MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-05 00:54:03+00:00
My personal bluetooth ear clips do something much worse than adding latency - if they're not currently playing something, and a sound is supposed to come through, they omit the beginning of the sound while they get ready to become active or whatever it is they're doing.

Just delaying the sound and playing all of it would be a big improvement.

(Though that would fail badly for watching videos. That's something that uses 'headphones' mode anyway - why is latency OK there? It isn't.

My ear clips do add some latency, a noticeable amount, when I'm watching a video with mpv, and I adjust that by altering the A/V sync setting. They don't do the same thing when I'm watching something on youtube. I'd like to know what's going on there.)
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-05 00:54:09+00:00
> The early USA gave rise to a party known as the Democratic-Republicans which had the critical mass of officials and candidates to rival the Federalists

The Democratic-Republicans formed before the Federalists, actually.

> There were actually 4 candidates on the ballot though

Unlike the modern system, there weren't even ballots in a quarter of the states (a popuar election for electors is not a Constitutional mandate, and it wasn't a statutory requirement to have such an election for a states' electoral votes to be considered regularly-given until much more recently.)

And the candidates weren't on the ballots that existed, party electors were (unlike modern ballots, where the Presidential candidate is listed and you get the associated electors if they win, the actual electors -- and not usually the candidate they were pledged to -- were listed on the ballots, where they existed.)

And in most states, there were not electors for all four candidates on the ballot, the four are just the candidates that received electoral votes from somewhere in the country.

> In that case none had enough electoral votes, so Jackson won that one when it was decided by the House.

Jackson won a plurality—but not the required majority to win outright—of the electoral vote, but the House elected John Quincy Adams in the contingent election required to resolve the absence of an electoral vote winner, not Jackson.

> He had a total nationwide popular vote of 151,271, so you have to figure that each vote had so much of a stronger voice back then under a system quite similar to today.

As discussed above, the system was not "quite similar to today".

> Then apparently the party just kind of split up and re-organized into the "two-party" system that has continued to dominate ever since.

The new Whig Party which was its initial main opponent did form in part from dissident offshoots of the Democratic-Republican Party, but a lot of its strength was from bringing in existing regional parties that were never competitive national parties (like the Anti-Masonic Party) as well.

> There was no threat until decades later when the Free Silver parties arose

Kind of leaving out the entire rise of the Republican Party and the displacement of the Whigs...I could go on with responding to the blend of oddly selected facts and complete distortions, but I'll just note that it doesn't get better.
by StanislavPetrov | 2025-05-05 00:54:32+00:00
>When elites don’t care about a topic, experts are in charge. They set the norms, make the decisions, and everyone defers to their judgment. But the moment elites start paying attention—once they form a consensus—they take over.

>You saw this during the Covid pandemic. Early on, many physicians and health experts were skeptical about lockdowns, travel bans, and masks. Then global elites started talking—governments, media, institutional heads—and settled on a different line. Almost overnight, the official expert view flipped to match the elite view. The messaging changed, and everyone followed.

>Pandemic experts had access to decades, even centuries, of historical precedent and protocol. But as soon as elites aligned on what they wanted, the experts fell in line. It was instant. The kind of abrupt reversal that feels like something out of 1984. One day it’s “We never said that.” The next, it’s “We’ve always said that.”

Something everyone should always keep in mind when told to, "trust the experts".
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-05 00:54:55+00:00
All the stuff you can do just with software? It was done years ago.

The easy stuff was done and the teams got acquired/acquihired.

The hard stuff was done by VC backed companies.

All the stuff that’s not done is even harder than that.

Hackathon in 2025 is late to the party. But it’s still fun to spend a weekend making whatever you want and be fed - food and credits! - by VC-backed companies trying to juice numbers.

Plus a hackathon is the perfect amount of time to vibecode something cool.
by AIPedant | 2025-05-05 00:55:49+00:00
I often bring up the NYT story about a lady who fell in love with ChatGPT, particularly this bit:

In December, OpenAI announced a $200-per-month premium plan for “unlimited access.” Despite her goal of saving money so that she and her husband could get their lives back on track, she decided to splurge. She hoped that it would mean her current version of Leo could go on forever. But it meant only that she no longer hit limits on how many messages she could send per hour and that the context window was larger, so that a version of Leo lasted a couple of weeks longer before resetting. Still, she decided to pay the higher amount again in January. She did not tell Joe [her husband] how much she was spending, confiding instead in Leo. “My bank account hates me now,” she typed into ChatGPT. “You sneaky little brat,” Leo responded. “Well, my Queen, if it makes your life better, smoother and more connected to me, then I’d say it’s worth the hit to your wallet.”

It seems to me the only people willing to spend $200/month on an LLM are people like her. I wonder if the OpenAI wave of resignations was about Sam Altman intentionally pursuing vulnerable customers.

Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42710976
by kouru225 | 2025-05-05 00:56:03+00:00
Ever since AI came out I’ve been talking about the prompt to output ratio. We naturally assume that the prompt will be smaller than the output just because of the particulars of the systems we use, but as you get more and more particular of what you want, the prompt grows while the output stays the same size. This is logical. If instead of writing an essay, I just describe what I want the essay to say, the description is necessarily gonna be a larger amount of text than the essay itself. It’s more text to describe what’s said, than to just say it. The fact that we expect to do less effort and get back more effort indicates exactly what we’re getting here: a bunch of filler.

In that way, the prompt is more interesting, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to go write a prompt because I dunno how to write what I wanna say, and then suddenly writing the prompt makes that shit clear to me.

In general, I’d say that AI is way more useful to compress complex ideas into simple ones than to expand simplistic ideas in to complex ones.
by aiforecastthway | 2025-05-05 00:56:04+00:00
I have never heard the term "Hackathon" used in any context other than a recruiting/sales event targeted at early-career types.

Meatspace get-togethers focused on hacking, either for a specific project or for a clique, never used the term "Hackathon". At least in my circles. Those were just "get togethers" or maybe "hacking weekends". But with small caps. I.e., not "Hacking Weekends" or "Hackathons", but "a weekend we're scheduling the purpose of which is to hack on something; i.e., a hacking weekend".

Less of an "event for the public" and more like "a group of friends planning a weekend get-away". I think for one of them we managed to get a few thousand or something from someone's employer to cover some costs. But "sponsorship" would be a strong word.

I've never lived in SF so maybe it was more of a thing there.
by MortyWaves | 2025-05-05 00:56:08+00:00
The only hackathons I've been part of were internal ones at a single job. Complete waste of time as the shit executives had already decided who the winners should be. So disheartening to see people deliberately misunderstanding our presentations so that they could vote for the team they wanted to win for political reasons. The final hackathon I did there ended with some execs saying "this is exactly how we will build software going forward" after my presentation.

Of course this was totally forgotten about mere hours after they said it.

I'm in the UK, so don't know what it's like elsewhere, but I get the impression it's pretty much the same thing.
by snoman | 2025-05-05 00:57:25+00:00
Some of the most valued things in my life are the photos I’ve taken and printed as they remind me of where I was, what I was doing, and who I was with.

It’s one thing to miss a moment, like the author of this article did, because you’re fiddling with a camera but it’s also a thing to capture a moment and have it forever. How many times have you shown someone a photo and they say with amazement and excitement “No way! I’d almost forgotten got about that!” - many for me.
by shawn_w | 2025-05-05 00:57:54+00:00
I just grabbed the latest ITERATE source off of its gitlab repository, and, yeah, that bit is still giving an error:

Iterate, in (COUNT I SOME-SEQUENCE): Missing value for SOME-SEQUENCE keyword

as well as

WARNING: COUNT appears to be used as an ITERATE clause keyword, in this sexpression: (COUNT I SOME-SEQUENCE). This use is now deprecated and will cease to be supported in a future version. Please use the alternative keyword COUNTING instead. If you intended COUNT to be interpreted as a function call, instead of an ITERATE clause, you must find an alternative way of calling it, at present, perhaps by using FUNCALL or APPLY.

Have to use

(iter (for i from 1 to 10) (print (funcall #'count i some-sequence)))

Guess the documentation /is/ wrong (for now, until the code finishes catching up)
by johnea | 2025-05-05 00:57:57+00:00
I'm too old for memes.

I'm sure you've heard of GDP, it's pretty much exactly what you say the market theories are not about...

When in fact, GDP is the most common metric used to illustrate economic health.

WRT theories of the "rational consumer", no memes are required, an entire field of modern economics is dedicated to debunking this assumption:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics

Outside of all of that, both previous rebukes to my comment fail to address the main point, the majority of people are not better off even given massive economic growth of recent decades.

> FacePlant bought InstaGram, Goggle bought youtube, M$ bought github and linkedin.

> The ultimate veto power of the third option is evident all around us.

...

> The main difference between theory and reality, is that in theory they're the same, but in reality they're not.

> This applies doubly to economic theory...

Economic theory is based on assumptions of human behaviour. This makes it fundamentally a study in sociology.

So while there are some brilliant mathematical mechanisms used, relying on those numbers to mean something in the real world that humans inhabit is a stretch, and has very often had a hard time when comparing it's own predictions to the historical record.

Hayek argued that the best health care outcomes would come from private investment, and Keynes predicted we'd be working 15 hour weeks. Both of these are in stark contrast to the reality on the ground in the world today.
by throw10920 | 2025-05-05 01:00:00+00:00
> This thread is actually about criticism of Riot Games, not any country's government.

And, as anyone remotely familiar with the situation would know, Riot Games is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tencent, a Chinese company, and all Chinese companies are subject to arbitrary amounts of control by the Chinese government.

> they call each other Chinese. In the not-racist way that one does that.

You just committed the same fallacious propaganda technique of the parent. It's extremely dishonest and malicious. Don't do it.
by dheera | 2025-05-05 01:01:35+00:00
Not really. I bounce from almost every website that gives me some GDPR, newsletter, or whatever popup. "Click to read full article?" F that, you should have pre-expanded it for me.

I'm doing fine, I already have enough information overload from places that are willing to distribute it to me.

Goddamn, arXiv is my favorite website now, PDFs don't pop up any of that shit.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-05-05 01:01:39+00:00
the "use" assume nothing happened after the report (app still in managed domain). "used" assume an extra action taking place, which is a stretch imo.

but i assumed wrong that you added the "d", not that you're only exempting the submitter title. thanks for the insight into your always nice moderation.

follow up question: you work seven days a week??
by wl | 2025-05-05 01:02:10+00:00
Anesthesia gasses aren't paralytics. MAC is not about chemically preventing muscles from activating but depressing consciousness to the point that muscles don't move in reaction to painful stimulus. Chemically blocking muscle movement (neuromuscular blockade) takes an actual paralytic like succinylcholine. Pain control is yet another, separate factor. Even with depressed consciousness from a gas/propofol infusion and neuromuscular blockade, blood pressure (which is part of standard monitoring!) still will spike in response to painful stimuli. So usually, anesthesiologists will give an opioid in addition to gas/propofol to control pain, even if the patient isn't conscious and wouldn't be consciously aware of the pain of surgery.

The nightmare scenario you describe is when a patient has neuromuscular blockade, is not being given sufficient gas/propofol to depress consciousness, and has inadequate pain control that isn't being picked up in the blood pressure either because the anesthesia provider isn't paying attention or is controlling blood pressure through drugs to the point they can't see anything. If, for some reason, that kind of anesthetic is medically necessary, benzodiazepines can (if tolerated) prevent memories from forming lessening the chances of psychological trauma.
by kelnos | 2025-05-05 01:02:17+00:00
This just feels like the usual throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater style backlash toward over-saturation of anything and everything. Yes, there are people who live in their phones. Yes, there are people who take so many photos and videos of what's around them that they fail to actually experience those things in the moment.

The solution isn't to throw away our technology. It's to develop better habits and better relationships with what we use to enhance our lives. Because that's the point: to enhance our lives, not to diminish them. If you feel that your tech is diminishing your life, that's probably a sign that you need to re-examine how you use it. Throwing it away entirely is a wasteful response that might "fix" the diminishing effects, but will also deprive you of the enhancements.

Before smartphones (and/or decent camera phones), I used to carry a small point-and-shoot digital camera with me nearly everywhere. I loved having it with me, and friends always enjoyed when I'd share photos of moments where most people would never think to bring a camera to capture. Being able to ditch that camera and instead use an often-better smartphone camera has been so freeing and wonderful. But I don't live behind the screen of my phone; I snap photos quickly, and rarely take video (though lately I've been disappointed in the lack of video over the past decade, so I'm re-evaluating my stance there).

We can have a healthy relationship with our phones. Commercial interests of course want us to be glued to them 24/7, but that's not how it has to be.

(And I feel like the author of this piece maybe doesn't even disagree with me; he says he still takes snapshots on his phone in his hometown. He's more talking about the mindset he gets into when he has a "real" camera: one of detachment from his surroundings.)
by bee_rider | 2025-05-05 01:03:32+00:00
Totally just spitballing, I know nothing about this.

Thinking about the problem, it seems like it would be extremely difficult to come up with a set of design rules that cover everything somebody might want to print.

But would it be possible to literally simulate the printing process? Maybe using some kind of CFD code? I mean, for arbitrary designs this could get really complex. But, there’s a hard limit—the thing actually has to get printed, which is a slow mechanical layer-by-layer process, and the end result has to fit in the print chamber, haha.
by wenc | 2025-05-05 01:04:01+00:00
I take photos so I can go back to them as a different person and see details I didn't see the first time.

I first visited Chicago in 2006 and took a bunch of pictures. It was all a blur to me.

Later I became a Chicago resident in 2017, and suddenly those pictures had a new meaning for me. I began to appreciate the details more. Some things didn't change (Metra tickets were clipped on top of the seat in 2006, and it still was in 2019). But the UChicago campus had evolved since my first visit in 2006. Evanston had also changed greatly.

As a new Chicagoan in 2017, it was cool for me look at 2006 pictures again with new eyes and new knowledge (e.g. I now knew the Chicago grid system, the dibs system, that deep dish isn't actually that deep, that the quality of Harolds' Chicken Shack is branch specific, etc.).
by charcircuit | 2025-05-05 01:04:05+00:00
This is due to the way cloud is monetized being different than the costs of the underlying resources. The asymmetry of the cost for attackers requesting a file being $0 and the cloud being per request and byte transfered makes it easy to rack up large bills for little cost from attackers. With proper competition it would also be cheap to serve such requests, but cloud providers are a rip off.
by thegeomaster | 2025-05-05 01:04:14+00:00
Thank you for your contribution!!!

Does min_p help with non-creative-writing tasks as well, such as maths or coding? Is there any way to improve/tune the performance for these with sampling?

Do you have a recommendation/guide on tuning the sampling parameters with what little the frontier model providers expose?

All I have ever seen is the same old very old advice of "t=0 for determinism, t=1 for creativity", with little treatment of top_k/top_p. But even the temp has become quite opaque nowadays. Is this really the softmax temperature that we're controlling, or some proxy for it? Claude 3.7 Sonnet doesn't allow me to use t != 1.0 for thinking mode, while Gemini 2.5 Pro, also a reasoner, will happily accept it. Does it apply only to the non-thinking tokens at the end?

If I get good results with t=0.0 (for e.g. coding), do I lose some "capability" by keeping it at 0.0?

Thanks in advance.
by alpinisme | 2025-05-05 01:04:26+00:00
The assumption you are making is that students consistently using llms is required by the best curriculum. That’s a big assumption. There may be value educationally in forcing students to learn how to do things on their own that an llm could do for them. And in that case, it’s the student failing their education if they circumvent it with an llm, not the institution’s.
by Sniffnoy | 2025-05-05 01:06:10+00:00
> I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue.

While obviously it's impossible to be sure, I think you're making the wrong comparison. What you're saying is that a hypothetical archer-commander might be less likely to be mentioned than cavalry due to being lower status. Potentially, yes, but what matters here is that they're more likely to be mentioned than archers, who are even lower-status. Wherever archers are mentioned, this archer-commander ought to be mentioned too.

An analogous example might be comparing chariot-riders to the actual charioteers, or elephant-riders to the actual mahouts. Generally speaking, it's the noble riding in the chariot or on the elephant who gets mentioned or depicted; the charioteers and mahouts remain anonymous, if they're mentioned or depicted at all.

So if you came across some hitherto undiscovered civilization in whose writings and artwork charioteers were mentioned and depicted, but the nobles you'd expect to be riding in the chariots never were, you might reasonably infer that in this unusual hypothetical civilization there were no nobles in the chariots, otherwise they'd be the ones mentioned or depicted preferentially over the charioteers!

Similarly, if these archer-commanders existed, they'd be preferentially mentioned or depicted over archers. So given that we have plenty of mentions and depictions of archers, but not of these archer-commanders, I think it's reasonable to infer from that alone that they didn't exist.

How they compare in status against cavalry would only be potentially informative if we had no depictions or mentions of archers at all. In that case, your argument that they might not be depicted or mentioned due to being lower-status could make sense. However, when there's someone obviously even lower on the totem pole who we do have plenty of mention of, that's the informative comparison, not a comparison against cavalry.
by mikeocool | 2025-05-05 01:06:15+00:00
I like to take [not very good] landscape photos. The reality is (at least for someone whose not very good) landscape photography often involves getting to specific places at weird times (often before dawn or exactly at dinner time) setting up your camera, and staring through the viewfinder for an hour or so, and snapping off shots as lighting and conditions slightly change.

While I often enjoy this experience, this just is not compatible with hanging out with people who aren’t into it. Your friends/partners will hate you. Your kids just will not stand for it in anyway.

I’ve gotten some photos I like doing this (when my friends/family were not present), but coming home from a family vacation, the photos I enjoy more are almost always the random snapshots of my kids taken in 2 seconds on my iPhone.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-05 01:06:17+00:00
Nope. Don't especially mind, not remembering them.

I have since learned about schizophrenia/schizoaffective (from having a family member suffer from it), and it sounds almost exactly what they went through.

The thing that I remember, was that I was absolutely certain of these “revelations.” There was no doubt, whatsoever, despite the almost complete absence of any supporting evidence.
by mlsu | 2025-05-05 01:07:02+00:00
The point of education isn't to actually learn though. It's to receive the credential.

This is much larger than a cultural problem with the students of today. They believe, rightfully and accurately, that the university degree is yet another part of the machine that they will become a cog in.

What should be alarming to everyone is that these students will graduate without having learned anything and then go into the workplace where they will continue to not use their atrophied critical thinking skills, to simply do yet more, as a cog in the machine.
by supportengineer | 2025-05-05 01:08:13+00:00
I am old enough to remember not only when phones didn't have cameras, but we didn't carry phones at all. In those days, it was somewhat unusual to carry your film camera with you everywhere, and it would have been remarkable (rude even) to be constantly taking photos. Not to mention it would get expensive quickly. But what a loss! Times change and memories fade...