MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by badmonster | 2025-05-15 07:27:21+00:00
Why do LLMs struggle so much with recovering from early wrong turns in multi-turn conversations — even when all prior context is available and tokenized?

Is it due to the model's training distribution (mostly single-shot completions), the way context windows are encoded, or an architectural bottleneck?

Feels like there's no dynamic internal state that evolves over the conversation — only a repeated re-parsing of static history. Has anyone seen work on integrating memory/state mechanisms that allow belief revision within a session, not just regurgitation of past tokens?
by seadan83 | 2025-05-15 07:27:42+00:00
> And indeed the natural and inevitable progression of this world line is a machine world,

Would you mind clarifying your line of reasoning for suggesting this?

Second: quoting wikipedia - "The many-worlds interpretation implies that there are many parallel, non-interacting worlds."

If the multiple words are non-interacting, how could one world observe a large scale extinction event corresponding to the other world line departing? The two world lines are completely non-interacting, there would be no way to observe anything about the other.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
by m4houk | 2025-05-15 07:27:47+00:00
I once built something like this for fun as a side project.

You can highlight some text in a chat and fork the chat to talk about that text selection, so the LLM has context of that along with the previous chat history and it responds in a new chat (entire chat history up to that point from the parent chat gets copied over - basically inspired by the Unix `fork`).

Your text selection from the parent chat would get turned into a hyperlink to the new child chat so you can always get to it again if you're reading the parent chat.
by Animats | 2025-05-15 07:29:07+00:00
Are the scraper sites using a large number of IP addresses, like a distributed denial of service attack? If not, rather than explicit blocking, consider using fair queuing. Do all the requests from IP addresses that have zero requests pending. Then those from IP addresses with one request pending, and so forth. Each IP address contends with itself, so making massive numbers of requests from one address won't cause a problem.

I put this on a web site once, and didn't notice for a month that someone was making queries at a frantic rate. It had zero impact on other traffic.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-15 07:29:11+00:00
I worked out that it's cheaper to write logs to high-end Samsung SSDs and then throw them away every month than to retain them in the log analytics systems of some cloud services for the same period of time.

Wait, no, sorry... that doesn't quite "paint the right picture".

The "single use" SSDs are 75 times cheaper than storing the data in the cloud.
by whitehexagon | 2025-05-15 07:29:22+00:00
If a company the size of MS isn't able handle the DOS caused by the LLM slurpers, then it really is game over for the open internet. We are going to need government approved ID based logins to even read the adverts at this rate.

But this feels like a further attempt to create a walled garden around 'our' source code. I say our, but the first push to KYC, asking for phone numbers, was enough for me to delete all and close my account. Being on the outside, it feels like those walls get taller every month. I often see an interesting project mentioned on HN and clone the repo, but more and more times that is failing. Trying to browse online is now limited, and they recently disabled search without an account.

For such a critical piece of worldwide technology infrastructure, maybe it would be better run by a not-for-profit independent foundation. I guess, since it is just git, anyone could start this, and migration would be easy.
by stuaxo | 2025-05-15 07:30:12+00:00
I don't think London has private mini buses like that, just a huge amount of buses.

They are operated by companies for TFL (though they are all red, you can read the company name).

I'm not sure at what point that arrangement happened, somewhere between the outright privatisations of the 80s, or the stealth ones of the black years, which used PFI.
by ActorNightly | 2025-05-15 07:31:13+00:00
People often forget that Google was behind Mu Zero, which IMO is the most important AI paper of the decade, not the Transformer one, because they effectively showed how models can learn how to search.

For example, for self driving, it makes much more sense to treat it like a game, where the model learns the evolution of the surrounding environment, and learns how its own actions affect it, and can MCTS its way into correct behavior - specifically because once it learns the environment dynamics, it can internally simulate crashes and retrain itself.

If this process is refined (namely the functions that control direction of training) , you can pretty much start training a model on the dataset of real world (sights, sounds, physical interactions, as well as digital ones), and as it learns the environment, it can be further and further refined, and then we get to the point where it can self evolve its decision making to be truly considered "intelligent".
by BlackFly | 2025-05-15 07:31:47+00:00
Bikes just don't take up nearly as much space as cars and don't really block each other as much: gridlock is a problem for cars but not really for bikes. In the Netherlands there are a number of famous intersections where there are no signs nor right of way rules and people on bikes and pedestrians just pass through each other by slowing down and taking turns. These intersection rules were chosen because of the high density: individuals in them can simply deal with the conditions better than formulated timeslots for right of way that waste time while changing priority. Some of these intersections also permit cars but the number of cars in such areas is generally small or limited to buses.

There is a natural limit to how far people want to bike (in a statistical sense, as the distance increases the number of people willing to bike that far drops). The highest density ends up occurring around train stations which is a focal point for foot and bicycle traffic and necessitates large bike parking lots. Those people then switch to trains although they might pick up a bike on the other side. Some people prefer bike rental for these reasons, since when you drop off your bike someone coming the other direction can take it and you can pick up another one at the end of the train ride.
by liampulles | 2025-05-15 07:34:32+00:00
I wonder increasingly with tools like ChatGPT whether ORMs make sense anymore? The argument I've always heard for ORMs is that they make it quick and easy to make the initial repository method, and that they make migrating to a new DB easier (hypothetically).

It seems to me LLMs now help fill both those roles, but with the benefit that you can now tune the SQL as needed. I also always prefer actually knowing exactly what queries are going to my DB, but YMMV.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-15 07:36:01+00:00
> Maybe you mean types of notifications that I'm not used to using, because notifications were the first thing I would turn off on any smart watch I've used (pebble, Amazfit, galaxy). The last thing I need if to have yet another device (now being worn) vibrating every 5min for some message.

At least on my smartwatch (Samsung one) I can choose which notifications I want to forward to the watch. And I have all the ones I don't care about turned off anyway, even on my phone. For me it replaces a lot of my smartphone (which I only use outdoors anyway, at home I have a real computer). The ability of the galaxy watch to also show pictures in notifications is a big plus (my old pebbles could not do that, not sure about the new repebbles)

The notifications on my watch are the main reason I have it. It avoids looking at my phone every time something comes in. It's not too often because I block so much and I don't use social media.

I don't care much about the health tracking, though I do sometimes use the sleep tracking. Especially the SpO2 tracking is handy because I have apnea. It does bother me that Samsung doesn't make it possible to turn off their health "gamifications" (every day I get nonsense messages like "Will you meet your goal today?", "You're halfway your goal, keep going!"). I still have to see if I can turn that crap off via ADB.
by masfoobar | 2025-05-15 07:36:03+00:00
(continued from my comment above) Apologies, I am missing some text on here. No sure what happened. I might have deleted before I submitted. I cannot edit this comment, but I need to clarify and correct it...

"new Guid()" is equiverlant "Guid.Empty"

Personally, I would prefer writing "Guid.Empty" as it is cleaner. It also helps ensure you understand reading other developers code... their intensions.

Afterall, a lesser experienced developer may not know (or simply forgot) that "new Guid()" does not create a new, unique value. So writing "new Guid()" looks more misleading.

var myGuid1 = new Guid(); // all zeroes, or a value?

var myGuid2 = Guid.Empty; // Ah.. all zeroes.

It is ESPECIALLY cleaner when doing comparison :-

if(myGuid2 == Guid.Empty) { }

To set a Guid, you would do :-

myGuid2 = Guid.NewGuid(); // This makes sense.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-05-15 07:36:42+00:00
> Could you help me understand what the difference is

Well the main difference is that this is being used to justify blocking and not demanding thousands of dollars.

> When AI can perfectly replicate the browsing behavior of a human being

They're still being jackasses because I'm willing to pay to give free service to X humans but not 20X bots pretending to be humans.
by palata | 2025-05-15 07:38:41+00:00
> This seems like a key failure point

Actually it is a feature. The whole point of the Yubikey is that you can't extract the key. Syncing keys would mean extracting them, which would defeat the purpose of the Yubikey.

Now I am not saying that it is a feature you want. That's why there are other kinds of passkeys. My point is that it is not a flaw in Yubikeys, it is by design.
by tralarpa | 2025-05-15 07:39:14+00:00
Interesting that it works for you. I tried several times something similar with frames from a 5G network and it mixed fields from 4G and 5G in its answers (or even from non-cellular network protocols because they had similar features as the 5G protocol I was looking at). Occasionally, the explanation was completely invented or based on discussions of planned features for future versions.

I have really learned to mistrust and double check every single line those systems produce. Same for writing code. Everything they produce looks nice and reasonable on the surface but when you dig deaper it falls apart unless it's something very very basic.
by setr | 2025-05-15 07:41:57+00:00
I’m not even sure it was correct for its time? The whole point of an RDBMS is to execute join operations. The only reason I’d suspect an RDBMS to be bad at its one fundamental job, in any point of time, is the N+1 query scenario or multiple left joins with unrelated dependencies, but that’s triggered by bad orm abstractions to begin with
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-15 07:42:06+00:00
Emotions are not inputs, they are outputs first. we process information using internal algorithms that we developed as a result of our life experience and genetic coding and the result is an emotional verdict over some input. That emotional verdict is presented to our decision making algorithms as input, we can ignore it or act on it.

I have neither experienced or observed anything about human emotions that indicates they are in any way chaotic, random or unexplainable. We have beliefs, memories and experiences. emotions always use these variables and produce some output. Not only are emotions deterministic, but they are used by any number of people, from spies, to advertisers, to state-level disinformation propagandists to manipulate large numbers of peoples reliably.
by lucianbr | 2025-05-15 07:42:07+00:00
> It applies immediately across Europe.

Does anyone know what the consequences are? I have no idea exactly what it is that applies immediately.

I would guess that starting today Google and others should stop advertising as they currently do it, it being illegal. I doubt it's that simple, and even if it was, I am sure they will not simply stop. So what happens now?
by Symbiote | 2025-05-15 07:42:44+00:00
The other case for personalised advertising is when a purchase is almost made.

I was recently searching for a toy across Etsy, Ali Express, eBay. I didn't buy it. A day later, I saw 'suggested' purchases on Amazon for the same toy. I boycott Amazon, so I don't often visit their website.

I normally block (successfully?) almost all of this advertising, so I find it particularly creepy when I receive it.
by sudoforge | 2025-05-15 07:42:47+00:00
to support the workflow where you, an individual, outside contributor, want to use git-bug to create or comment on an issue on a third-party platform that you do not control, you would:

- install git-bug

- create a directory (and `git init`), optionally fetch/clone the remote repo (but this is not needed)

- create a git-bug identity (`git bug user new`)

- configure a bridge to (for example, using vscode) github (`git bug bridge new`)

- pull issues from the bridge to your local repository's refs/bugs namespace (`git bug bridge pull`)

- create a new issue, or browse existing ones and comment on them at will

- export your activity to the bridge (`git bug bridge push`)

this works without push access to the repository, because when importing to or exporting from a bridge, the API credentials you provide when configuring the bridge are used -- `git bug bridge {push,pull}` does not push your local `refs/bugs` to the remote.
by shmeeed | 2025-05-15 07:42:59+00:00
It's hard to imagine the horror and the struggle for bare survival that took place in this narrow space over the span of just a few seconds, but if I had to guess, it might very well be that in the end they did not manage to free their luggage and take it with them to the exit.

If I read the article correctly, only three people from the rows behind those reported trying to take their luggage with them survived. It's not in the mentioned whether the people that caused the plug have themselves perished or survived; and tempting as is the speculation when one looks at the seating plan, suffice to say that if those people are still alive, they very probably will be forever haunted by their guilt.
by marianikulina | 2025-05-15 07:44:50+00:00
Hi! I'm Maria, a Senior UX/UI Designer with 5+ years of experience. With a keen eye for detail, I design user-centered, intuitive, and functional interfaces that align with both user needs and business objectives.

Experience: FinTech, Startups, Logistics, Business automation, E-commerce.

Design practices: User Research, User Flow, UX/UI, Web, Design System, Variables, Wireframes, Email Design, Dashboards, Mobile App Design, Illustrations, Animations, Figma, FinTech, E-commerce.

Location: Warsaw, Poland

Remote: Yes

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mauash/

Email: maryenna.nik@gmail.com
by jclulow | 2025-05-15 07:45:13+00:00
Yes, LLM-era scrapers are frequently making use of large numbers of IP addresses from all over the place. Some of them seem to be bot nets, but based on IP subnet ownership it seems also pretty frequently to be cloud companies, many of them outside the US. In addition to fanning out to different IPs, many of the scrapers appear to use User Agent strings that are randomised, or perhaps in some cases themselves generated by the slop factory. It's pretty fucking bleak out there, to be honest.
by azath92 | 2025-05-15 07:45:26+00:00
Because of how old they are there is some really interesting long term data as the earth itself around the tunnels reaches a new thermal equilibrium. In looking for a source, i found a good wikipedia article on tube temp in general.

These comments and the article made me see how much of it is/was due to braking. TIL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_cooling
by bambax | 2025-05-15 07:46:04+00:00
> The machines had a good idea of what humans wanted at this point, and so they put vast green forests and big tall mountains onto the planet; they engineered warm sunsets, and crisp cool rain showers on hot afternoons. It was beautiful.

The point of all this is to liken "machines" to a very traditional image of God, and of the rest of nature to God's gift to man.

Machines aren't part of life. They're tools. The desire, or fear, of AGI and/or singularity are one and the same: it's an eschatological belief that we can make a God (and then it would follow that, as god's creators, we are godlike?)

But there is no god. We are but one animal species. It's not "humans vs. machines". We are part of nature, we are part of life. We can respect life, or we can have contempt for all life forms except our own. It seems modern society has chosen the latter (it wasn't always the case); this may not end well.
by franga2000 | 2025-05-15 07:46:27+00:00
Unfortunately there are a lot of "is this number voip" services that use various tricks to detect voip numbers, or simply buy this data from the voip provider or someone else in the path.

If nothing else, if a particular voip provider only does voip, you can just put them on a blacklist. You can get any number's provider from the number portability clearinghouse (this might be country dependent, where I live, there's only one, and anyone can query it).
by arghwhat | 2025-05-15 07:46:48+00:00
Motion resolution? Do you mean the pixel response time?

CRTs technically have quite a few artifacts in this area, but as content displayed CRTs tend to be built for CRTs this is less of an issue, and in many case even required. The input is expecting specific distortions and effects from scanlines and phosphor, which a "perfect" display wouldn't exhibit...

The aggressive OLED ABL is simply a thermal issue. It can be mitigated with thermal design in smaller devices, and anything that increases efficiency (be it micro lens arrays, stacked "tandem" panels, quantum dots, alternative emitter technology) will lower the thermal load and increase the max full panel brightness.

(LCD with zone dimming would also be able to pull this trick to get even brighter zones, but because the base brightness is high enough it doesn't bother.)
by silverliver | 2025-05-15 07:46:52+00:00
This is really neat! I know Microsoft would never integrate this into github, but what about integrating this other less vendor-lockin-ey scm platforms like forgejo or gitlab? It might be a much better fit then retrofitting activity-pub (current efforts in this space).

Imagine having repository issues seamlessly propagated and replicated across all your git mirrors.
by braza | 2025-05-15 07:46:53+00:00
One of my pet peeves with the usage of complex(ity) out of the traditional time/space in computer science is that most of the time the OPs of several articles over the internet do not make the distinction between boundaried/arbitrary complexity, where most of the time the person has most of the control of what is being implemented, and domain/accidental/environmental complexity, which is wide open and carries a lot of intrinsic and most of the time unsolvable constraints.

Yes, they are Google; yes, they have a great pool of talent around; yes, they do a lot of hard stuff; but most of the time when I read those articles, I miss those kinds of distinctions.

Not lowballing the guys at Google, they do amazing stuff, but in some domains of domain/accidental/environmental complexity (e.g. sea logistics, manufacturing, industry, etc.) where most of the time you do not have the data, I believe that they are way more complex/harder than most of the problems that the ones that they deal with.
by frankie_t | 2025-05-15 07:47:02+00:00
There is a parallel to this Celtic imitations that is found primarily in modern Ukraine[1], attribute to Cherniakhov culture[2]. The theory for them is that once the trade with Roman Empire ceased, the locals needed bigger supply of coins and started minting their own.

There is a curious thing with this "branch", I'm not sure if it's the same in the Celtic one. The last time I talked to people researching this, I was told that: a. The findings are mostly unique, it's hard to find two copies of the same coin. Sometimes obverse of one coin could be found on another, but reverses don't match. b. These coins are not cast, they are minted through "hammering", which requires a stamp. However, not a single stamp has been found so far. A much easier way to make currency out of existing one would be to just slap existing coin into some clay, make a casting mold and just pour molten metal into it.

This of course is more of a curiosity/rumor level, I don't have any qualifications to back it up.

[1]: http://barbarous-imitations.narod.ru/ (apologize for a .ru website, but it's the best catalogue to my knowledge.)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernyakhov_culture
by GeorgeCurtis | 2025-05-15 07:47:56+00:00
Thanks for clearing up some of these points. Really pleased the post has reached the industry leaders, and I genuinely appreciate your response :)

With regards to the prefiltering, I was referring to filtering during the neighbor search in the HNSW. If you wanted 10 vectors, but with specific conditions, you'd have to retrieve surplus vectors and then perform the filter, hoping you were left with enough. Does that sound right? I suppose that is metadata filtering.

I should've been more specific about the memory issue. Not tying to slate you here, just that a lot of complaints I've read online were about issues with memory overflows using the vectors. But of course, a misconfigured system would definitely perform poorly :)

Thanks again for the response!
by ryzvonusef | 2025-05-15 07:48:11+00:00
> Ms. Stapleton decided to do some digging. She reviewed her professor’s slide presentations and discovered other telltale signs of A.I.: distorted text, photos of office workers with extraneous body parts and egregious misspellings. > She was not happy. Given the school’s cost and reputation, she expected a top-tier education. This course was required for her business minor; its syllabus forbade “academically dishonest activities,” including the unauthorized use of artificial intelligence or chatbots. > “He’s telling us not to use it, and then he’s using it himself,” she said. > But, oh, how the tables have turned. Now students are complaining on sites like Rate My Professors about their instructors’ overreliance on A.I. and scrutinizing course materials for words ChatGPT tends to overuse, like “crucial” and “delve.” In addition to calling out hypocrisy, they make a financial argument: They are paying, often quite a lot, to be taught by humans, not an algorithm that they, too, could consult for free. > Shingirai Christopher Kwaramba, a business professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, described ChatGPT as a partner that saved time. Lesson plans that used to take days to develop now take hours, he said. He uses it, for example, to generate data sets for fictional chain stores, which students use in an exercise to understand various statistical concepts. > “I see it as the age of the calculator on steroids,” Dr. Kwaramba said. > Dr. Kwaramba said he now had more time for student office hours.
by fmajid | 2025-05-15 07:48:53+00:00
The Celts were far from primitive barbarians. In fact, the Romans adopted many technological innovations from the (Celtic) La Tène material culture in what is now Switzerland. This includes the gladius and spatha swords, the Montefortino helmet, the lorica hamata chainmail armor and the oval scutum shield. In fact, most of the armament of a Roman soldier was based on La Tène originals or Celto-Iberic ones.