either. That's a reason to be butthurt, but that's not a legal argument.
by hinkley | 2025-05-12 21:31:19+00:00
Neutron decay is one of those things that I forgot between college physics classes and today and it was sort of surprising to rediscover it.

We also know that electrons eventually decay but it's something like 10^26 years, which is long enough to say that probably not many electrons in the solar system have decayed since the universe was born but the universe is really stupidly big, so it absolute numbers that could still be a lot of dead electrons. Maybe a solar system's worth.

Surprisingly there is no wikipedia page for this. Just rando articles.
by Zigurd | 2025-05-12 21:32:19+00:00
What made me very skeptical about Starship is that Elon seems to think that software people have the right idea about project management for everything. When in fact software is the oddball. Almost every other kind of project should be done the traditional way. Agile doesn't work for most things outside of software and the way Elon views. The style of management is as an excuse to make bullshit pronouncements about timelines.
by machtiani-chat | 2025-05-12 21:32:49+00:00
Just use codex and machtiani (mct). Both are open source. Machtiani was open sourced today. Mct can find context in a hay stack, and it’s efficient with tokens. Its embeddings are locally generated because of its hybrid indexing and localization strategy. No file chunking. No internet, if you want to be hardcore. Use any inference provider, even local. The demo video shows solving an issue VSCode codebase (of 133,000 commits and over 8000 files) with only Qwen 2.5 coder 7B. But you can use anything you want, like Claude 3.7. I never max out context in my prompts - not even close.

https://github.com/tursomari/machtiani
by kazinator | 2025-05-12 21:32:52+00:00
What if it isn't actually a free market?

Secondly, the reasonablity or unreasonability of payouts is linked to premiums.

In other words, one way that the parsimonious insurer would still have customers is that they offer low premiums compared to the liberal insurers.

Even people who know about the bad anecdotes from reading online reviews will brush that aside for the better deal. (Hey, reviews are biased toward negativity and miss the other side of the story; chances are that wouldn't happen to me.)

The free market doesn't optimize for quality. Firstly, it optimizes for the lowest price for a given level of quality. But the price optimization has a second-order effect of a downward pressure on quality.

If you're selling something and the margin is optimized: it's about as cheap as can be, what you can do is reduce quality by some epsilon, and make a corresponding decrease in price. It still looks like about the same quality to someone not using a magnifying glass and fine-toothed comb, and you have temporary price edge against competitors. That triggers a kind of "gradient descent" of declining quality which bottoms out at some minimum level of quality below which viability starts to get eroded past a point where the market still finds the thing acceptable.